RRD Photo - Cincinnati Photography and Digital ImaRRD Photo - Cincinnati Photography and Digital ImaRyan Dlugosz is a freelance photographer and tech guru in the Cincinnati, OH area. His blog explores photography from a technological perspective and the less tangible aspects of the creative process. Articles
Digital night photography: Exposure balance
2007-06-10 00:25:00 Photoblogger Joe Reifer has some good tips on how to properly treat exposure when taking night photographs. It certainly is a sensitive thing - too short and you won't get enough detail in the shadows; too long and a moonlit scene will look like daylight.Joe suggests "exposing to the middle" for optimum nighttime ambiance; a play on Michael Reichmann's scientificly sound advice on Exposing to the Right. Interesting read, but personally I'd prefer to capture all the detail I can and then have the option to pull the exposure back a bit in Lightroom or Camera RAW. I certainly try to get the exposure "just right" in camera, but the fact remains that you'll have cleaner results from pulling an exposure back than if you push it brighter (provided everything is within the range capabilities of your camera's sensor to begin with). I typically err on the side of having more data to work with.Joe's article has some great tips on how a night shot should look - whether or not you're ... More About: Photography , Night , Balance , Digital , Exposure
Three Zoom Effects for Adding Life to Your Photos - Without Photoshop!
2007-06-06 12:48:00 In photography we typically want the camera to be as still as possible in order to get a sharp image. However sometimes a little blur is all you need to make a dull image into one that's full of life. Here are three ways to make use of that zoom lens to add a bit of flair to an otherwise static photograph.1. Standard Zoom BurstThe first zoom trick is to take a photograph while zooming the lens. You'll want a reasonably slow shutter speed - try something around 1/2-1/4 second to start with. It'll help to be set up on a tripod: we're going for a radial look here & motion other than a zoom (e.g., up and down) will distort the look. That said, this is all about experimentation so feel free to change things up a bit!Using the zoom burst in this shot of an old railroad engine helped me on two fronts: first, it suggests the idea of motion and second, it effectively cleans up the very cluttered & un-supporting background of the scene! This scene was exposed for 1/5 second and star... More About: Life , Photos , Photoshop , Three
OTR Summer Tour of Homes - June 3
2007-06-05 13:08:00 This past Sunday I stopped by the home tour in the Over-the-Rhine area of Cincinnati to check out the renovations that are being done down there. If you know anything about the city, you'd know that this is considered to be the "bad part of town" - and it most certainly is.But, there appears to be some hope for revitalizing the historic buildings and bringing new life (and less crime) into the once grand location. Indeed, the blocks involved in the self-guided tour seemed quite safe, clean, and even inviting. And the grand, large, and open condos that we saw were all very, very cool and quite affordable. (In fact, I'd venture a guess that if the units we looked at would have been at least double the price had they not been in this neighborhood.)My favorite building was easily the Duveneck Flats. The units in this building were very slick and spacious, including some multi-level units that had a private roof-top deck. Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of this one; we got... More About: Summer , June , Tour , Homes
The Importance of Moment in Photographs
2007-06-03 12:45:00 A couple of weeks ago I was wandering around Eden Park in Cincinnati with a few of my friends looking to take advantage of the late afternoon light. One of the more interesting subjects in the park is a climbing wall re-purposed from some kind of raised boardwalk that has seen better days. Each of us had fired off a few frames (Spencer posted his also) and, I presume, ended up with the same basic results.I went through them last night in Lightroom and had 4 frames that were all more or less equivalent - they captured a scene, but were all missing something. These photos left something to be desired: the climber was in all of them (in basically the same place too; he was getting nowhere fast!) but there were 4 or 5 people milling around on the right. Those other people gave some context to the scene but they took away from the climber, which I feel is the most powerful subject in the photograph.I had moved on to shooting a few other things for a bit and then came back to shoot the ... More About: Photographs , Moment , Graph , Import
Lightroom tip: Grid vs Loupe view
2007-05-30 12:36:00 Is there a difference between the Lightroom Grid and Loupe views beyond the obvious? You bet!When you're in the Grid View , selecting multiple images and making changes to metadata, keywords, etc. will affect all selected images. This is great, especially when keywording.However, when you're in the Loupe View, any changes you make apply exclusively to the currently displayed image - even if you've got multiple thumbnails selected in the filmstrip across the bottom!The same applies for a variety of functions in lightroom including flags, deleting images, and pretty much anything else you may want to do. It was something of a eureka moment when I finally figured out what was going on; while I question the intuitiveness of the interface (after all, you can select multiple in the Loupe's filmstrip - it just only works with the sync metadata command) it does make some sense. Still, a simple dialog warning that says "You've got multiple images selected, but in Loupe View your chan...
