Join us for a Photowalk on Sunday, February 10th, 2013 as we enjoy a sunset view of one of the most beautiful city skylines in the world. Whether you’re a beginner, a dabbler, or a seasoned pro, the event is absolutely free and everyone is invited to attend. So bring your DSLRs, Point & Shoots, Phones, or whatever camera you may have, or simply join us for a nice evening stroll around the harbour. We’re happy to have you!

And, if hanging out with a bunch of your fellow photographers wasn’t exciting enough? Attendees will have a chance to win FREE prizes and giveaways from our friends at Google Australia, Joby, and Smugmug! No registration is necessary. Just come to shoot, hang out, have fun, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Along the way, we’ll make stops and I’ll give brief talks and demonstrations on photography and answer as many questions as possible. Feel free to ask away, whether it’s photography related or just for fun.

You can RSVP & Share Your Photos of the event on Google+

Cost: FREE
When: February 10th, 2013 from 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Where: Beginning at The Opera House Steps (see the map below)
Who: All ages and skill levels are welcome to attend

Find out more about Elia Locardi at blamethemonkey.com

In this informative webinar, we are going to take a ride with Chris Georgenes, author of Pushing Pixels, Secret Weapons for the Modern Flash Animator. Chris is going to share with us what it takes to make a quality animation come to life, and how he has woven the Intuos5 pen tablet into his creative process.

If you are a designer, artist or simply someone who is interested in “moving” people with your work, grab a stylus and strap yourself in for an animated time in Flash with Chris Georgenes!

Thursday, February 7^th 2013 11:00am – 12:00pm PST

Sadly, no matter how fun and visually mesmerizing my naked raindance may be, I’m fairly sure it’s not altering the weather. However, I do believe that it’s these uncontrollable variables that have the potential to create the magic in a photograph and give it that special something. And while we can’t control certain variables, we can learn to understand and recognize them.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Venice quite a few times and each time I’m always looking for the perfect amount of variables to line up, especially in places like The Rialto Bridge and views down The Grand Canal. The boat and gondola traffic, the clouds, the light, the turbulence of the water, the restoration projects and scaffolding – getting all these things to work together in harmony can be tricky business but when it all works out, you can come away with something truly unique. This is probably what compels me to visit Venice year after year; that pursuit of that one magic shot. Well, it’s either that or the abundance of amazing (and cheap) pinot grigio.

Image courtesy Elia Locardi. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Technical Mumbo Jumbo | Before and After Comparison

Camera: Nikon D800
Lens: 14-24 f/2.8 (Shot at 17 mm)
Tripod: RRS TVC-33 / BH-55 Ballhead / RRS L-Plate
ISO: 100 – 400
4 Exposures at f/8, 1 Exposure at f/6.3, and 2 Exposures at f/2.8

Hardware: 15” 2011 Macbook Pro, Wacom Intuos5 Small Tablet

Software: Lightroom, Photoshop, NIK Software

Technique and Details: Dynamic Blending using 4 bracketed exposures and 3 manual exposures, shot at different times over the course of 30 minutes. The aperture and ISO settings were changed on the fly to compensate for moving objects and fading light. With shooting, the tricky bit was keeping the mob of people from bumping into my tripod since The Rialto Bridge is one of the busiest places in Venice.

In Photoshop—with the help of my Wacom Tablet—I was able to manually blend in the exposures together using hand painted masks. I started with a base of exposures 0 and +1 before brushing in the sky with a blend of exposures -1 and -2 for. Using more hand painted masks, I then brushed in the 2 separate f/2.8 exposures to create the water. Lastly, I brushed in one more exposure at f/6.3—shot 15 minutes later—adding the lighting on the buildings.

Espresso: A lot of it! Thankfully, I packed accordingly.

This article was originally published by Elia Locardi on his web site Blame the Monkey on October 25, 2012.
Republished with permission. You can see the original article here.

Visit Elia’s full Bio

I did quite a bit of scouting on this visit to Venice and thankfully I was able to shoot this on the same morning as Venetian Blues. Any time that I can squeeze 2 shots out of a 4AM wake up call is call for a celebration or at the very least, an extra shot of espresso in my victory coffee.

