Link: F. Scott Schafer

Got a call from VH1 to do a very large scale, two-day production for Mob Wives Season 2. They wanted a very decadent, over-the-top image that represented the countdown to midnight, as well as the new season, which started on New Years Day. The idea was that this image was taken moments before the main cast members engaged in an all-out brawl. We knew this would be a very complicated shot due to the sheer number of people involved, the restrictions of the location, and the limitations surrounding the main cast. For instance, the main women could not all be in the room at the same time. Since they are on a reality show, if there was any interaction between them, it needed to be recorded by the TV cameras. So we had to photograph them separately and then stitch them together along with all the other pieces that would be involved in this composite.

File names are hard.

Nailing down a coherent and consistent file naming strategy for my own library took some time. Let alone for my clients. And the thread goes way back. Back to before we even starting thinking about how to support folder structures and manipulate file names in Lightroom.

I think a lot of the reason why photographers have such a hard time with file names in general, goes all the way back to the innovation of “files and folders” in early desktop computer user interfaces. As much of an innovation as the graphical display of files and folders was, the one fatal flaw was that it reinforced a very distinct real-world behavior that eventually conspired to actually make finding a specific thing in the computer more difficult.

Video #7 Get Social helps you plan for your interactions with the 800 million people on Facebook, 300 million on Twitter, and 400 million on Google+. The numbers sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be – we’re not saying that every social media outlet will work for every photographer. But there’s enough evidence to suggest that a strong social media campaign can translate into real marketing exposure and revenue. Check out the video below for more.

The best photography websites today aren’t just pretty displays for your pictures anymore. Now they’re full-blown sales and marketing tools that can host your photo archive, sell photography online, and more. Bottom line: they’re an integral part of your photo business. Allen’s video for #6 Tune-up Your Website is a good reminder of what a functional photo website must have in order to draw clients and customers.

SEO for photographers is no joke – if you aren’t employing the most basic SEO strategies (at least), then you’re selling yourself and your photo business short. The goal of SEO is unsolicited website traffic – people looking for whatever your service or product is, without yet knowing who you are. In section #5 Build Your SEO, Allen talks about three main areas that all photographers can focus on immediately to improve their website’s SEO.

10b Photography has established itself as one of the world’s leading digital darkrooms, handling post-production for scores of award-winning photojournalists who trust that the company knows where to draw the line between processing and manipulation. Olivier Laurent meets the founders.

Combining strong photojournalism with strong graphic design is a win-win. In the crowded and competitive photojournalism marketplace, it behooves you to make every part of your online presence look thoughtful and professional.

Joe Gosen, a Visual Journalism Instructor at Brooks Institute, is teaching a class on web design for photographers. From my perspective, college classes in web design always seem to be behind the times, arming students with knowledge that’s a touch out-dated, and are structured around “how it looks” than “how it works.”

But his class is different.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll discuss how to choose a template, modify it using basic HTML and CSS and add useful plug-ins. To quote Placeblogger C.E.O. Lisa Williams, “No journalism student should be intimidated by the process of setting up and managing a website — it is well within your ability, and it can all be learned and practiced before you graduate.”

The intended audience is those who haven’t done any serious digital printing but would like to. In other words, this is the introductory stuff (and, to pre-answer the question I know I’ll be asked again, no, there is not going to be a series on advanced printing). It doesn’t matter if you have wet darkroom experience or not. If you don’t have digital printing experience, this is for you

This is the first of a three part series on how you can plan, design, build and maintain a successful photojournalism portfolio website. Part 1 focuses on planning your website

In 2006, Chien-Chi Chang—who throughout his career had exclusively shot 35mm format film—embraced a new photographic pursuit, to work with a medium format 6×7 rangefinder and began his ongoing project, Home. For the series, Chang purposefully shoots a single frame of his subject to build 9 frame contact sheets—chronologies that record his personal life as a travelogue and visual diary. Chang describes the series as “a documentation of my life with an effort to make every frame count.”

The takeaway pont, though, is for many wide-aperture primes, stopping down slightly, just to f/2.0 or so, will dramatically increase resolution. For others, stopping down makes little difference, especially in the center of the image. Like everything else in photography, the more you know about the specific lens you are shooting with, the better you can use it.

On Twitter this evening, I talked a little bit about how to handle twenty bajillion photographs and stay afloat. My thinking on this has been shifting quite a bit over the last year and has been greatly influenced by conversations with others about the shoeboxes (or filing cabinets if we were a bit more sophisticated) we used to keep our archives in. Those thoughts aren’t yet complete and I’m not ready to write the big treatise on how my workflow really works, but I’m far enough along to at least give a sneaky peek on one aspect of it.

Barry isn’t particularly interested in the writer’s craft. She’s more interested in where ideas come from — and her goal is to help people tap into what she considers to be an innate creativity.

These are just personal adaptations I have made with the x100 to help my style of shooting in the streets of Mumbai.

For those who haven’t been force-fed this bit of dubious dogma, “Expose to the right” is a rule that asserts that to get the best quality in your digital photographs, you should push your exposure as far to the high side (the right side of the histogram) as you can without clipping the highlights.

I’m currently in the process of updating and printing a new portfolio and I thought I would take a moment half day to talk about the process.

My dear friend, Marc, has said of editing, “It’s like lining up your children and deciding which ones you’re going to shoot.” That quote isn’t going to end up on the front of a greeting card anytime soon but it does get to the heart of the matter. Andy Lee rephrased it to, “…deciding which ones you love more.” Either way, the process can suck but it is a process you need to go through on a regular basis. At least twice a year. Minimum.

a photo editor:

Nik Software released the fourth version of Color Effex Pro, their popular Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture plugin. Like Photoshop actions, CEP4 allows photographers to quickly combine multiple small adjustments into different treatments or filters. But unlike actions, and even its own previous versions, CEP4 has a stand-alone user interface that makes adding and blending multiple enhancements fast, easy, and intuitive. We spoke with Denver-based adventure sports photographer Lucas Gilman, one of Nik’s beta testers on CEP4, to find out how it integrates into his workflow.

the image, deconstructed:

I’m also looking for layers, which is a reason why I prefer
using a 35mm f1.4 rather than a 400mm lens. I want more
information, not less. I want more intimacy, not less.