Pushing On

While the Covid-19 pandemic pushes on, over one million cases have been reported in the United States, with over 1,600 cases in my county and over 2,000 in my immediate area.  Yet, the governor has partially opened the state, to commerce.  I am sorry, but this is scary to me.  Many businesses were boarded up during this time with lots of graffiti artist painted their graffiti on the boards.  Because of some of those businesses deciding to open up, many of the boards are coming down.  It seems like a waste of talent.  Why don't some of those businesses use the boards as part of their decor?  It could be that they don't want to be reminded of the times, but it is a piece of history.  Someone once said, "The reason that history repeats itself is because we don't learn from it".  Some have said that the world will not be the same after this and others have opined that perhaps we should not go back to the old ways.  Perhaps.

Focusing more on the positive, I have been listening to podcast and getting ideas for things that can help my process my photographs.  I created a preset for Lightroom, that I will use to process my photographs as I import them into Lightroom.  I also made a LUT (Look Up Table) for my colors and tones in Photoshop.  Both of those were inspired by listening to Blake Rudis' podcast on the Virtual Summit that Dave Cross put on.  Now all I can have all of my colors and tones can look the same throughout my photographs.  I am looking forward to using it on many if not all of my photographs.

I also listened to Dave Cross' podcast called "Talking Shop".  He made a suggestion about using two curves in Photoshop, one for darkening and one for lightening and then making an action to put the two curves on your layer stack.  I have been interested in trying to burn and dodge in Photoshop without using the burn and dodge tools.  It is my thought that with using a mask in Photoshop, making the mask black, then painting in white with my settings at 10% intervals for the brush and going over and over until I am satisfied with how the highlights and shadows look in my photograph.

If you think about it, every object that we see, has highlights and shadows.  Photographs are two dimensional objects having only a length and width.  It is putting highlights and shadows in your picture that helps it become three dimensional helping it to have depth.  Having the ability to dodge and burn will really help in my processing abilities.  I am looking forward to making the action and putting it in my library in Photoshop so that I can use it in my post processing.

I am itching to get outside and take pictures but I am doing my best not to dwell on the negative and focusing on the positive.  I hope that you are as well.

COVID-19 Continues

Grrrrrrrr COVID-19 still has me stuck at home.  I am still hoping that as some of the medical experts have said that heat of the summer will kill the virus.  Is it possible that many of these restrictions will be eased up?  In my state, some have, but then the city is still taking precautions since there are close to 1200 cases of the virus here.

I am a person that needs to get out.  This business of sitting at home is getting to me.  I still want to go places and see things that I haven't seen or really experienced yet.  Yet my camera is sitting in its bag gathering dust on my floor.

You might have noticed that I did not post last week.  That was because I was attending a Virtual Summit on Photoshop.  As per the typical summits or conferences, some of the instructors were very informative and others were just so so or down right not interesting.  One particular instructor that I enjoyed was Blake Rudis from https://f64academy.com/.  It was through him that I learned to do a LUT (look up table) to help with my post processing.  While, Blake uses Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw to process his pictures, I am going to split his process putting the Adobe Camera Raw part into Lightroom as a Preset and the Photoshop part into its own LUT.  Then, when I import my image into Photoshop, I can use the LUT at the first action to get the proper tone and colors to begin my processing with.  I am excited to set this up and start using it and see what it does to my processing.

Someone else that I really enjoyed was Jack "Wow" Davis http://jackdavishowtowow.com/.  Jack took a step by step approach to using Lightroom for my iPad.  He really made it seem interesting to me and I have the feeling that it is something that I can use if I am at lunch and want to see how some of my pictures may look once I put them on my desktop computer.  Presently, I use my iPad to take panoramas, so I am looking forward to using it and getting over some of the wonder that I might have after I take a picture that I feel really good about.  As I tell many of the people that I interact with, "Everything looks good small".  It is when you get it larger that you start noticing the flaws.

Where Have I Been?

In looking back at my blog, my last post was December 2016.  Today is March of 2020, quite a long time.  In short, I have been busy doing nothing.