The Rock Chick
2007-05-28 16:21:00 I spent some time at my father in law's house this holiday weekend, and he has a large collection of neon signs in his basement. Recently, he's added a mannequin to complete the bar atmosphere he has going down there - I figured it'd be a good opportunity to play with some lighting. After all, I could tweak as long as I wanted & the model would never get bored...For this shot, I used a snooted 580EX with a CTO gel on camera left as the key light and had an SB-26 on the right with a blue gel for an accent. I shot this with the EF 50mm f/1.4; exposure was 1/250sec @ f/2.8. Though literally every wall is covered in neon signs, I didn't have too much room to work (there's furniture, a pool table, etc & I didn't want to go move everything around) so a longer focal length wasn't an option. I cranked the strobes' output way down in order to get a fairly wide aperture & limit the depth of field. The shot above is basically straight out of the camera: just a slight saturat... More About: Rock , Chick , The Rock
Rescue operation for a turtle...
2007-05-26 21:05:00 I'm out of town visiting relatives this weekend, so posting is likely to be short & sparse - hopefully you're outside enjoying the Memorial Day weekend anyway! :)Early this morning we saw a large snapping turtle that was about to cross the street. We went back to the house in order to get some rescue gear (looking at the claws this guy had we were not about to just pick it up). By the time we got back, he had already gotten the hint that the road was not meant for tortoises and he was back down safely near the edge of a pond.Prepared to shoot the mission, I had my camera and figured that I may as well take a quick snapshot for posterity's sake... Somehow, just before the photo a dandelion fell from out of nowhere & landed square on the big guy's head! More About: Turtle , Rescue , Operation
Canon Virtual Lens Plant
2007-05-25 05:36:00 Want to know why your camera's lenses cost so much? There's one heck of a manufacturing process that goes into each one & it certainly can't be cheap!Canon has posted a collection of behind-the-scenes videos of the lens building process. It's pretty crazy how much goes into it.To check out the videos for yourself, visit this link:Canon Camera Museum | Technology Hall - Virt ual Lens Plan t
Lightroom Library is corrupt... got a backup?
2007-05-25 01:59:00 Don't you sometimes wish that you could write the copy for fatal error messages? I would have certainly have chosen a better one-liner for this gem of a helpful dialog!We're sorry, the Lightroom Libra ry is corrupt and cannot be used.Love, AdobeCall me crazy, but doesn't it seem like Lightroom (a $300 piece of software) should - perhaps - make a suggestion of what you should do next in this situation? This message is more of a playground taunt than a useful error. At least give a link to some help docs before crashing and burning.For the record, I have no idea why this happened. I just tried to start LR this afternoon and it was dead. Hm... glad I backed up.YOU'D BETTER HAVE A BACKUP (or five)!Well, the bottom line is that it didn't really matter: Even though closing this dialog means lightroom disappears from your screen, as long as you've got a backup of your database you've got nothing to worry about!Lightroom will move your corrupt database into a directory called "Cor... More About: Backup , Room
Kilgour 5k Race Photos now online
2007-05-23 02:06:00 Pictures from the Kilgour 5K Run are now available in the RRD Photo Galleries. The race was held this past Friday evening & was met with gorgeous weather. The course ran through Ault Park and the surrounding Hyde Park/Mt. Lookout neighborhoods.I provided the official race photos for the event and will be making a donation back to the Kilgour Sports Boosters about a month from now once the orders seem to be all in. I hope this will prove to be both a good fund raiser for the school and a worthwhile venture for me - time will tell!In some future blog posts I'll discuss some of the lessons learned from a photo business point of view on covering an event like this: getting the word out, hiring and locating additional shooters (and properly licensing their work), and most importantly - editing, keywording, and posting thousands of images in a short amount of time! For now, feel free to browse the images and stay tuned for more.Special thanks to Scott (who got this excellent shot to ... More About: Photos , Race , Online , Line