Technical Mumbo Jumbo

Camera: Nikon D800
Lens: 24-70 f/2.8 (Shot at 45 mm)
Tripod: RRS TVC-33 / BH-55 Ballhead / RRS L-Plate
ISO: 100 at f/8 / 400 at f/2.8
3 Exposure Brackets at f/8, 1 Exposure at f/2.8

Hardware: 15” 2011 Macbook Pro, Wacom Intuos5 Small Tablet

Software: Lightroom, Photoshop, NIK

Technique and Details: Digital Blending using 3 Bracketed Exposures at f/8 and 1 Manual Exposure at f/2.8. The f/8 was used to correct the motion blur on the boats from the long exposures at f/8.

In photoshop—with the help of my Wacom stylus—I blended the 3 exposure brackets ( -1, 0, +1) together with simple hand painted masks. Then, with an additional layer, I masked in the boats from the fast exposure at f/2.8. Since the water wasn’t completely soft, I softened it by using a gaussian blur filter along with a few brush strokes with the blur tool. This allowed me to seamlessly blend the edges where the building structure meets the water.

Espresso: Lavazza Rossa (one of my staples)

Image copyright Elia Locardi. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

This article was originally published by Elia Locardi on his web site Blame the Monkey on October 30, 2012.
Republished with permission. You can see the original article here.

Visit Elia’s full Bio

Image courtesy Jay Patel. All rights reserved. Used with permission. Eagle Creek, Oregon

Take a look at the workflow I used to process this photograph from Eagle Creek in Oregon.

Raw Image

Raw Image + iHDR Highlight Blend

Take a look at the RAW image above on the left – the trees look just right, but there are some blown highlights in the water. This is a typical problem when shooting water. The solution is simple. I process the same image again – this time for the highlights in the water. I blend the two images using layers and masks in Photoshop. The result looks like the image on the right. Both the trees and the water are properly exposed, and we can see details in highlights as well as shadows.

The next step is to make some minor adjustments to restore contrast in the image. I use a stylus to draw selections with my Wacom graphics tablet and create masks to make adjustments that are targeted to specific areas. A little bit more contrast at the river’s edge, some softer contrast in the water… and so on. The image below shows the layers and masks I used to make those adjustments.

Raw Image + iHDR Highlight Blend + Targeted Adjustment

Most of our post-processing revolves around these simple steps.

To learn more about photography, check out my ebooks and webinar on my site.

Visit Jay’s full Bio

Image courtesy Catherine Hall. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

His Medusa-black hair is stained with thick playa dust – his piercing black-lined eyes rest intently in the direction of my lens. Even amid fire dancers, bare bodied beauties and thousands of bohemian Burning Man pilgrims, Eric Hudock cuts a striking outline against the stark landscape. Armed with my Canon 5DMII, I find myself invigorated by this muse, the subject of many of my fine art photographs. His striking features, complexity, and willingness to be vulnerable inspire my perpetual craving to explore the depth of human character.

Burning Man is a subjective utopia of endless self-expression and freedom. I wanted to experiment with dramatic lighting in the high desert, and attempt to capture a glimpse of what it feels like to be at such an indescribable festival. Like every part of this environment, the light is harsh: hard shadows, no atmosphere (except dust storms!), and fleeting sunsets. Desperation grips as the sun slips the mountain’s edge. Set the lights and get that shot! A warm key light to balance the cool twilight backdrop as the sun’s final rays kiss the cheek. Click.

Retouching Workflow:

-Basic tonal adjustments in Lightroom

- Using Photoshop, retouched out inevitable clutter in the shot (i.e. people, bicycles, Tecate cans, you name it…we are at burning man after all).

-I utilized Nik Software to burn in the sky. Nik “control points” make this much easier than burning and dodging.

-Using Nik Color Efex, I toned the image warm, a little less saturated and more monotone to make the image look more surreal.

-Simple curve masks were used to darken the sky and brighten the subject.

-Lastly I added a mix of two texture filters at low opacity to create more grit/ depth.

