The silver plated fish

Is not silvery and you know it. The Cubera is red or copper colour but not silver. Thus, with a bit of work in Lightroom you can edit it in black & white and get the shinest result of them all. I think that this is a good looking fish in any colour, from any point of view and with most of the lights available, natural or artificials. I bet I had a spray of flash here as well but I cannot remember now. I like the edit of this image, it makes me love Lightroom more and more.

How can you give life to a block of marble?

How can you give life to a block of marble? Well, sculptors do. They know how to make a 2 tons piece of unanimated rock turn into something alive. Michelangelo fired his hammer against his Moses once it was finished asking ”Perché non parli?” (Why don’t you talk?), and if you are like me and like sculptures, you will be probably staring at a statue in awe mouth open and with your head going blank.

I’m not a great fan of paintings, or I should better say not as much as I am of sculptures. Classic sculptures are my favorites, from the ancient Greeks and Romans masterpieces to Donatello. Funny to admit it; being a photographer or at least someone who is in love with photography and working on his learning process, painting should be the thing to look at with more attention. The use of light, then rule of thirds, the search for the third dimension, all valuable inputs any photog should grab from the master painters. Yet it is harder for me to understand how a man can sculpt the body of The David and Goliath, than painting The Last Supper. Probably I have the wrong concept that if you make a mistake while working on your canvas you can go back and somehow fix it, but if the scalpel knocks out too much marble your work has gone for good.

Now, just to make something clear I’m not an educated lover of sculpture, paintings or art in general. Yet I grew up in a city like Rome and spent long summer holydays in Tuscany, hence art and architectural beauties where around me all the time. I’m pretty sure that my small brain and my short sighted eyes absorbed all that beauty like sponges, and stored it somewhere. Now it floats to the surface and every once in a while, when I have the chance to witness shows of manmade wonders I breath it deeply, and if I have the camera with me I grab my vision of it.

Wandering around the Vatican Museums for a whole day has been such a grateful experience that I almost thanked my wife for dragging me there. I was scared to go, mid August, crowded with people, sticky hot… not a great plan. My longing to see the museum was being beaten by my laziness, but thank God I was not alone. To my surprise, once inside the Museum I was alone. Not that the thousands of people grazing around have gone at once, just that when I put my eye behind the viewfinder of my Nikon everything softened out and quieted down.

My wife had her ear glued to the audio guide and never interrupted me in my inspired journey through those wonders. I was literally absent, walking on a cloud and filling GB of images. Thus, I wasn’t shooting like a madman; neither was I looking for the most famous statues or masterpieces. I mostly shot what I liked, the way I liked it and using the available light as much as I could. Looking back at the images I have the exact proof of what I’m now stating so confidently. The only real good images I have are those I shot with the most passionate feeling, being attracted by the details or the rim of light coming through the windows, or the composition I managed to get by moving around it and profoundly looking for the best possible angle (at least for me).

Last but not least I shall not forget the editing work in Lightroom. I couldn’t be happier of my reading of David duChemin book “Vision & Voice”. His work is having a profound influence in the developing of my images and especially for things like sculptures, I believe that the editing process is utterly important and I tried to take care of it the best I could. I hope that they manage to convey what I want them to, and the way I felt about them.

There’s still a long way to go but we’re working hard J

Three from Rome

I have been few days in Italy visiting the family and enjoying my vacations; needless to say I had an amazing time. Few days in Rome and few others in Tuscany allowed me to grab quite a few Gigabytes of images with my D90.  For these two weeks I borrowed a Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 that I have used a lot. Is not a lens designed for an APS sensor but I must say that was tough for me to unscrew it from the camera. What a superb piece of engineering! What a sharpness! It has been an unfortunate move to carry it with me, now I brutally raised my quality demand, and in addiction to that I also put my eye on the 70-200 f2.8VR to replace the already sold 18-200VR.  I’m longing for a fast bankruptcy because they would both work well with a FX body…..