Adobe gives Sneak Peek of Lightroom 1.1
2007-05-22 16:17:00 At a recent conference, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty showed off some of the new features of the upcoming Lightroom 1.1 update release. Free to current users of Lightroom 1.1, this update will add some enhanced organization of your Presets and Templates (awesome, since my menu is getting long and cluttered), the ability to export libraries, and......A Sharpening Panel!! I'm pretty excited about that one - often times I want to make a print of a photograph that doesn't require any detailed editing in Photoshop CS3, but I'm forced to export a PSD and work it in CS3 just to sharpen for print. Lightroom's current "Low, Medium, and High Print Sharpening" is kind of a joke - I'm honestly surprised that it was included in the final release. If this dedicated Sharpening Panel is essentially the CS2/3 Smart Sharpen filter then we're really getting somewhere!You can read more on Scott's excellent blog here:Photoshop Insider » Adobe gives Sneak Peek of Light... More About: Room
How to: Fix Numeric Lightroom Keywords on SmugMug
2007-05-22 00:13:00 I love SmugMug - I think they're a great company and their customer service is the best I've experienced. But, as with anything in the tech world, sometimes not everything works exactly the way you want it to or think that it should!I ran into this recently when working on the 5K race photos mentioned elsewhere on this blog (yep - search will be online ASAP!!). I added all of my keywords associated with each runner's Bib Number in Lightroom , which divides separate keywords with a semicolon. This is fine - until you realize that SmugMug's Keyword Guidelines require that numeric keywords be wrapped in quotes and, oh yea - the keyword divider should be a space.It's times like these when knowing how to program is really handy!Fortunately, since they've got a "bulk" interface which just shows a thumbnail of every image along with a caption & keyword box we can write some quick Javascript that'll massage the data to SM's liking. In order to execute this code, you'll need to i... More About: Keywords , Numeric , Room
The Pilot Boat: Jan Dlugosz
2007-05-21 12:57:00 I spotted this in my Bloglines search feed today (it shows me any blog post that mentions the name "Dlugosz"). Apparently there's a cargo freighter out there named after my surname's most famous historical figure, Jan Długosz. Clicking the link below will take you over to the original blog post where you can see pics of the ships and commentary on other shipping vessels.Kind of cool - with a name like mine you don't see it very often, let alone across the side of a boat!The Pilot Boat : Jan Dlugosz
Infrared Panoramas of the Cincinnati/NKY Riverfront
2007-05-20 16:25:00 Recently, "Mark", a member of the Ohio Valley Camera Club posted some Black and White Infrared Panoramic shots of the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Riverfront. He didn't provide many technical details regarding his setup; I'm unsure if he's using a modified camera or if he's just using a visible light blocking filter on his Canon 30D. He also did not specify how many images were stitched together to make each of these compositions, but given his 180-degree field of view I'd suspect it's several.Whatever the technique, these are some great images that Mark has put out there. Click the thumbnail below to get to his gallery where you can see more.Infrared Panorama s Photo Gallery by ©MVM at pbase.com More About: Nora , Rare
Lightroom Shortcuts!