I had a lot of back issues.  I went through a lot of misdiagnosis of my problem.  I finally went to a pain management doctor and he referred me to a spine specialist.  This spine specialist diagnosed me with a combination of scoliosis and stenosis.  Much of my back naturally fused itself over the years, but I was having trouble with the L series in my back. For those of you that are not familiar with what different parts of the back do, the L series of vertebrae in your back control your legs.  I ended up having surgery in January of 2019 and today, I am actually walking around without the use of a cane or any other device to help me walk. 

I am back to being able to carrying my camera in a backpack type camera bag and I have gotten into mirrorless cameras.  Specifically, I was able to get a Sony a7 camera and I have gotten two lenses to shoot with and am doing very well using that.  Of course, I ended selling my Nikon camera and gear so that I could acquire my Sony, but overall, it has helped me to get out and start shooting again.

I hope to start posting on my blog on a regular, consistent basis.  Of course this Coronavirus pandemic has happened and so like many others, I am staying in so that I don't come down with it.  I am and will always deal with chronic depression, that is part of why I am a photographer and do what I do. 

I have taken some pictures, but I want to work on some processing skills while being forced to stay at home.  One of the techniques I want to work on is sharpening my photographs.  I have gotten a lot of comments about how great my textures are in my photographs, but like the person that I am, I am my own worst critic and feel that they can be better.  I also have changed my post processing routing and use much more Photoshop than I was.  I still put frames around all of my work, but have seen some other people that use frames and want to incorporate some of their ideas into my frames as well.

Until next time.  Stay healthy, stay well, and most of all keep shooting.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness:  "The practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one's thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment to moment basis"  Merriam-Webster online dictionary www.merriam-webster.com.

Often, when we go into certain situations, we have preconceived notions or expectations about what we expect or want to happen.  In my article on meditation I stated that I often listen to music that contains the sounds of ocean waves, babbling brooks or even waterfalls and suggested that words to songs can "pollute my mind" and help me raise false expectations of what I want or expect to come away from a shoot with.

Susan Kanfer on the Photofocus website posted a picture of Zion National Park.  Given the same opportunity, many people would come away with just one picture from this opportunity, but Susan was able to discover five other pictures within the one picture that many of us would have taken.

In my previous post titled "A Christmas Walk At The Driskill Hotel, I talked of watching an inspirational video that gave me ideas of possible post processing ideas for pictures I wanted to take to accomplish my ideas.  When you go out shooting, it almost makes the shoot to be a sort of scavenger hunt for the opportunities that you seek and desire to accomplish the objectives you desire.

So what can we do to take pictures that show our heightened  or complete awareness of our thoughts, emotions or experiences that we are having when we take pictures?

First:  Walk slowly over your selected path.  Just as if you were looking for something that you might have lost, I often tell people, "Look up, look down and look from left to right, but look slowly."

Second:  Don't be so concerned with the total picture.  If you go to Google Search and search images of places that you would like to take pictures at, you can see plenty of those.  If you have Google Earth, you can literally see pictures that other people have taken of the places you want to go to.  What will make your pictures stand out is if you take selected images from that bigger picture.  Look for things such as water flowing over rocks, trees that are standing next to each other that perhaps have contrasting colors, perhaps green and yellow or red and either green or brown.  Don't be enchanted with a waterfall.  Again, there are plenty of pictures of those.  Instead look for the water cascading over what is causing the waterfall.  Perhaps you need to put your camera in a vertical position so that you can capture more of the falls.  Perhaps, you need a zoom lens on your camera and a tripod because you can't get close enough to that picture.  Many have suggested using a Neutral Density (ND) filter to make the water more milk like in appearance.  Also, try taking several pictures at a faster speed on your camera and then importing them into Photoshop as layers.  You will find that your vegetation is not blurry around your waterfall, especially if there was a wind, which often seems to happen.

Third:  Before you take your picture, think how you are going to process it.  I eluded to this about the waterfall.  How you are going to process your picture is very important to how you take it. Do you need just one picture or do you need several?  It is difficult to go back and try to take the same picture, especially if the place you took the picture is a long distance from you.  Besides that, the light is never the same because of the rotation of the Earth.  Remember the old phrase, "Better safe than sorry"?  It applies to photography as well.  It is far better to take more pictures and then discard the ones that you don't want to use when you post process than to go back and retake your picture again.