Anyway, back to Rome for the moment. I took my wife for some brief sightseeing visits and collected most of the shots during a late afternoon one that eventually stretched into the night. Being together with someone who wants to see things and walk around at a different pace than yours is not the best option to do the things properly but she’s patient and I had my share of time. As a matter of fact I also carried my tripod, which is not known for being a tool that fastens things up.

The Gianicolo is one of those spots you must visit. Is one of the roman hills and the view you get from there is quite staggering. Rome spreads in front of your eyes like a renaissance painting, the old mixes with the new and the churches’ domes scratch the polluted sky. The sky was dark but the sun was finding its way through the clouds giving me the chance to grab at least a dramatic light. For this image I did a bit of work in Lightroom, transforming it in a duotone and pumping up the contrast. For the original shot I used a ND Grad filter but I enhanced a bit more the sky with an additional grad filter in post.

Then it got dark and it was that magical hour when the tungsten lit buildings create that amazing contrast against the dark blue sky. I love this time of the day, even an average image collects few extra points, and most of them are quite elegant to say at least. Doesn’­­t last for too long though, so you have to work pretty fast to seize the moment. In this case I had a problem with quite a bulky and dark object in the foreground, name it statue: Marco Aurelio’s. I took a first shot, and it was quite poor. With a 30 seconds exposure I had the sky well exposed as well as part of the building, but the statue was pitch dark and the lights burned out. So I took a different approach; slowed the exposure to 20 seconds and pulled the SB800 out of the waist jacket. I don’t know how many times I have used the speedlight so far to dramatically change the result of an image, being this animated or not, this for sure has been one of those. With the camera on the tripod, during the whole length of the exposure I painted the statue with the flash and pulled out most of the details not long before hidden in dark shadows.

When the sky turned black I was still around Piazza Venezia trying to figure out how to make a decent image with so many people around, work in progress, cars and bad lights. Finally I decided to go for the Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Maria, in front of the Foro Traiano including the famed Colonna Traiana. There’s nothing really special in this image, but I had a ball working on the HSL in Lightroom retouching saturation, luminance and hue in most of the colors.

Obviously there’s much more photos in the laptop’s hard disk but either I had not much time to edit them, or they were not worth it. Soon more stuff about Rome though, maybe some museum….

Lightroom 2.6.

Since my Photoshop copy doesn't want to work properly, yesterday I downloaded the trial version of Lightroom 2.6. My friend Jorge, the director of the photo magazine I write for,  always insist on how good this program is for my kind of editing so I decided to give it a better try. This is my second attempt to use this software, I have already tried a couple of years ago but couldn't get used to the interface, hence I skipped it.

Yesterday I shoot some product images in the studio so I had quite some editing to do, and eventually, I found Lightroom quite improved, easier to use and probably, because it was my second try anyway, everything went smoother. I have also received some instructions from my friend so haven't had those difficult times in exporting the images, and handling them properly.

Funny enough, the biggest problem I had came when I had to resize the image you will see here. I have moved the original folder from the desk to my main disk and Lightroom couldn't find its way to it. Once I put the folder back to where it was before everything worked again.

I do have to put a lot of hours on the software to understand all its tricks and potential, but so far so good...

HDR? I'm going to think about it!

This is my first attempt to HDR using Photomatix (http://www.hdrsoft.com/), probably the bets program around to edit your HDR photos. What is HDR? The word stands for High Dynamic Range and in very simple words it is the result of 3 or more images taken at different exposures and mixed together to achieve such an incredible dynamic range that most of the times neither the human eye is able to detect. For example one image is exposed for the shadows, one for the mid range and one for the highlights. The program blends them together and gives you a vast array of sliders to play with every aspect of the photo.

Usually the results look like a tad fake to me. People either overwork the images on purpose to achieve a specific effect, or they do it by misusing the program and create monster images, amazing to see but tiring, due to their non realistic look. The good ones, those who master the software, make great works, and I bow to them. Check out the HDR group in Flickr http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr/ to see what this is all about.

