Red, Green, Pink, Yellow and Blue Cameras

I was talking recently about the differences in shopping habits between men and women and how these differences affect camera design and esthetics.  Most men usually like black or silver cameras, beefy, two-handed creative tools (or so I have observed), while many women look for small, pocket cameras that are easy to carry, easy to use, and produce good quality images.  It doesn’t hurt if the camera comes in a cool designer color, too.

Let’s see….heavy, bulky, black camera vs small, light, designer color camera….Maybe I need a small, red camera.   Above are a few of the new breed of colorful cameras.

What do you think about this?

The Convergence of Video and Photography

Marines conducting field medical drills at Camp LeJeune, NC.

I’m very excited about how motion media and still images – video and photography – are converging in the latest generation of hybrid cameras that shoot video footage as well as do traditional still photography.  Cameras such as the Canon 5D Mk II, the Canon 7D and the Nikon D300S break down the boundary between video and stills and provide truly amazing capabilities at a reasonable price.

Last week, I shot my first video/still assignment using a Canon 5D MK II DSLR, and it was wild. Non-stop, run-and-gun video at Camp LeJeune of Marine medical drills staged in an open field under blazing sun, running in and out of medical tents following  stretchers that were carrying make-believe patients. The 5D performed like a champ, delivering beautiful, well-exposed hi-def video in conditions ranging from bright sun to near darkness. A great feature of the 5D is that you can take a still photograph while it is recording video, and return automatically to recording video. Very cool!

The new equipment does, however, upset the established division of labor for both video shoots and still shoots. Before hybrid cameras, you needed a still camera to capture stills and a video camera to capture video. On location, this usually meant a video crew of at least two or three people: camera operator, sound recordist, and producer/director; and a still photographer. Now, agencies are trying to squeeze this down to one person with a hybrid DSLR tasked with both jobs.

Shooting both stills and video with a DSLR can be challenging for one person to do, especially in a fluid, fast moving  environment where that person has no control over events.  When to shoot video? When to shoot stills?  Shooting stills with a Canon 5D while it is shooting video is easy, but it interrupts video recording for about one second.  Will that second contain important action?

As well, the on-board microphone is really only good for recording a background sound track;  it also picks up all of the camera handling noise.  A remote microphone is needed for a good sound track, either a wireless or a directional mic that mounts in the camera’s hot shoe. Now, that one lone photographer/videographer has a lot of balls to keep in the air!

Nevertheless, I’m convinced that this is the future of video/photography, and photographers and videographers will need to learn each other’s  job and become good at using the this new equipment.

Times Square 25 Years Later

I’ve done a lot of work in New York City over the years, including a wondeful  project  documenting the construction of a giant hotel in Times Square. For more than a year, my crew and I filmed the progress every month, as the building climbed more than 40 stories into the sky.

I rarely went back to the area after that project ended, until last night. Wow! Has it ever changed!  A few years ago, NYC closed off some of the traffic lanes on Broadway, from 42nd Street to 47th Street, and converted them into a huge pedestrian plaza, complete with tables, chairs, and a terraced seating area that was filled with people from all over the world, enjoying the light show.

The place is cleaned up, bright with neon and giant TV screens, and is a blast to visit.  I wandered around for a couple of hours with my Canon G10 camera and a monopod, making pictures and just trying to take it all in.

I’m going back tonight!

Do You Color Outside The Lines?

New York skyline, approaching storm.

Profiles.  They can be good or bad, your left side or right side, or what you write about yourself on Facebook.  But in digital printing,   profiles are part of the the glue that connects the colors your digital camera captures to the colors in your digital print.

A printer profile is a bit of software, called an ICC file,  that describes  how a particular combination of printer, inkset, and printing paper reproduce colors at a specific printing  resolution. For example,  the ICC profile SP7898 PLPP260 PK 2880.icc describes how an Epson 7800 printer using the K3 inkset with Photo Black ink printing on Epson Premium Lustre 260 paper at a printing resolution of 2880 dpi reproduces color.

Profiles are useful because they let Adobe Photoshop  accurately  preview what your image will look like when it’s printed, and  to control your digital printer’s output so it matches that preview. (or, at least, as close as ink on paper can look to pixels on a monitor).

Once the appropriate profiles are installed, Photoshop  uses them in the View>Proof Setup command on the top menu to preview images,  and in the Print dialogue to control your printer. Voila, an accurate print.

Or maybe not.

Along with ICC profiles, colorspace helps to determine what colors your camera records, that Photoshop displays and  your print or digital file reproduce. A device colorspace defines the range of colors, or gamut, that a device, such as a camera or printer, can reproduce. An editing colorspace is device-independent, but determines the color range you can work in with, for, example, Adobe Photoshop software.

The main colorspaces photographers work in are Adobe RGB (1998), the traditional editing space for, naturally, Adobe Photoshop;  sRGB,  which is primarily used for  images posted on the web; and, more recently ProPhoto.

sRGB  has a smaller gamut than Adobe 1998, which has a smaller gamut than ProPhoto. Why is this important?  Because to know how the beautiful colors in your digital image will look in a print, your devices need to be using the same colorspace, your monitor needs to be calibrated accurately to the same colorspace, and your editing software needs to display the same color space.