2007-05-18 13:03:00 Here's a quick list of some of the Lightroom Short cuts I've been using recently... Lightroom is tuned for managing lots of images and learning to use the keyboard shortcuts will greatly improve your workflow speed.Handy Lightroom Shortcuts: G – Return to Library Grid viewL – Lights dim / out modeB – Add to Quick CollectionCTRL+Z – Undo / CTRL-Y – Redo1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – Set RatingP – Mark as Pick / X – Mark as Reject / U – Un-flagTAB / Shift+TAB – Hide/Show PanelsCTRL+/ - Show Shortcut Help Text for Current ModuleAnd one more that I just saw today: Hold the ALT while adjusting your Split Tone Hue. It'll temporarily boost the saturation so that you can more easily see what you're doing. Cool! More About: Room , Cuts
Bullets from last night's Lightroom Overview
2007-05-18 12:45:00 Last night I led an overview session on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (CCofC. It was a great session, if a bit long (we ran about 2 hours), with a highly interactive audience. I think everyone was pretty impressed with how comprehensive a product Lightroom is, especially in the Library and Develop modules.If there are any follow up questions from last night, please feel free to email me.Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: An overview Ryan Dlugosz - Camera Club of Cincinnati ryan@rrdphoto.com :: http://blog.rrdphoto.com Links: Adobe (includes 30-day trial): http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopli ghtroom/Lots of free tutorials! http://www.photoshopsupport.com/lightroom /tutorials.htmlDevelop Presets, etc. http://inside-lightroom.com/Tips, Tricks, and more: http://www.lightroomkillertips.com Lightroom Fundamentals: Complete workflow application for managing Digital PhotographsImport, Manage, Develop, PresentNon-destructive editing on all file types ... More About: Room , Bullets , Overview
How to: PocketWizard remote camera trigger for Canon
2007-05-17 12:44:00 Yesterday evening I stopped by RadioShack to pick up a few things I needed trigger my Canon 580 flash with my Pocket Wizard remotes. My old eBay triggers had PC connections and the PW's use a miniplug (1/8") instead, so I needed to add a few short male-to-male miniplug cables to my kit. Of course, my local RatShack only carried gray cables - at the end of the day I don't *really* care, but come on! Why they wouldn't stock black cables is beyond me.While I was there, I picked up a miniplug-to-submini (3/32") adapter so that I could plug the PW into my camera's cable release. I don't use the Canon release (the RS-80N3) because it's relatively expensive for what it does & there are a variety of alternatives available for far less. I use the ADIDT M1, which does what the RS-80N3 does plus includes a sub-mini port so that you can connect to another trigger.A quick note on the ADIDT M1 - the site linked above pans the build quality of the M1, and with the first one I had I comple... More About: Camera , Remote
SmugMug is Chicken Soup for the Photographer's Soul
2007-05-17 00:50:00 Those guys over at SmugMug are great! In a recent post to his blog, Chris MacAskill writes about SmugMug being featured in the book Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul . Happy for being mentioned, they're offering a free copy to anyone who wants one. All you have to do is email their help desk and ask for a cup of soup...I figured that they must have gotten a load of free copies from the publisher, but I was surprised to find a package from Amazon waiting for me when I got home. Bill to address: Chris MacAskill! Helluva nice guy. More About: Graph
Kilgour 5K Race/Walk 2007
2007-05-16 12:44:00 The pictures are now online! Check them out here: Kilgour 5k Run pics -RRDJust a note that I'll be providing the official race photos for the Kilgour 5K Race /Walk . The event is this Friday, May 18 at 7PM in the Hyde Park area. The course begins and ends at Ault Park and over 450 racers are expected. This is one of the most popular Friday Night races in the Cincinnati area and is the kick off for the weekend-long Kilgour Carnival that starts Saturday. Special events for younger kids, food, non-alcoholic beverages, live music and awards are all part of the post-race fun.Two other photographers will be working with me to provide coverage & prints will be available for sale on the Monday following the race. I'll post an update to this blog when the images are available!GIVING BACK: One of the best parts of the whole deal is that we'll be donating back a portion of the proceeds to Kilgour Sports Boosters. Hope to see you there!
Unlimited online backups for your photos with Mozy
2007-05-15 01:49:00 Until very recently, my backup strategy has been good, but too manual: I keep duplicate copies of everything (including photos, documents, etc) on multiple hard drives in my home and I have another set of drives that I rotate home from the office in order to maintain an off-site backup. ...I do use a Dell laptop so a sudden fire is always a possibility!This is a pretty solid backup solution - so what's the problem? It depends on me to do it! And, as my wife will tell you, I have one of the worst memories going. The system depends on me to rotate those drives and I can tell you that I'm not always on top of it. In the event of a total disaster, I'll more than likely lose a few photos from my most recent shoot(s) & that's just not acceptable.I've long wanted to set up an automated, online backup system for all of my files and photographs. I've considered a few options ranging from copying the data to one of my web hosting accounts (prohibitively expensive) to leaving a dri... More About: Photos , Online , Unlimited , Line , Mite
Where to meet with a client?
