Story

Last September, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. As a result, throughout the past 6 months, our family has gone through many changes. One of them being my mom losing her hair due to chemotherapy. However, she has not let it affect her, and has developed many different ways of covering her head. When her Chemo ended, we decided to get photos of all of the styles of hats and scarves she wore on a daily basis. I set up my studio, and shot some pictures of each scarf and hat she has worn. I also got a shot of her simply without hair.

Shooting

I wanted to add a more dramatic look to the photos, so I felt that black and white suited the photos the best. I setup a white sheet, with a strobe behind it, then set up two more strobes, diffused by umbrellas, at 45° angles from the subject. I then used my Canon 50mm f/1.8 to get some nice torso shots of her.

Editing

The editing process was fairly simple, but took some time. First, I selected the photos that would look good in the poster — I tried to not get duplicate styles (read: hats) — and put those in a separate file. After that, I opened them up in Adobe Camera RAW, and processed them. This part was rather easy, as they were all shot at the same exposure because of the controlled light setup in which they were shot.

After processing them in ACR, I did some minor cleanups on the skin, changed all to grayscale, and sharpened them. Finally, I arranged then in a large canvas in photoshop so that it would look good when printed as a poster.

In all, I spend around 12.5 hours on this project, with around 2 ¹/₂ hours shooting, and 10 hours editing and processing.

Friday, our school traveled to Lewiston to compete in the regional SkillsUSA competitions. I have been working on the promotional bulletin board project (and I will post my total work on it after state, I don’t want to show everything I did, as it isn’t finished), and I presented my board (what it is so far) to the judge panel. Unfortunately, I suckz0rz3d @t the sp33ch, so I either got 4th or 5th.

Anyway, for the photography competition, we were ordered to go take pictures for an hour, shooting for a portrait and a photo that depicts the outdoors. After shooting, we had to edit them, and make a color photo, a b&w photo, and an outdoors photo (any saturation).

After the competition, at the awards ceremony, I received 2nd place (1st place was awarded to Alyssa Schmidt). The prize was a 2gb PNY usb flash drive… super legit.

Abbey Road

For the first picture, the outdoors one, I really wasn’t intending to shoot it Beatle-esque, but after I edit the image together, someone (the Orofino High School Photo teacher, I believe) stated that it looked just like the Beatles’ Abbey Road CD, and that I was obviously a Beatles fan. However, I do not believe that I have ever listened to a whole Beatles song (I probably have without realizing it). Anyway, I think the image is just slightly buenísimo.

Photo B&W

I wanted to create a different photo than what I have done in the past, so I found these sweet steps outside the student union at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, and I took this sweet pic of Erin.

I originally tried using this for my color photo but then I decided that it was better desaturated.

Espresso drip

I wanted to use this image, greatly, but it really didn’t seem to fit any of the categories, so I didn’t use it, instead I used the shot of Blaine.

There was another image I wanted to use, but I realized after I came in, that it was blurry. So sadly, I was unable to use it.

Anyway, below you will see the contact sheet.

The past week, Stephen and I continued to work on the Promotional Bulletin Board for the Lewiston, Idaho SkillsUSA competitions.

Recent changes/additions include finalizing the backdrop, working on the foreground, and getting ready to print. We are also starting to think about the speech and q/a.

Once we’re done, I will post the final copy, and possibly all of the steps involved.

–Scott

This past week, Stephen and I have been working on our Promotional Bulletin board design. Currently, we have created a background design as well as the textual designs. We have also brainstormed foreground ideas, and have set in at designing this in illustrator.
We hope to be done with the design phase by Friday, print Monday, as well as work on and practice our speech.
–Scott

Throughout this semester, I have photographed the night many times… seemingly too many; and as I was shooting this assignment, I decided that I was going to do something different. While contemplating other options, I simply decided to go with my shots, and write a tutorial on night photography, and post-processing of said shots.

CHAPTER I: Capturing the image

I am going to divide this tutorial into 3 chapters, with individual steps within them. This first chapter is capturing a great image. I will leave the composition and location up to you… but there are some important aspects of the capture that you should keep in mind. The first is the exposure: while photographing the night, one needs to make adjustments to make sure that an adequate amount of light is allowed into the sensor (or film) of your camera.

ISO

While shooting at night, I like to set my camera to ISO 100. There main reason for this, is noise. While shooting at night (or anytime for that matter), the last thing I want in my images is digital noise. The higher of ISO one has, the more the noise one will have in their photo.