I have tried with a couple of photos on the trial software, this is why it comes with a water mark, and finally decided to keep this one to show you. We are far from the editing of some stunning images, here I used the blending mode that is said to give the more realistic results and played very little with the sliders.

When I browse people’s work in Flickr (www.flickr.com)I am always a tad suspicious about HDR images. Being a bit on the conservative side, those photos look just stunning compared to the others and still I’m not sure if this is ok or not. Confused by progress, that’s what I think I’m suffering now but…let me learn how to use the machine from hell and I might become a great HDR fan… !

My humble guide to better fishing portraits. Chapter 1

I'm far from being a professional photographer, whatever it means, and by no means I'm a good one but at least, I have dedicated 80% of my shooting time to grab images of recreational fisherman with their catches, or situations very much alike. Being in contact with several good photographers and very helpful magazine editors, I have slowly improved my skills and discovered new ways to make better photos. Of course there's much room for improvement, every day I learn a new trick and through the global web and it's many forums dedicated to photography and imaging, there's always so much to learn. Anyway, here's what I can pass along at the moment. This is what I have learnt so far and I hope it can be of some help for the readers of this humble blog.

Composition is sure enough one of the main issues. Most of the time you need your subject to fill the frame, what you don't want is to have a lot of sky, land or boat appearing in the shot, and the angler with the fish as a dot in the middle. Even worst is somebody's back or an arm included in the image, rods sticking out of the back of the angler and alike. The following image is an example of what to do not, in fact it includes in one single shot everything you can do wrong (and it was one of my biggest dog tooth tunas....)

Here is another image, less crowded, with a better cropping and yet with many undesirable elements in it. The back of another fisherman and the rod sticking behind the guy holding the fish

This is an idea of how a proper image should look like, tightly cropped, no much room around the angler and his catch and still some background to understand that he is in a beautiful place, the Andaman Islands in this case

Here is another example of what I consider a decent take, with the help of a beautiful stormy sky

A problem that often shows up is the leaning horizon. This is not an extremely big issue because you can easily correct it later in Photoshop , but if you get it right by the time of the exposure you have few advantages. First of all you don't have to crop the image, hence you don't risk to damage the take because you find yourself with the fish jaws in line with the cropping. You don't loose precious pixels either, they could come handy if your image need to go on a double spread. You save editing time too, and this is valuable when you have to work on hundreds of photos after a trip. The photo below is a decent example of wrong horizon, fortunately here there's enough room to correct it as you will see in the second image.

People, when at sea, usually wear sunglasses and hats. Nothing wrong with that, they add protection to your face and head in case a vagabond lure skyrockets against you or a flying treble hook decided to get a grip on you eye. The problem arises when is time to take a picture, in fact, especially in harsh midday sun, when the light is right on top of your subject, you cannot see his/her face or, at the best, is very dark, as you can see here.

The following photo shows how a flash, even a external flash put on camera, can lit up the whole image, get rid of the undesired shades and make the best of an harsh light. Quite an easy and handy solution. Whatever weather I'm in, whatever is the sun position I always use a fill flash. Put in manual, best of all off-camera, choose the correct amount of light you need not to over or under due and changing the angle of the light to your subject take few shots. Sometimes 1/64Th will be enough while other days, especially if you want to underexpose the sky, you might need to pump up the power and go to 1/4Th, or 1/2. So far, being so close to the subject, especially when using such extreme wide angle lenses, I have rarely needed to get full power but if you start clamping your flash further away from the subject, it might be necessary to take advantage of the full capacities of your strobe. I've yet to try that but as soon as I have some direct experience I will keep you posted.

We stop here for the moment, but this is not finished yet. In a following part I will try to explain new ways to take the best possible fishing photos. In the meanwhile, if you would like to contribute to this blog please go ahead and write your comments