Abduzeedo had me making excited grunting noises with this magnificent post. Like, wow. If you didn’t click that link, the photo below should convince you to.
What I had planned to blog about completely pales in comparison to that awesome photo, so I’ll save it for later.
Also, the “send” button on my contact form is there once again, after taking it down because of the incredible amounts of spam it made for me. Find it here
One post that helped me a lot when I was starting with more advanced retouching techniques was How to contour your face. by CeeMe. Its a makeup tutorial, not retouching, but its really not hard to translate.
I see a lot of beginning retouchers making the mistake of using liquify or some other method that actually moves pixels around to try to make people thinner or better when in many cases a little shadow here or there would do the trick. Thats not to say liquify isn’t totally kickass, I use it often, but a lot of beginners would do good to back off a little and try some DnB.
The gulf photo plus 2010 shoot-out from gulf photo plus on Vimeo.
Ive been waiting for this to get uploaded for ages. Its three of my favorite photographers, I’ve followed each of their blogs for a while now, in a shoot out. Then theres a little Joe McNally added on the side. Seriously, whats not to like? David Hobby gets the vote from me.
The extreme amount of work I mentioned in the last post is nearly done, and I can return to my normal duties. Its nice to be able to slow down for a bit. Im going to sit back, relax, and hopefully write something interesting for you tomorrow.
One of the more inspiring projects I’m working on right now is DigiCMS. Its a content management system being built by Digitized Solutions as the ultimate CMS solution for their clients. Rather then waste time deciding whether to use ExpressionEngine or WordPress or Joomla or whatever, they decided to make their own from the ground up. Everything they need, and nothing they don’t, and they got me to design the front end. Its been an interesting experience for me as I have to put more focus on usability and less on aesthetics then I do with most jobs, and its been pretty enlightening.
This is the face I make when I design something I am inspired about:
Ive been making it a lot lately.
In any case, I am really looking forward to seeing this project finished, as it looks like it would fit the needs of my clients and me quite nicely as well. I’ll ping you people when theres something more substantial that I can show you.
To any poor soul who keeps checking back here in the hopes of finally finding part two of White Background / Studio photography with one flash up, I am sorry. Ive been bombarded with work recently, I hope to have it up soon.
This article on smashing magazine was the most interesting and informative thing that Ive read in a long long time. It should be required reading for any designer who wants to become a successful freelancer. Thats all I really have to say, just read it if you haven’t already.
Common Questions About Design Professionalism
I found this part especially interesting, its some major food for thought:
Imagine for a moment that you’re a physician trying to determine the best course of treatment for your patient. In that situation, you would not ask the patient what he thinks should be prescribed. Instead you would inquire about his symptoms, history, environment, physical needs (e.g. is he a pro athlete, or does he simply need to be able to get around normally?). The answers to these questions will define the constraints and indicate the appropriate course of action. Your patient’s opinion on what prescription would be appropriate is likely irrelevant; he came to you because he lacks the ability to help himself.
I’ve a huge folder of things I’ve found on the web that have inspired me in some way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be awesome, just has to spark my imagination in some way. Heres a few of the recent ones:
I’ve always had this grand vision to try to do a video like this, just on a smaller scale, for the websites in my portfolio. Sadly the amount of time it takes to create something like that is more then it takes to make the website itself so I don’t see that happening any time soon. Still, whenever I see a video like this it brings back the urges. Also, has anybody noticed that churches these days seem to have an incredible amount of awesome websites in comparison to websites on other topics?
Oookay… elephants…
The Starcraft2 website is amazing, the design, perfect use of flash, the layers + transparency in the footer, then of course the detection to see if your browser supports it. The website even works in IE 6 for Gods sake. I marvel. You cant see any of this awesomeness in the little image above, so go to the Starcraft2 Website at Starcraft2.com. Be sure to scroll all the way down for the intense footer.
Its just… nice. Not super spectacular, theres just something about the look of it that makes me feel warm and fuzzy… or… something.
The grand finale:
Yeasayer “ONE” By: Radical Friend from ODDBLOOD on Vimeo.
The music is wonky, the singer even more so, and I’m not even sure if I would call it “inspirational,” but its like a trip on acid and totally worth your time.
More to come.
A question Ive had to deal with a lot recently, do I deliver what I believe to be sub-par work, even though the client wouldn’t notice, or perfect a project at cost to myself? Most of the time it comes down to my professional pride, I hate to work on a project that isn’t as good as I think it could be.
I could go into details about why I feel that this “desire for excellence” is a large part of why I’ve seen a huge increase in clients recently, but I’ll let this article on webdesignerdepot do that for me.
In this post I’m going to walk you through how, with only one external flash, in a normal room, you can manage to make a photo that looks like it was shot in a studio. Hopefully you will get a better grasp of light and how it works in the process. You’re going to need to know how to use your camera in manual mode. This post is about light, not “the basics of using a camera,” and you’re going to need a way to fire your flash off-camera. Go here for details on how to fire any recent Nikon flash off-camera. The rest of you will want to go here for tons of different ways. If you’re on a tiny budget and you don’t mind a little hit to reliability then I would recommend this4 Channel Wireless Hot Shoe Flash Trigger & Receiver Set
If you’ve got those things covered then lets move on.
In keeping with the low-budget theme of this post, I’ll be shooting in pretty much the most low-budget place possible:
As you can see, this is about the furthest thing from a studio around. There’s really not much to work with in here, so we’ll be shooting in front of the door. Its sorta off-white but its close enough for our purposes. If we just stick the subject in front of the door, using just the ambient light in the room, we get something like this:
The background has the shadow of the subject on it, and even the parts unaffected by the shadow are a murky grey. The light doesn’t flatter the subject at all either, there are nasty shadows, bags under her eyes and no catch lights.
So here is where flash comes in. For these shots I’ll be using one Nikon sb-600 fired by the pop-up on a d90 to keep it simple.
Basically, I;m going to put my flash behind the subject, and below waist level, pointing up at the part of the door directly behind the subject, like so:
I’m not going to post the specific settings that I used for my flash here, as the settings will vary for each situation. The key is to set the flash power up until the background goes white and the shadow of the subject goes away, but not too high as to cause flare. So play around until you find a happy medium. Since the flash is pointed at the background instead of the subject, you’re going to use primarily the ambient light in the room to light the subject. Still, you can reasonably expect some light from the flash bouncing around the room to provide a little fill and lighten up those shadows on the subjects face.
This is what I’m getting at this stage:
So, we’ve fixed the background problem, its white, theres no more shadow on it. Its getting better. If you’re really lazy then you could stop here, but I’m going to experiment with some cheap ways to make it even better.
The background is fine, what needs work now is the light hitting the subject. Right now its just the ambient light helped out a little by spill from the background flash. In this situation it’s not THAT bad, but in many cases the ambient light isn’t bright enough, is to harsh, or in the wrong place, or even an entirely different color. I want something I can replicate reliably. Ideally you would bring up your shutter speed to stop the ambient light from affecting your photo and run another flash through an umbrella
The problem is you’ve only got one off-camera flash unit, and thats already being used. This is where we need some creative thinking.
The rest should be done tomorrow. Let me know what you think of it so-far.
Been busy as hell recently so that post on off-camera flash will have to wait till tomorrow. again.
in the meantime I leave you with this photo by NV6V on Flickr which I thought was extremely interesting. Selective coloring backwards, and without Photoshop? Weird.
