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Archive for August, 2009

Howick Photo Workshop

August 14th, 2009 Roger No comments
We’ve just finished another of our Howick Photography and Photoshop Workshops held again at the delightful Yellowwood Cafe just outside town. We had some old friends along – Fran, Nick and Doug who have all done at least one of our workshops before, as well as a number of first timers that we hope will become old friends. Judging from some of the comments it was enjoyed by many and certainly Pat and I had a fun time. It always is when you in amongst people that are passionate about photography.

The first morning we simply worked Yellowwood Café’s gardens including their “small animal” farm. They have a number of miniature farm animals (and I don’t mean young - I mean small in stature) that made excellent subjects as did the flowers that John Handman, the clivea farmer, brought along to do some macro work on. It was then into the centre to evaluate the images and work through some Photoshop. That afternoon we drove out towards the Karkloof to the very beautiful Karkloof Falls where we played for a few hours shooting pix of the waterfalls, reflections, trees and so on. The light improved as the afternoon wore on and we finished up alongside the river, chatting photography, dealing with some queries and sipping wine. Not a bad finish to a day full of photography!

Early the next morning we met up with a couple of young mountain bikers – Bradley McGee, the son of friends Mike and Karen and a pal of his, Joel Grobler. The guys rode up and down the forest trails, pulling wheelies, skidding sliding and jumping until the light got bad. We, on the other side of the cameras, blazed away, experimenting with slow shutter speeds, (using blur to illustrate speed) high shutter speeds (to freeze motion) and different camera angles. It was great fun in spite of (or maybe because of) the dust. After sessions of photo theory and Photoshop we had a very pleasant afternoon working with two young models, Carmen Watson and Caroline Zuma. We did images indoors using the windows as a lovely soft light source and then went outside and in the late afternoon sun, experimented with reflectors as a way to light a model. The next morning we had a practical session in Photoshop, learning how to improve the texture of skin, take away a blemish or two, add a little sparkle to the eyes etc.

One of the interesting things on the workshop was the camera one of the participants – Maria Andrzejejewska – was using. A simple Sony point and shoot. It had virtually no controls and just look at 2 of the images she got! Who says that you need a camera with a gazillion pixels and more brain power than NASA when they put men on the moon! Have a look at the other images that were made on the workshop here.

If you’d like to know more about our workshops please visit www.oldcanvasexpeditions.com or e-mail me at roger@africaimagery.com. We are doing another of our Howick workshops in October (8 to 12) and on this one we’ll be working a little more with Photoshop to improve editing skills.


Categories: beginner photography, kwazulu natal, learning safari, photo, photo tips, photographic workshop, photography, photoshop, photoshop tutorials

Digital Imaging Workflow

August 5th, 2009 Roger 1 comment
Setting up and maintaining an effective workflow and storage structure is essential when working with digital images. At the moment I have just under 11 000 images that need editing and all of them are at different stages in the process. When I have finished with them – deleting junk (VERY important), setting the RAW conversion parameters, adding captions and then key words – they will need to be sorted into one of 350 different categories and join some 25 000 existing images in our image bank. There HAS to be a system! To try to do this without one is a nightmare.

So, here is what I do:

I have 3 hard drives that I work with on a daily basis (I’ve actually got many more but this is specifically for dealing with images). My working drive is a 500gig external drive and then I have 2 X 1 Terra Byte external drives for backing up the images. Normally the backup drives are switched off and are only used when I need to access the files or backup new images. In the field, I have 2 X 250 gig USB drives onto which I save images. These are small, light and do not need their own power supplies.

Whatever we are busy with I ultimately end up transferring the pix to a folder on my working drive on my desk top machine. I have set up 2 folders – Editing To Do and Processed. The folders in the Editing To Do folder vary, depending what we are busy with but at the moment they go something like Berg NEF, Berg DNG, Durban NEF, Durban DNG, iSimangaliso DNG, iSimangaliso DNG and so on…

Then:

1. I either copy the pix to an existing NEF folder or create a new one if necessary.

2. Once all the images have been copied across I then rename them. The actual name you give them is unimportant – it is just there to give each image a unique number. The file names that cameras dish out are usually limited to a maximum of 9999 and once this is reached it starts again at 1. This can cause HUGE problems with duplicates so it is best to set up your own numbering system. I’ve tried “intelligent” numbers that include date and subject codes but maintaining these is a complete pain and all this data is available in the image EXIF information anyway. I just started at 300 000 and worked up from there.

3. When the images have been renamed I copy them to both the backup drives.

4. The images that are in the NEF folder are then imported into Adobe Lightroom with no preset settings and exported as a DNG file to an appropriate DNG folder. The alternative is to simply convert the files to DNG files using Adobe DNG converter but until very recently this program did not handle my Nikon D3x files so I had to go the Lightroom route. This conversion is not strictly necessary as it is perfectly fine to work with the raw files from your camera and if you are shooting jpegs then you can skip this step completely. There are, however, some benefits to working with DNG files.

5. The DNG files are imported into Lightroom with appropriate “Develop” and Metadata presets.

6. I then work through the images checking the exposure (using the histogram), sharpness at 100% and composition.

7. The images that I like are tagged and the rest are deleted (remember, I’ve backed up all the NEF files onto the 2 X 1 TB drives).

8. Now the editing work starts in earnest. Every image is checked for: exposure, contrast, black clipping, highlight clipping, brightness, chromatic aberration, noise reduction, vignetting, dust spots, colour balance, clarity, vibrancy and saturation. Changes are made as and where necessary.

9. In Lightroom, a suitable caption is added answering the following: What is it? (Including scientific name where appropriate). What is it doing? And where is it doing it? In addition all the other necessary IPTC data is added and/or modified.

10. Again in Lightroom, appropriate keywords are added.

11. The files are then exported into a temporary folder as highest quality, non-interpolated JPEG’s.

12. This folder is opened in Adobe Bridge and the keywords are fine-tuned.

13. Using an “action” in Photoshop these images are then resized to 425 pixels (the size of the low res files we send out as selections to clients) on the long side and a www.africaimagery.com watermark is added.

14. The High res JPEG’s are then copied to a folder where we store these

5. The processed low res files are moved to appropriate folders in the image bank.

16. Both the High Res JPEG’s and the Image Bank are backed up.

The Africa Imagery Catalogue has a structure similar to the one below. Obviously there are many more categories in the catalogue but it’s the principle that’s important. Develop a structure along similar lines that suits your needs.

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