Before and After - Why Photoshop Rocks, Part One | Hartwell, GA Photographer

Photoshop is probably the coolest tool a digital photographer has, aside from the camera.  It takes a massive amount of time and energy to learn the program, which can do wonders for photographs.  What I find more daunting, though, is how much I don't yet know and how much I haven't even realized is possible.  I am not a pro.  I refer to my books and favorite blogs regularly for tips and tricks and sometimes step by step instructions.  Since many people don't get the chance to really get into Photoshop, I'm going to write a series of posts that highlight the awesome things that it can do, from working in partnership with the camera, enhancing selective parts of images, to fixing those "Oh, darn, (something) is ruining this picture!" situations.


Part One:  The Camera/Photoshop Partnership

This is a true use of Photoshop as a tool.  The rainbow photo that we popped up on Facebook yesterday is actually a series of 9 photographs, carefully edited and aligned and cropped together to form one image.  This is why it covers such a wide angle of view (see: Panoramic Photography).  You can see the photos are gray, they lack contrast and are individually uninteresting - but Dave shot them with the intention of putting them together.  For sanity's sake, I'm only putting up two of them: 

These photos are Straight Out Of Camera, or SOOC. 

But wait, before we jump into it: I know you're thinking "Wow, yuck! Why such blah color?" Here's why:

The image is shot in RAW. This is the original image, as shot in camera. When a camera shoots a JPEG, the chip in the camera uses complex algorithms to adjust for color, saturation, light, contrast and many other tiny factors to give you a pretty image when you download your camera. It also discards the "extra" data that is leftover when the image is prettied up. JPEGs are smaller files and for most people, a great way to work. Many of them make good prints straight out of camera. A small to medium sized JPEG image will likely run you about 1-2MB, so you can click away and store a ton of photos without worrying about space on your hard drive.


RAW images, however, include every little bit of information present at the time of shutter click. This means the file is a) much more in-depth to edit and b) huge. It's not uncommon for RAW files run up to 13MB/image (to illustrate: remember those 3 1/4" floppy disks we all used a decade ago?  It would take 13 disks to hold one image). When you're shooting 200, 400, 800 images at a time that adds up pretty quickly.  However, RAW files are very forgiving and give you many more options when it comes to editing if you don't mind starting from square one and correcting everything. Since the files are larger, they can be cropped down dramatically and will still be high-quality images if they're properly exposed and tack sharp to begin with.

Still with me?

OK.  So we have 9 images, and we put them together, crop them down to a uniform size and voila, we have a panorama:

Now it's time for general workflow - the steps I take with each image to adjust contrast and color and burning and dodging and tweaking to make all of the parts of the image look the way I feel they should.  Every photographer has a workflow, what makes sense to them as an order of operations to process images.  This is where my workflow landed this image:

The phrase I mentioned in the beginning is applicable here:  Oh darn, those power lines, they're ruining the picture...

Removing them required a lot of patience - remember, RAW=huge file x 9 photos means this original file is 69" wide and over 100MB before resizing for the web!  Anyway, this is the final product:

(clicking the image will enable you to view it as large as your browser window)

Instead of capturing a corner of the rainbow, Photoshop let us capture and display the whole thing.  It's not a shot we could have made, unless we used a very specialized, very expensive wide angle lens - but even then there would be a huge degree of distortion.  Pretty cool, right?  Check back in a couple of days to see another Before and After!

Questions?  Comments?  Leave a note below and I'll get back to you.  See more pictures on Facebook!

The Rainbow - Hartwell, Georgia Photographer

Dave rocks.  :)

See, I was content to stand outside, look at the sky, then start bathtime with the kids... Dave was the one that went back into the house, grabbed the camera and crafted this panorama.  For what it's worth, this pan is 'segmented' - it has been stitched together from 9 individual photographs. 

Questions? Comments?  Leave them here and we'll get back to you.  Not a fan already? Become one!  Click "Like" on www.facebook.com/snydersphotography!

Dirty Happy Faces | Hartwell, GA Photographer

They love the sandbox.  And at 4:30 on a Friday, there's not reason not to get a little dirty!

Follow us on Facebook  or check out our website.  :)  Have a super weekend! 

Catching Up | Hartwell, GA Photographer

If I had to choose a downside of photographing people for a living, it's losing your own family's photos in the mix.  For any artist, the new work is always the most interesting, the most exciting.  It's what one had just made an emotional connection to - in short, you lose interest in the older stuff and forget about it because the new stuff seems way better (even if it's not).  This is exactly what happened after our vacation and I'm glad Dave called it this time, before the pictures disappeared from my radar. 

Last week, Asplundh parked some large equipment in our yard.  We all thought it was pretty cool, until it was used to take out all the trees along our right-of-way. 

I think "gangly" when I look at this one - he's getting so tall I hardly see the 'little' boy in him anymore.

The Phillips Family | Hartwell, GA Family Photographer

When Stephanie and I spoke about photos prior to our session, she said that she loved colorful pictures and that's what she really wanted.  When we met up this past Sunday evening, there was a gorgeous afternoon breeze and it was so nice to be outside.  Already, though, the leaves on the tree below are a brilliant yellow, a sure sign of the crisp weather on the horizon. In the end, it seems fitting that the colors from this session show off the beauty of these final days of summer. 

Thank you, Stephanie, for the invitation to soak up the end-of-summer delight and for sharing your family with us; thanks Adam, for happily carrying Morgan from here to there and back again; thank you Morgan, for being an exquisite model; and to BoBos, Zoe and Oreo cat, many thanks for all the giggles and company. 

   

 US Army helicopters flew overhead during our session, so we all spent a few minutes looking for the loud noise in the sky. 

Well, everyone except Dave, who kept snapping. 

 Pure joy - we were standing outside getting used to each other when BoBos, Zoe and Oreo cat went racing past. 

See the entire Phillips family gallery, or like our page on Facebook to see what the fall brings for us!

The Haymarket Series | Boston, MA Photographer

**First of all, happy 9th anniversary to my sweetheart, Dave - without you I would not be the person I am today.  Thank you for sharing your heart, your talent and your life with me.

A couple of months ago I pulled out our college portfolio cases for an afternoon, just for giggles.  It was a self-affirming moment; not only did I get to briefly to relive those awesome years when one figures out who "me" is, but it was pretty cool to see what I/we considered good work then and compare it with today's description.  Does the old work still hold up?

Of all of the work (two photography majors x three years, folks = mountains of prints), I was most excited to see Dave's Haymarket series from 1999.  Haymarket is Boston's outdoor farmer's market, and has existed since the 1830's.  It's only open on Fridays and Saturdays now, though I believe back then it was a Saturday-only event.  I introduced Dave to the Haymarket around the same time we were charged with coming up with an in-depth semester-long project for our major's class.  It was instant . 

From January through May, Dave either camped out in my dorm room or took the early train into the city from his home in Concord.  He arrived at the market long before sunrise and photographed everything about the market, which, in January and February, was a very cold task. During his semester he built up relationships with some of the vendors, drank a lot of coffee to keep warm and became an insider in this unique little corner of the city.

The majority of this series was made with a Mamiya TLR camera which shoots a 2 1/4" x 2 1/4" negative - this is why the images are square.  The rest were shot with his old faithful Nikon 35mm, all on Tri-X 400 black and white film.  He printed each photograph himself during marathon darkroom sessions on 11x14" Agfa Classic paper.  In the end, he produced a 30+ piece body of work that earned him the only Honors grade awarded that semester. 

 

 

 

 

 

Feel free to browse through all of the Haymarket photographs, or like our page on Facebook to see more of what Kristin's digging up on her days off!