APERTURE

While shooting at night, I like to close up my aperture for two reasons, 1: focusing at night is difficult, so with a closed up aperture, I can get close to the correct focus, and still have most of the picture in focus. This is because as the aperture closes up, there will be a deeper depth of field of focus, making more of the image in focus. 2: It creates light stars. What are light stars you ask? Just look at the image to the right. The bright lights at the restaurant Beverly’s have turned into brilliant stars, instead of glowing orbs of light. For my image, I shot at f/13 to achieve this effect. I would go even smaller, but unfortunately I would have to lengthen the exposure of the image, and I really didn’t want to. Think of it this way… go out at night and look at a rather bright light, and squint your eyes… the light should have a similar effect as to these light stars in this image.

In short, to get light stars in your images, close your aperture to as small as you can go.

SHUTTER SPEED

As a result of closing the aperture and turning down the ISO sensitivity, I needed to compensate the exposure with a looooong shutter speed. And as with any long exposure, one needs to stabilize their camera some how. My stabilization of choice happens to be a tripod… but if you do not have one for your use, you can rest your camera on a stable object. You will get very blurry images if you try to hold your camera no matter how stable you think your arms are.

For my image, I used a 63 second exposure to compensate for the lost light from the f/13 aperture and the 100 ISO.

While shooting, you will have to play around with your exposure until it is just how you like it. It really varies on how much light is available for you to work with.

One last thing on exposure… if you reach a point where you need to have an exposure longer than 30 seconds (the limit for many cameras), you will have to put your camera in BULB mode and either hold the shutter button and time yourself (I use my iPod’s timer), or get a locking remote (some even have timers built in).

CHAPTER II: Post-Processing

The second half of taking night shots, is the post-processing. In this section, I will describe the steps that I took to make the image look like it does above.

RAW

When ever I shoot photos, my camera is always in the RAW setting. This enables me to make adjustments that the camera would normally make. Think of it as dark-room adjustments when developing film. If you click on the second image, you can see the adjustments made. Below is the image right after converting from the RAW image.

TOPAZ ADJUST

To the left, you see, there are still some adjustments to be made to make the image look like my final product. You will notice there are 4 gnarly lens flares, the top part of the tower is too dark in relation to the lights, and the sky doesn’t look as cool. So I’m going to do some magic.

First, I used a Photoshop plugin called Topaz Adjust. This plugin essentially enhances details throughout the image. I chose a few settings, including some de-noise, and enhanced the light and color. Once I was done, the result below was displayed.

Although the adjustments did make the image look very cool, I felt as if it was taken too far, and looked too fake. So I brought in the original image and created a layer mask and brushed back some of the first image to take away some of the fakey-ness (new word).

The red areas are where the Topaz is being applied, whereas the blue/purple areas are the original image. I feel that this gives the photo a much more natural look.

LENS FLARE

The next step was to remove the 4 flares from the light. I first went about removing the flare on the far left. This one was the easiest as the sky is pretty much a blurry pattern. So I just used the spot healing brush and Photoshop took care of the rest.

The next one was the far-right flare. This one was slightly more difficult, but still rather simple: I took a rectangular cut of the building just above the flare and pasted it below. Then I faded the edges by masking the layer to make it look natural.

The inner lens flares were taken on by a slightly different approach. For these, I created a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer. From there, I set it to the Yellow mode.

After setting those settings, I created a mask so that the layer would only affect the two inner flares. After making those adjustments, I was finished with the editing of the image.

CHAPTER III: Saving for the Web

After editing, saving for the web it the next step. For me, I simply resize the image, apply a border, add my watermark to the bottom, and save it.

Resize

Generally, I don’t ever save an image wider 1500 if it is landscape, or 700 wide if it is portrait – simply to save bandwidth. I use the image size tool (cmd+option+i) and type in my values.

Border

The border that I usually use for my images consists of a black border with a white stripe through it. This is quite simple to make. First, I make sure that my image is flattened, then I enlarge the canvas (cmd+option+c), and I choose the relative check box. Then I make it 6 pixels wider and 6 pixels taller.

After completing that step, I repeat it twice, once with a white stripe of 4 wider and 4 taller, then again with a black stripe of 12 wider and 12 taller. Once I’m finished with this, the border is done. I have created an action of this to speed things up.

Watermark/Name

I always add my name to the bottom of my images so that if someone swipes them, it will have my name on it. I feel it is probably unlikely that my work is stolen – considering that I’m not really the most famous photographer… but it is still a good habit to get into.

First, I create a text layer with my name. I usually use the font Impact set to white. I choose the font size based on what looks best. Once I’m done, I set the layer style to add a stroke of 1 px black (or 2px) and add a drop shadow. These are simply to add to the æsthetic properties of the image.

SAVING

Lastly, I save the image. This really is the easiest step of the process. Simply, I open the save-as dialog, choose jpeg, name it, and choose a jpeg quality (usually 8 for the web).

I hope that this tutorial has given ideas for those wanting to try out some night photography. None of the steps discussed in this tutorial are necessarily required to do night photography, they are simply the steps I used to create this specific image.