Fourth:  If something makes you happy, take a picture of it.  Life is filled with sorrowful moments. During those sorrowful moments it is often best to go back and reflect on those positive happy moments in your life.  You will find it puts a smile on your face.

There is a quote associated with Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Clemons), "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness".  He went on to say, "And many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one's lifetime.

Happy shooting.

My Processing Workflow -- Part 1 Lightroom

From my experience most of us are visual learners.  If we watch someone and take notes through what they show us, we can learn, but it is much better when we put the methods that we are taught into practice and then repeat them over and over again.

Two primary teachers I have had are Jack "Wow" Davis and Mark S Johnson.  Jack Davis taught me about Lightroom and Mark Johnson taught me about using Photoshop. I took what I learned from each other them and then worked it into my own workflow.  Yes, I have learned techniques from other people like Blake Rudis, J.R. Rodriguez, Anthony Morganti and others, but this system works for me.

This will be a two part blog post separating my work in Lightroom from my work in Photoshop.  They are two different programs and some people may only desire to use Lightroom and not include Photoshop in their workflow. If you happen to be using Photoshop, Lightroom works very similar to Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).  For me Lightroom is less intimidating.

Once I have loaded my photographs into Lightroom (I use Lightroom to catalog my photographs rather than using Bridge which is part of Photoshop), I go way down to "Lens Corrections".  Check the boxes that say "Remove Chromatic Aberration" and "Enable Profiles Corrections".  Be sure to check your Histogram up at the top on the right hand side to see what the length of the lens you used was.  You might find that it is giving you the wrong lens.  Then go down to "Transform".  Here I select "Auto" but I also look at the picture as I might have to manually adjust my picture to get it the way I want.

Next I go to the top and crop my picture to the way I want it.  Then I go into the Basic panel and set my White Balance.  On a RAW Photograph, you have choices (just one of the reasons I shoot in RAW).  From there I adjust my Highlights and Shadows.  Most of the time you will find yourself pulling the slider to the left to reduce your highlights and to the right to open up your shadows.  It is important to make sure that you are not clipping your whites or blacks, but if you don't like what you are seeing you can always adjust them in Curves, when we get there.  Then go down to Clarity and adjust your Clarity.  You will see your photo sharpen right up.

Then adjust your Whites and Blacks. This might help some of your clipping, so it is why I don't adjust my Curves until I get there.  Then you can adjust your Vibrance. You will really see the colors come to life doing this.  From there I go into the Radial Filter.  Hold the Ctrl (on MAC the Command key) and double click on the picture.  You will see that you get a vignette. Make sure that "Invert Mask" is checked.  This will allow you to adjust what is inside the mask.  Most of the time all I adjust is the Clarity here, but you might need to make some other modifications  Remember you are the artist.  As Bob Ross would say, "It is your world, so present it the way you want."

So just a quick recap to this point:

Lens Corrections
Transform
     Auto
Crop Tool
Basic Panel
     White Balance
     Highlights/Shadows
     Clarity
     Whites/Blacks
     Vibrance/Vignette

Jack Davis calls this the "Wow Tango".

If you still need to fix your clipping for blacks and whites, go to Tone Curves and adjust the side of the curve on the left (for blacks) or the right (for whites).  Just push it straight up to adjust the blacks for clipping and straight down for the whites (you need to be in the point curve for this maneuver).  Once you get the triangles not to have white in the Histogram, you have done the job you need because we will make another adjustment in Photoshop.

Go into the HSL panel and adjust the colors to the way you want.  I start with the Luminance, then go to Hue and then to Saturation.

Then go into Detail and adjust your Sharpening (typically 71 is enough for me), Masking, then Luminance if I notice grain (a look that looks like someone took and threw a handful of sand across your image.) and then do the Detail for the Luminance and the Masking (just about the Masking slider).

That is my basic Lightroom workflow.  When I am finished in Lightroom, I right click on my picture, go to Edit In, and choose Photoshop and let the program transfer the program.  That way I keep my pictures from being destroyed by Photoshop.

Stay tuned for my workflow by Photoshop.