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The Coming Storm – A complicated Blend | Varina Patel

Sometimes, I can finish post-production work in just a few minutes… and sometimes, it takes a lot longer. This shot from Snowmass Wilderness in Colorado was a real challenge. Let me see if I can give you an idea of what made it difficult, and how I handled the processing. First, taking this shot was an amazing experience. We watched this storm coming toward us for a short time, and then grabbed our cameras and headed out to get a few shots. The first thing that caught my eye were the colors. The brilliant golden leaves were a perfect compliment to the deep blue tones in the approaching storm. I wanted to capture that juxtaposition – and also capture the chaos in the sky. I chose a simple composition – ignoring the lake behind the trees and choosing a single peak to minimize distractions. I took several shots, waiting for a moment when the skies were full of textures.

Because the leaves were moving in the high winds, I knew I would need to capture the entire dynamic range with a single exposure. If I couldn’t do that, I would end up with a “ghosting” effect as I worked on a blend. If I could process a single image twice – once for the leaves in the foreground and once for the background – I would get a much cleaner blend. Because the skies were heavily overcast, I was able to get the shot I needed.

As the storm blew closer, I could hear the rain falling on the water of the lake – getting closer and closer. As the first drops fell on my camera, I packed up and headed back to the car – just in time. We both love storms, so we watched the rain for a while, and then continued on our way.

The first step in post, was to process the image for the leaves in the foreground and then again for the background. You can see those two images below.

I processed the image once for the leaves…

…and once again for the background.

Then, I created a mask using the color selection tool to isolate the yellow leaves on the lighter layer. The blend sounds simple enough… but moving leaves can be difficult to deal with – even when you are processing a single image twice for a blend. The problem is that some leaves are moving more than others. So, some are slightly blurred, some are completely blurred, and others are sharp. When I make a color selection, I feather it slightly for a smoother blend. The problem is that the selection needs more feathering in areas that are more blurred, and less feathering in sharper areas. That’s a tough problem when you are dealing with thousands of leaves.

I blended the images in Photoshop using our manual iHDR techniques.

Of course, there are lots of different ways I could have solved the problem in Photoshop – some easier than others. But there was no quick fix this time. I tried several different methods for refining my mask – from isolating and subtracting the blue channel to creating a soft light layer and using a targeted luminosity mask to capture those edges. I even converted the image to the ProPhoto color space so I could create a smoother luminosity mask for a cleaner transition in high contrast areas. The problem was worst where the branches reached above the horizon into the sky, so I used a mask to target that area on another layer.

Here are the layers I used for blending. Notice that I also used curves layers to bring out some contrast in the background layer, and to bring back the blue tones I remembered from being on location.

Still, I wasn’t satisfied. In the end, I decided to work on a pixel-by-pixel basis. I zoomed in close, and used the Precision Mode option on my Wacom Intuos 5 tablet to work on those tiny details. I made very slight adjustments to the mask for the foreground trees layer – painting on the mask itself. I went back and forth between my black and white brushes, changing the size of the brushes with the touch ring as I went.

Finished leaves at 100% – shadows on the leaves, and similar tones in the background made masking difficult. I used Precision Mode on my Wacom tablet to clean up my mask for a clean finish.

Of course, I didn’t make adjustments to every single leaf. I targeted those that seemed distracting and took a few extra minutes in those areas. Post-production for this shot took more than an hour – though some of that time was spent experimenting with techniques that didn’t work. You can see the finished image at the top of this post. What do you think?

To learn more about photography check out my ebooks and webinar on my site

My setup was very deliberate in that it was powerful but totally not mobile. I ran a Mac Pro workstation connected to twin Dell 30” (3011 model) LCD displays that were calibrated every 90 days using my X-Rite ColorMunki Photo. My 16Gb Sandisk UDMA CF Cards were imported using a Calumet Firewire 800 reader directly onto my Drobo-S array running five identical 1.5TB Seagate drives. All input and editing was done using my beloved Wacom Intuos5 Large tablet. All incremental onsite and offsite backups were done using an app called Chronosync to twin 4Gb G-Tech drives. Onsite backups ran nightly and offsite backups ran every two weeks whereby I would shuttle the drive from my desk at onOne Software back home, run the backup job, and return it to work the next morning.

Image courtesy Brian Matiash. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

When I had reasons to travel, I would keep all original files on my CF cards and back them up to my laptop solely for archival purposes. I would not do any meaningful editing (beyond, perhaps, a cursory review of the images) until I got home and began the aforementioned process.