2007-05-14 12:24:00 I discovered a great new web service today called A.PlaceBetween.Us. Basically you enter your zip code/location and that of the person with whom you are trying to meet. It will return to you a set of places on a Google Map that are roughly halfway between your locations which fit a certain category - the default being "coffee".This is a really cool idea and one that would surely be useful when trying to meet up with a new client, model, etc. in your area. It certainly beats sitting on the phone saying "so... what's nearby that we could meet at?"A great example of a simple but highly useful tool. More About: Meet , Where , Client
A flower for Mother's Day
2007-05-13 16:05:00 Here's a nice Amaryllis red lion flower for any mothers who happen past this blog... hope your day is an enjoyable one! (Actually, according to WikiPedia this is more accurately a Hippeastrum flower, but they are often confused for Amaryllis.)Info on the photograph: This was taken at the Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati, OH during the spring flower show preview in 2006. The solid blue background comes from a backdrop held behind the flower when the picture was taken.PS - could someone who knows flowers please leave a comment indicating the proper name of this specimen? Thanks to Amy who answered this request in the comments! More About: Flower , Lower , Lowe , Flow , S Day
Plum Diore Spring Fashion Show
2007-05-11 12:48:00 Note: Clicking on any picture in this post will take you to a larger version. You can find the full gallery from the show at this URL: http://gallery.rrdphoto.com/gallery/28112 48A couple Friday's ago I stopped by Plum Diore, an upscale fashion boutique in Pleasant Ridge, to check out their Spring Fashion Show and Soirée. I didn't bring along a ton of gear, figuring that there was someone else covering the event. That turned out to not be the case! I set up at the end near a guy shooting video and hoped I'd have enough juice in my flash to make it for the whole event. Hm...The models came from the New View agency which is local to Cincinnati. They were wearing a variety of the new spring lines that Plum Diore will be carrying this season. The outfits ranged from casual sun dresses to elegant evening wear.The models were very into having someone shooting the show - the flash bursts in sync with their poses really brought up the energy in what was already a pretty glam event. ... More About: Fashion Show
Personal Ramblings about the Red River Gorge
2007-05-11 00:19:00 The following is a response to my previous entry regarding John Snell's RRG book from my friend Lon who I know through the Camera Club of Cincinnati. I found his comments to be an interesting part of the history of the Gorge and well-worth posting here. I also recommend checking out the new Small Flash Lighting specialty web-store that he has recently started. Lon is well-versed in the ways of lighting and getting all your gear to work together; he helps me out all the time! -RRDPerson al Ramblings about the Red River Gorgeby Lon I am a native of Kentucky, and have lived in Kentucky for over half a century. I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, in the tri-state area of KY-WV-OH, in Boyd County to be precise. My college years, and a few more after graduation were spent in Lexington, Kentucky (BSME University of Kentucky - 1976). And, have been in Northern Kentucky since 1981. While in Lexington in the early to late 1970’s I began going to the Red River Gorge as an inexpensive di... More About: Bling
Photoshop Lightroom: Top 5 Features & Tips
2007-05-10 12:57:00 I'm a Photoshop Lightroom user. The slick, photographer-oriented workflow has helped me to get through the large pile of images I return with after a shoot and to get my selects online quickly. Here are my (current) five favorite Lightroom Features & Tips in no particular order.1. Disable Lightroom Sharpening - In an apparent oversight, there is no obvious way to disable the default sharpening (25) that is applied to all of your images. While this isn't a big deal if you're just cranking out a bunch of event pics for small-format prints, when you're working a hero image in Photoshop for a large fine art print you never want to sharpen until the very end!Though it isn't difficult to follow my steps to disable Lightroom sharpening with a saved preset, I believe that Adobe will be including a more straightforward approach in a future release (Lightroom 1.1 perhaps?). Why? This blog gets more hits for "disable sharpening lightroom" than for most other search terms combined - c... More About: Room
How to: Fix Lightroom's Edit in Photoshop CS3 "not found"
