Category: Technique & Workflow

Robo-cams go for Olympic gold

Is it possible to get 11 photographers into a box and put them in a position where you could never place a photographer? Normally, it would be absolutely impossible. But nothing is impossible when it comes to the Olympic games.

via Reuters: http://blogs.reuters.com/photographers-blog/2012/07/04/robo-cams-go-for-olympic-gold/

In Defense of Depth

From Russian Noir by Jason Eskenazi By John Kennerdell If there’s a single received idea that fires up the imagination of my young photographer friends these days, it’s that for “professional looking” photographs they should buy fast lenses and then…

via The Online Photographer: http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/06/in-defense-of-depth.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FZSjz+%28The+Online+Photographer%29

Link: Revisiting The Zone System… or, How I Learned To Love My Light Meter Again.

My goal for this artical is not to create yet one more tome on how digital exposure works. That’s already been done, repeatedly, and new efforts are always underway. Rather, my goal here is about two other things. First, to try and rectify a minor problem with my own technique of using an already-gamma-encoded gray scale for demonstration purposes in Lightroom—which we’ll get to later. Second, I hope to clarify a few things about the linear capture and gamma-encoding relationship, that seems to continually get muddled in the popular press.

Link: DSLR News Shooter | Final Cut Pro X for news shooters: You say you want a revolution? (Or, how I learnt to stop worrying and love the X)

Every time I learnt how to do something I made a post-it note with the shortcut and stuck it on the wall above my computer. I ended up with about 50 post-its on my wall. They continue to be a handy visual reference as I use the software; the shortcuts vastly speed up your workflow and learning them from day one is definitely the way to go. Here is one of the first videos I edited using X. It is predominantly made up of time-lapses of Beijing and with most of them I re-timed them using X’s powerful re-timing tool. This is a massive advance from FCP7’s ‘change speed’ tool and one of the many reasons why I really like FCP X.

Is It Time To Eliminate Stills From Your Shoot? – A Photo Editor

Last summer I was having dinner with an Art Director who was fielding emails from a client who wanted to pull stills from the commercial video shoot to drop into the background of the commercial stills shoot he was on. He bemoaned the fact that he would p

via A Photo Editor: http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2012/05/15/is-it-time-to-eliminate-stills-from-your-shoot/

Link: Luminous Landscape

Lightroom 4 is footing the bill for a catered banquet, as the new Process 2012  raises the bar on image adjustments!  The new Shadows and Highlights sliders can do things curves can only dream about. Things that can really improve images

Link: DSLR News Shooter

‘Inside the Story: a masterclass in digital storytelling by the people who do it best’. It’s a collaborative ebook I’ve produced with the help of some of the best digital journalists working on the web. 

George Jardine

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.