And this is how things ran for a long, long time. Functional? Certainly. Practical? Not really. My process was stifling my ability to work on images dynamically while the experience of the shoot was still fresh in my mind. I was chained to my own requirement of having to wait until I returned home in order to begin editing. This began taking a toll on my productivity and creativity. Something had to change.

In the past 18 months or so, my life has shifted rather dramatically from just about all corners. Most notably, I’ve been traveling with a lot more frequency and the radius from home has been expanding more and more. It became clear that if I were to be productive with my image storage and editing, I’d need to adapt my system to take advantage of mobility. This had truly come to fruition with a recent two-week trip to Cambodia. It was on this trip that I learned what I needed to do going forward to be as versatile as possible while not compromising on the tools I depended on. Part of being versatile meant that I needed to find devices that provided the same performance and quality without any excessive size and weight.

First, I needed to get rid of the Mac Pro given that it wasn’t exactly portable. I was fortunate enough to get a top-of-the-line 15” Macbook Pro Retina from onOne (my employer) and the sad truth was that it simply outgunned my 2009 Mac Pro in nearly every way. This made selling off the big rig a quick and easy decision. And with that, I also inherited one of the most gorgeous displays on the market built right into the laptop. Now, I had a display that output amazing resolution – more than enough to satisfy my needs while traveling.

Display calibration has always been a very critical component of my workflow partly because I am Red/Green colorblind and I need to make sure that my displays output color correctly. I opted to replace my X-Rite ColorMunki Photo with the smaller, yet very capable, X-Rite i1Display Pro. I also bring my ColorChecker Passport with me, making the important task of achieving correct White Balance a breeze.

My Macbook Pro Retina has 512GB of SSD storage built in and my core system and application usage never exceeds about 200GB, leaving me with more than enough internal storage for offloading photos. For backup purposes, I picked up two OWC Mercury Extreme 240GB SSD drives that were each inserted into USB 3 mini enclosures. These serve as a dual backup system whenever I’m traveling. I’d back up all of my photos and Lightroom catalog onto both drives each night. One would stay in the hotel lockbox and the other would travel with me. At home, I upgraded my Drobo-S to the new Drobo 5D, which takes advantage of the Macbook Pro’s blazing fast Thunderbolt bus, and upgraded the hard drives to use five x 3TB Seagate drives. My old Drobo-S now serves as my new on-site backup volume.

Finally, we’re left with the input device. I cannot express enough how much I rely on my large Wacom tablet. There is nothing more natural than using a pen and that goes double when it comes to image editing. As far as I’m concerned, there is no better or more effective way to edit images than with a Wacom. Using a mouse or a trackpad doesn’t come close. However, the sad truth was that I couldn’t fit my tablet into my camera bag (an F-Stop Satori EXP). This certainly was the fly in the ointment. I had come to rely so heavily on my Wacom tablet that I found myself really at a loss whenever I had downtime in Cambodia. I’d go through the motions of importing and rating images but editing just didn’t feel right. It never became clearer to me of just how important my Intuos5 tablet was, especially when I needed to do fine editing. I found myself mostly working on images that required global changes or changes that could be applied using sliders. Masking and fine editing was pretty much out of the question and that was a big disappointment.

Image courtesy Brian Matiash. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

This brought to light a big hole in my mobility workflow. In order to truly work wherever I was, I required a Wacom tablet that was portable. The solution was right there, plain as day. I could get all of the benefits of a pressure sensitive tablet without the excess size by investing in an Intuos5 Small. Its miniature form factor makes it the perfect companion because it fits just about anywhere. If only I realized that before flying to the other side of the world.

In thinking about and writing this article, an important idea came to mind and it goes beyond gear and hardware. Namely, it’s important to always audit yourself and what you do. In the case of my image editing workflow, my rigid process of doing things in a specific way with specific hardware really limited my productivity and agility with working on fresh images. The same principles can be applied with getting stuck in a routine of shooting the same thing or editing the same way over and over. Blind repetition can calcify and have a detrimental impact on your growth. It’s important to keep working on being fresh and always learning new ways of doing things. Ultimately, we’re all striving with growth and an important lesson to remember is that real growth is often synonymous with real change.

