by successfulbob | photography, photography education, photography lighting resources, photography seminar
Dean Collins was a lighting master extraordinaire and wonderful educator. If you have the chance to study his old videos you will learn a lot. Purchase here.Yes, he was still based in film but the lighting techniques don’t change. You’ll have to watch several times because he’ll probably be talking over your head until you expand your vocabulary and put some of his ideas to work. (pause buttons work great with Dean’s videos ’cause you can take time to absorb before moving on)
Dean mentioned one thing that really sticks in my head and leads to today’s Photo/Art quote and that was to break down your lighting equipment every night. Put away your lights. If you leave them in the same positions that they were in the day before chances are you’ll be making the same images you did before…
“Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.” Bernard Berenson
Bernard Berenson was an historian that dealt with art so we let him in to the Photo/Art quote on Successful-Photographer. You know I don’t need a heavy connection to photography to bring up a point or two in these Sunday conversations…
Anyway, I digress. The point is I’m a firm believer in education and experimentation. I believe it was Einstein that said, and of course I’m paraphrasing here, ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same things the same way and expecting different results’. We need to attend lighting programs, sales programs, read books, magazines and scour the Internet and try new things if we are to grow as image makers. I see many photographers stop attending workshops and monthly photo meeting and I quickly see their image making skills grow stale.
Seek. Practice. Play. Become a stronger image maker. I dare you.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
by successfulbob | fine art photography, Lumix Lounge, photography, photography education, photography seminar
At the end of the week I’ll be winging my way to Tennessee to present a couple all day programs on my techniques for creating fine art painterly images called Photo-Synthesis.
Get more info here
The first day will be in-depth starting with the basics in Photoshop and is hosted by the Photographic Society of Chattanooga and sponsored by Panasonic and the Lumix line of cameras and is $20 Contact the society to sign up and pay. Day two will be more in-depth and hands on. We’ll hit the streets to capture images to work with then go to our individual computers to create artwork with me stepping you through the process… That class will be $49. Get in touch with me to sign up and pay. bob@bcphotography.com
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
by successfulbob | black & white, Lumix FZ 1000, Lumix Lounge, photography, photography education
Take away the color!
Let the shape, form and tones come forward… Simplify.
It’s easy to do but not necessarily simple.
Making black and white conversions of our images can give a whole new level of depth to our image making skills. With the ability to touch every single pixel we have more control than ever before. Ansel Adams would have been in Heaven to have this level of control to achieve the image he saw in his mind. That was what the Zone System and his special ways of exposing the scene and processing film not to mention choosing paper, light source and dodging and burning in the darkroom to pull the print he wanted.
Today’s subject is a green bloom from a Gopher Plant. Lots of green tones from light to dark are represented in the capture. By the way I used the Lumix FZ 1000 in Macro mode. When zooming in to 400mm you can fill a frame pretty well with it’s minimum focusing distance of 3.3 feet. If you shoot wider you can focus down to 3 centimeters but without adding supplemental light I find I have too many shadows to deal with so photographing from a distance can be helpful. In this case I was back just a bit with a 27mm equivalent setting.
Original capture.
Different settings and conversions to black and white.
You may or may not like the one I choose which is a combination of some of the settings seen above. The point is through experimentation and using different ways of stripping color from an image you can create many different feelings from the same information. One of my favorite programs for converting to black and white is Google’s NIK Silver FX Pro 2. By the way if you own a license for almost any NIK product Google will hook you up at no charge for the full NIK software suite. If you don’t have a current one you can get the suite for, I believe, $149. This is some solid software with lots of creative possibilities.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
by successfulbob | event, Lumix GH4, Lumix Lounge, photography education
The parties move around to a different restaurant each night during the Sedona Film Fest and last night it was Sounds Bites Grill playing hot with a great spread and music by Ralf Illenberger on guitar and Troy Perkins on his handmade bass. Just seeing the work Troy did on his bass guitar shows me he’s a pretty incredible carpenter! (missed the name of the drummer… sorry about that!)
Michele asked me to stop by to create some stock advertising images for future promotion of the restaurant showing how they take care of biz for group events. Here’s a few.
Chef kicking out the Bananas Foster
Capturing the crowd from behind the stage
Looking round from the regular direction, crowd to band photo.
A little slice of the stage with the Sound Bites logo lit on the wall.
Images were captured with the Lumix GH4 and a bit of on camera fill flash. Always try to not make the flash apparent by dragging the shutter (slow shutter speed) to allow the background to register with the ambient light and then a kiss of flash to freeze and fill the foreground.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
by successfulbob | Lumix FZ 1000, Lumix Lounge, photography
While at the Virginia Professional Photographers Association Convention in Richmond I tended to have the Lumix FZ 1000 in hand. The more I use this the more it seems to want to become my second camera. It weighs just under 2 and a half pounds but has a huge zoom range. 25-400mm at f2.8-4.0. The optical stabilization is pretty darn amazing and it handles quite well. It’s not a pro camera but has a ton of pro features.
I like to have a camera with me almost all the time because you just never know what you want capture at a moments notice. Here is a hallway captured in two different ways at the same time using a preset and using the RAW plus jpeg setting.
Liked the lighting in the hallway with the father and son walking…
Caught this rendition of the hallway scene at the same time using a preset that I tweaked to black and white.
This lighting class with Jeff was shoot in a completely darkened room. Opened the RAW file and pulled up the shadow slider a bit and pulled down the highlights slider and was able to tame the contrast.
Word is ‘proper tool for the proper job’ and I find the Lumix FZ 1000 camera under at $895 MSRP and available on Amazon for $717 to be an amazing deal…
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
PS – remember if you like the info being presented here using the links (like to Amazon) help support the web site with small affiliate fees.
