photOgraPHic journal

Talent plus nothing produces nothing

Wed, 1 Jun 2011 09:16:17 -0700

I kind of cringe when I hear someone make reference to how talented someone is. As if talent is the driving force behind someone’s success. If a farmer yields a plentiful crop, could we make reference to the fact that farmer is an extremely talented farmer? Or is there a greater force at play in the success of that harvest.

We could say that a farmer might have a natural propensity at being a good farmer. But if you talk to a farmer, they will tell you they have dedicated their life to farming because they truly love to farm. They work long hours, overcoming all sorts of obstacles to bring their crops to harvest, because they love to farm. Farming is hard work, and if you don’t love the farm, you won’t last long as a farmer.

You can be an extremely talented person and achieve nothing in life. There are all sorts of talented people living on welfare. In fact, we could say that there are some individuals that are extremely talented at sucking the life out of others around them and extremely talented at doing nothing. Talent plus nothing, achieves nothing.

I have a saying, it is part of my talking points as I speak promoting the photographic process; “hard work will outperform talent any day of the week”. There is no shortcut to hard work. We are often very good at avoiding hard work, but in the end it is hard work that is the main ingredient to success. Have a passion for what you do, but never rest on your natural talents to get you through the day, but on the fortitude to succeed through hard work.

New Tutorial Just Released on Masking/Knockouts

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:55:17 -0700

Finally I have put together a tutorial on masking knockouts. There is no question, that the future of photography is going to demand the ability to create greater cutouts than ever before. The greatest challenge in knockouts is working with hair.

A few years ago I work with a program called Fluid Mask and I had mixed results. When CS4 was introduced, I began doing all my knockouts using the refine edge techniques, but still, hair was pretty much impossible. At last, Adobe made great strides with CS5 in their new refine edge and masking technique’s. However, there was still issues with fringing that left unwanted artifacts on the masking selections. After many hours of experimenting, I have come up with some amazing new techniques that I believe take the masking knockout techniques to a whole new level. One of the issues with knocking out hair is that each color creates a different set of problems. One of the ways I got around this, is by creating two masks and applying a color and a levels adjustment layer that allows me to pick the hair color and blend the two masks together.

All this without the use of channels. Did I hear an amen to that! With these new techniques, I can now completely do a knockout with hair in under 10 minutes. That is a huge advancement over my early knockouts which took sometimes up to two hours.

Linked tutorial

Kansas City Heart Beat Of America Conference

Wed, 6 Apr 2011 13:54:52 -0700

Just got back from Kansas City where I was ask to speak at the Heart Beat Of America PPA conference. As expected, it was a great group of folks and once again I had the opportunity to emphasized the importance of photography as a creative process.

I was also able to take a day and get into the city to shoot some HDR backgrounds. What a gold mine! I truly felt like I was in HDR heaven. Hopefully you will be seeing more of those background in the future as I incorporate them into my images. Above is one example, and the Harley Rider subject was shot during my hands on lighting demonstration. I didn’t get a chance to shoot his bike, but I will try and snag a image of a Harley to drop in and round out the image.

Pano/Stitching Portrait

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:42:15 -0700

Stitching multiple exposures to create a single panorama landscape is nothing new, but most people would probably never think to try this on a portrait application. A few years ago when I first started shooting multiple stitched images, I tried this and actually produced some good results but set this technique aside for a while. Obviously stitching together images where there could be potential movement can be an issue, but you would be surprised at how little this becomes a factor.

For starters, your camera has to pivot on your lens nodal point. I happen to use a ball head, L-bracket and hardware from Really Right Stuff. They are without question the industry leader on panorama hardware. In their catalogue, they have some material that covers step by step on how to find your nodal point with each lens. It is really not difficult. Here is a link to their web site; www.reallyrightstuff.com. I have also found a youtube video that covers the steps as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0HaRZi-FWs

So, why go to all this trouble. True, my 21 mega pixel single capture is very adequate for most applications. Let’s face it, there are times I know the output demands exceed my current resolution capture. With a possible 50 meg capture, the output possibilities can be breath taking.

Black cloth series

Tue, 8 Mar 2011 14:08:35 -0800

I have talked in the past about working on a series of images building a body of work. When you revisit a subject over and over again, the better you will be familiar with what works and what doesn't. This makes sense, but for some reason photographers seem to forget this. Art Buyers, Editors and Curators are more likely to take notice at a body of work that carries a theme or similar content than a grouping of random images. So pick a subject and shoot it over and over again. You will be surprised at how quickly things start coming together. As with this Black Cloth series, with each shoot, the ideas keep developing. I am looking forward to where this series will lead.