Artist: Brian Matiash
Website: brianmatiash.com

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Image courtesy Sean Bagshaw. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

I had spent the night camped in a dense wood with my friends, Chip Phillips and David Cobb. We had crossed over Cascade Pass near Pelton Peak the afternoon before. As evening approached we were dismayed at the sight of a fallen mountain climber’s body hanging from a rope as it was recovered by helicopter from deep in the mountains. It put us in a somber mood and the image stayed with me as I slept fitfully.

The next morning Chip rose at 3:00 AM, intent on photographing sunrise from high on the Sahalie Arm, a thousand feet above our camp. David climbed out of his tent and hiked into the dark about an hour later. Uncharacteristically, I was the last one moving. Perhaps fatigue from the previous day’s hike and a restless night’s sleep were taking their toll. Having been a climber myself, I have seen body recoveries on several occasions and it never fails to darken my usually upbeat and energetic spirit.

I hadn’t gone far up the trail when the darkness began to lift, and my outlook with it. But a few minutes later I was cursing myself for sleeping in, realizing that the sky was about to produce a powerful and rare display of light and that I was in a lousy position to photograph it. As I sprinted up the trail I stopped to take a “just in case” image, still quite low in the valley. It was nearly dark and the exposure seemed to take forever. Aware that the best light would come rapidly now, I continued on.
As the earth rotated toward the morning sun a gap in the clouds on the eastern horizon allowed twilight to flood in. Fingers of deep crimson branched out across the overcast sky. The color intensified as I frantically searched for something to anchor my foreground. I found a small mountain ash tree beginning to show it’s autumn color. The light reflecting off the clouds was back lighting the foliage making it appear to be illuminated from within. At the same time I noticed the stream in the valley was reflecting the bright red of the sky. The image I made at this spot was to become my favorite.

The scene continued to transform. Further up the trail I noticed the colors shifting from deep reds to oranges and yellows. Then, as the sun neared the horizon, cool blue light began to filter through the clouds from the sky above. Some sunrises last only moments, but this one stretched on for nearly thirty minutes. During that time my senses were heightened and my complete attention was focused through my camera.

Image courtesy Sean Bagshaw. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The sun finally broke the skyline and proceeded to rise above the clouds. Without light on their underside, the clouds faded to a dull gray and the landscape lost its luminosity. Within moments the magic was gone, and the scene took on it’s more typical daylight appearance. During the sunrise event the vision of the climber’s body had left my mind. However, I’m sure it is subconsciously reflected in how I captured and developed the images. In the moment I felt re-energized, grateful for the experience and pleased that I was able to show it to my camera.

Image courtesy Sean Bagshaw. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Capture

Date: September 2010
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lenses: Canon EF 16-35mm L and Canon EF 24-105mm L IS
Settings: Early “just in case” image f/13, ISO 640. Later images, aperture f/22 for vertical and f/16 for horizontals, ISO 160

The contrast range when photographing directly into the rising sun is beyond the dynamic range of a camera’s sensor, making it impossible to record all the light values in a single exposure. While it is possible to use graduated neutral density filters to try to balance the bright sky with the dark landscape in-camera, I rarely use this technique any more. Graduated filters leave a dark transition line across an mountainous skyline and can’t be feathered or locally adjusted to perfectly match the scene and the light. They can also increase flare when looking directly toward a light source. Instead, I choose to manually bracket exposures. I take the number of exposures necessary to have one exposure that captures all the highlight information, one exposure that captures all the shadow information and additional exposures at one stop increments in between.

Post

Developing: Manual blending of bracketed exposures to contain the contrast range using layer masking techniques in Photoshop as well as additional contrast, tonal balance and color work.
Hardware: Windows 7, 64-bit PC, Wacom medium Intuous tablet, Samsung Syncmaster 275T 27 inch LCD
Software: Lightroom, Photoshop CS

Image courtesy Sean Bagshaw. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

After optimizing the raw image files for each exposure in Lightroom I opened them in a single image document as layers in Photoshop. Using layer masking techniques, including free hand masking, masking through selections and Luminosity Masking, I carefully blended the proper portions of each exposure into a version of the image that contains all of the dynamic range while maintaining the highest image quality and a very natural look. I find that the fine control and pressure sensitivity I get from my Wacom Tablet allows me to create free hand masks and delicate selections, as well as accomplish dodging and burning and other creative adjustments in Photoshop better than any other tool.