2007-05-10 04:37:00 Today I noticed that Lightroom lost track of where Photosho p CS3 was at on my computer, which means that the "Edit in Photoshop CS3" option was missing from the menu. Also, in the editors section of the options "not found" was listed next to the Photoshop section.The reason for this is because I uninstalled CS2 after installing CS3 and it removed an important registry entry. In order to fix Lightroom, all you need to do is restore the value that tells windows applications how to find the Photoshop executable.Click for a larger viewThe (kind-of) Hard Way:In the screenshot above, you can see the value that we need to replace. You can follow these steps to recreate the value, or skip down to the bottom where I've provided a simple export file that will do this for you. Keep in mind that editing the registry can be dangerous; you may want to just use the file below if you're out of your league...Click Start and select RunType regedit and hit EnterIn the RegEdit window that pops up... More About: Room
Big day with the USPS
2007-05-10 01:14:00 Today was a huge day for me in the mail... The friendly neighborhood post man showed up with:Two Pocket WizardsA PC-to-Household cable from Lon at FlashZebraReceipt for my Ohio Sec. of State filing for my LLCMy Canon rebate check!All said, that's a big mail day! More About: The U
John Snell Red River Gorge book
2007-05-08 00:51:00 I got an email today from Lexington, KY nature photographer John Snell announcing the second printing of his 168-page book, Red River Gorge , The Eloquent Landscape. The book contains 130 photographs from the gorge and is the first coffee table book dedicated to the area.John will be in the Cincinnati area to sign copies of his book and to meet with folks on Saturday, May 19 at the Barnes and Noble in Newport on the Levee from 6-8PM. Photographers will want to note that the book contains a five-page section that tells the best "gorge" places for photographing waterfalls, wildflowers, rock formations, sunrises and sunsets.John has a lot of great work on his website and is an excellent photographer. I suspect that his book will be of similar high quality. For starters, check out his first (of three) Red River Gorge gallery.If you have any questions or comments, please contact John directly. More info on Red River Gorge itself can be found on their site: http://www.redrivergorge.com/ More About: Book , E Book
SmugMug's tribute to Ginger Jones
2007-05-07 12:30:00 On Saturday, members of the DGrin internet forum (the SmugMug user community) were saddened to learn about the passing of Ginger Jones . Ginger was a very active member of the photography community there, posting over 13,000 pictures to her SmugMug account and adding many of them to the Daily Photos community. A great landscape and nature photographer, she has won more DGrin Challenges than any other forum member.SmugMug is, in their typical style, giving back: they are keeping her galleries online with a permanent renewal and are encouraging everyone to purchase prints. In fact, they're taking it a step further and will actually buy the print for you and have it shipped to your home; just send their help desk a note with a link to the photo and your address. They'll make sure that all profits get to Ginger's family (who, incidentally, can use the help).I ordered the nature scene below. Prices are very low: an 8x12" lustre print is only $19! If you don't want to spend quite ... More About: Bute , Tribute , Tribu
Which to buy: Photoshop CS3 or Lightroom?
More articles from this author:2007-05-07 03:30:00 This weekend, I was in a conversation on an internet forum with a guy who was unsure whether he should be buying Adobe Photosho p CS3 or Photoshop Lightroom . He could only have one or the other for budget reasons (and who can blame him - total for both would be $1k) and was stumped as to what the right choice was. Based on some of the background he provided, my response is below:Rob -If you could only get one at this time, I would strongly recommend Lightroom over Photoshop. The main reason being that Lightroom can do all of the critical things that you would want to do with a photograph in terms of basic exposure, cropping, color correction, black and white conversions, etc.. It provides a powerful workflow system that I've been using to much success, even with thousands of images.It can do basic spot removal (cloning) and red eye reduction, but for heavy lifting you'll need something a bit more. Lightroom lacks the sophisticated masking capabilities of Photoshop, nor does it hav... More About: Room 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 |
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