See what I meant by insanity?  BTW, for you people working with Adobe Lightroom, it uses the ProPhoto color space.

My, What A Beautiful Profile You Have!

Surfside Dawn

One of the great things about digital photography is convenience. You can see your pictures right away, and delete those you hate and take more.

You can take a bazillion pictures and they’re saved on a teeny tiny memory card that’s barely bigger than your thumbnail.

You can load them into a computer and store them,  erase the memory card, and go out and take more pictures.

And you can make prints yourself, hooking your computer up to a digital printer, and – sometimes they look great.

But too often, digital  prints are a disappointment because the colors are wrong, or the pictures are too dark, or they just look gooky –  not at all like the glorious images you saw through the viewfinder.

I teach digital printing workshops, and the question I hear most often is,  “Why don’t my prints look the same as my pictures looked on the monitor?”

That’s a good question with a complex answer.

It’s because  digital cameras see (and record) color differently than a computer monitor, which sees color differently than a digital printer. Metaphorically, while they’re all talking the same basic language, it’s like each one is speaking a different dialect and missing a few words of what the others are saying.

In my digital printing workshops, I teach how to get all these devices talking to each other properly to get consistent results, to have your prints match what you see on your monitor, and how to control the digital printing process so that you can make artistic choices in how to render an image.

Or, in other words, the art and science of  using a color managed digital workflow.

And, just as the future rested on single word, “plastics,” whispered to Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate,” digital color management also rests on a single word: “profiles”

Next Time:  Profiles, Color Space and  Insanity.

Fun with Photoshop Actions

I now use Adobe Lightroom for about 90% of my work, but I still use Adobe Photoshop for pictures that require layers,  compositing, and creative tools that Lightroom doesn’t have,  such as Actions.

Actions are awesome. An action is a programmed series of operations in Photoshop that is set in motion with a single mouse click, and can be designed to do just about anything, from simple to extremely complex. They’re one-step solutions that can really add to productivity and creativity.

Photoshop comes with a few actions, and you can write your own, although the process is not very intuitive. There are gobs of free actions on-line for a huge range of tasks, and I regularly surf for them,  looking for new ones to add something special to my pictures or automate  really boring and repetitive tasks, such as resizing pictures and saving them as jpgs.

One of my favorite actions converts an image into a high-contrast black and white duotone.  I often combine this action with layer masking and painting to create duotones that also have areas of color.  Above  is a before and after example of this technique.

To add an action to Photoshop, click on the menu box in the upper right corner of the Actions Palette, and select “Load Options”. Then, navigate to the folder on your computer where you have saved the action and select it.

To apply an action to an image, first open the image in Photoshop and click on the button for the action in the Actions Palette. In the picture on the left,  above, each of the horizontal bars with text is an action “button”.

Below are some of my favorite Actions websites;   Google “Photoshop Actions” to find many, many more.

Have fun!

Action Central

Deviant Art

Smashing Magazine

What in the World?

I work a lot with patterns, line, shape – the textures of the world.  And, sometimes, I see things through the viewfinder, in isolation, that I might not see if I didn’t have a camera pasted to my forehead most of the day.  I’ve been working with a new camera, the Canon G10, that produces big, sharp pictures, and the other day I went around the house photographing patterns that caught my eye. I’ve posted some of the most interesting ones here, to see if anybody can figure out what I was photographing. In my next post, I’ll reveal what they are.

A Day of Her Own

Diane receives certificate proclaiming May 16 Diane Chamberlain Day in Surf City, NC.

As some of you know, my significant other is a noted novelist, and last weekend we went to a party in Surf City on Topsail Island to celebrate her 20th year as a published author.  It was a great party where we saw old friends and made new ones.  The highlight of the evening was a proclamation from the Mayor of Surf City officially designating May 16 as Diane Chamberlain Day. Pretty cool, to have a day named after you!

Kids, Capes and Cameras

It’s been said that photographers should avoid children and animals, but I really like working with kids. They are great fun to photograph, because once you gain their trust they open up to you and are entirely at ease in front of the camera.  I recently started a new series with children, sparked by a shoot I did with my significant other’s grandkids, boys age 3 and 5. It started as a conventional portrait session, but suddenly veered into something else when the 5 year old wanted to wear his new red cape, that has a big white star on it.  Now, I’ve photographed a lots of kids modeling clothing, for advertising and clothing catalogs,  but this time was very different.  What I saw through the viewfinder wasn’t a shy, quiet 5 year old boy, but a SUPERHERO ready to save the world, and that came across powerfully in the pictures.  I started photographing other kids dressed in costumes and acting out their fantasies, and their transformation to superhero, ballerina, sports star, or cartoon character has yielded strikingly different and powerful images. As a result, I’ve added Kids’ Fantasy Photo Adventures to my portrait business.  I hope you’ll visit my site and check out the Fantasy Photo Adventures gallery and let me know what you think.