Building Stock Photography

Stock photography is fantastic way to be reminded about past images. I was asked to photograph a victorian home for Alameda Magazine back in 2004.  I scouted the location and then returned at the best time of day to get the image I wanted.  I was disappointed that the owners were not home at the time, since there were some things that wanted to take some liberties with, for the image.  For example, they had some political signs in the front yard that needed removing, along with a few other things I wanted to change.  I returned a few days later after making an appointment with the owners about taking the photograph of their home.  We took down the signs, and I had them turn on all the lights in the house. Unfortunately, not every room in the old home had lights to turn on!  Undaunted, I shot a series of images as sun dropped in the sky and figured I could fix a few things in Photoshop later.

The first thing I realized was the sky wasn't very nice. Pure white is not all that compelling. Thankfully, I shot some sky photographs near this home a day or two earlier so I grabbed those out of archive. Next I had to do some tonal changes to the front of the house. After some change of levels, burning and dodging, and color correction I started to see the image I was looking for.

I selected out the top edge of the home and dropped it out so I could place in any sky I wanted at that point.  I tried to find an evening sky that looked compatible.

 Lastly, I had to go into the image and fix the details.  Some of the changes are marked above.  Taking out the man-hole cover, fixing the shaggy lawn, turning on lights in rooms that did not even have lights. Color correcting the front porch light. Darkening the street, softening  the side buildings to bring focus to the Victorian.  Fun stuff.

 Extra sky was added to give room for the magazine to print the magazine title and other information.  The great thing about this image is that has been sold several times.  Just last week, some eight years after it ran the first time, The Alameda Civic Ballet will be using it in one of their campaigns. Stock photography, the gift that keeps on giving.

Sea Otters

The endangered California Sea Otter is a fantastic subject for photographing.  While in the Monterey area of California, I happened upon a group lounging in the sun and took out my 600mm lens with 1.7 converter and started shooting.  They drifted in a small inlet as they cleaned themselves and floated in the sun.  When the opportunity arises to photograph wildlife, make sure to make the best of it.  Move around if you can to get different angles. In this case I photographed groups as well as individuals.

Whenever possible always try to get some vertical as well as horizontal images. I always try to shoot some images with space to the left, space to the right and space above on a vertical to allow for a magazine to use your photograph as a cover. This will allow them the needed space to print your image "full bleed" (meaning that the whole page will be used for your photograph) and to have space for the magazine name, and story topics.

Following the Hawk

The other night I decided I would go out to my favorite regional park Lake Chabot and do some work with my new wildlife lens.  Photography has changed in that the sensors in today's camera's are outstanding.  In the Nikon D4 that I shoot, the ISO can be run up to a very high number to compensate for the low light of the evening sunset.  This coupled with a very fast lens, 600mm f/4 -the wildlife opportunities are boundless.

I had been watching a couple of young Red Tail Hawk hunt the surrounding hillsides.  Since I wasn't going to try to disguise myself as a bush, I set the lens down where I knew the light would be nice on my subject.  I had hoped that one of the hawks would start working the hill in the sunlight and I got lucky.

This youngster landed on a bush to see what was on the menu this evening - so it enabled me to get into position to photograph him when he would take off.

He didn't stay too long, maybe about 20 seconds, but that was enough time for me to frame up the shot, check my exposure and lock in a good focus.

I was able to buzz through about 10 frames before he was lost in the shadows - but I'll be back and I'm fairly certain the hawk will be there as well.

Panoramic Portraits

If you photograph family portraits, it is always a good practice to try and create an image that is a little different.   I had the pleasure of photographing the Lucas family, which included Mom, Dad, five daughters, one son and their two dogs. So with this large family we created an image that is not your normal family portrait. To get the image I had in mind, I took out my panoramic gear, had the family sit as still as possible and started to work.

With the 85mm in place, I shot several vertical images going from left to right with a generous overlap to each image.  Then I did the shot again, this time, going from right to left.  For good measure, I shot one more set, left to right. All of these images amounted to about 30 shots total. This Panoramic Rig from Really Right Stuff, allows me to keep the center of the lens perfectly aligned over the exact center of the tripod.  So when the panoramic images are created, they are perfectly aligned with each other.

The next step was to load all these images into Lightroom 4 and figure out which was the best series of 10 images images.

Once the best series of ten images was figured out, I stitched them together using Photoshop.

In Lightroom 4, you select all the images you want to build your panorama with and then right click.  Go to Edit in>Merge to Panorama in Photoshop. This will open up Photoshop and then start placing images on thier own layers and creating layer masks for each one.

You can probably see from the image above where there were a couple of  problems.  It was not with the people, but with the dogs.  They didn't sit entirely still. So even in a quickly shot series of images the dogs were in different positions with each photograph. I figured this might be the case when I was shooting, that is why I shot so many extra photographs.

In one shot, the dog is laying down and in the next shot that was suppose to be blended with it, the dog is sitting up.  Photoshop doesn't know anything about the subject so it does the best job possible lining up the images.

To solve this problem, I had to go back to the original images, where the dogs looked best and then cut them in separately.  By selecting each dog, I was able to pull them out of one photo and then place them into the main combo shot.  I had to consider shadows, sleeves, hands that might be covered up, etc. to make the shot look believable.

Finally the main photograph was done, built out of ten portions of a series of images.  This extra work created a very large file that gave me the ability to print it large and still maintain sharpness and quality.

Final image with people and dogs all in place.

Photographing Yosemite

Yosemite is a fantastic place to visit but it can be quite difficult to get the shot that you want because of the conditions.  I found this scene near the exit of the valley floor. As you are exiting the park, its on the left side,  pull over there is plenty of parking.  The Merced river runs right by you with El Capitan in the in the background.  This is not a secret spot, in fact, I have seen it many times in photographs.  During the three hours we were at this location waiting for the best light, at least 200 people stopped to get this same shot.

The conditions that Yosemite throws at you can be difficult to deal with. First off, is dealing with the people.  If you want to shoot pure landscapes, then you aren't likely to want people in the shot.  Most people understand and will move out of the way, some people, however, are so self absorbed they have little regard for others around them.

Photographers like this can make shooting Yosemite difficult.

I had been in position for about a half hour, waiting for the best light of the day, when this photographer decided to jump in the middle of my scene and get his shot. This guy walks up, looks at me with my tripod in the water and just walks in front of me to get his "amazing" shot. I knew that he would be gone as quickly as he arrived, so I didn't sweat it.

There are a couple of things you can glean from this photograph to determine as to why his picture wont be all that special.  First off, he will have to be shooting very fast to hold that pose, thereby having the water in his image, not soft but hard looking.  It looks like he will not have anything in the foreground except the water so that is not likely to be very interesting. Also, because of the contrast of Yosemite, his foreground will be too dark or the section of El Captain will be too light.  Since he is hand holding the shot, it's not likely he will be able to create a merge photograph like I will show you in the next section.

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After being at this spot for a while, I started looking around at my foreground.  I liked a downed tree off to me left and I also liked the rocks that were right in front of me.  I put on my 24mm lens and decided to make a vertical photograph.  Here is what I started with:

For the composition, I had the rocks and grasses int he foreground lead your eye to the log, which will lead your eye to El Capitan. On the first photograph, the rocks and river were the way that I wanted them, exposure wise  - however, El Capitan was still in bright sunlight and therefore extremely over exposed.

In the second shot, El Capitan was correctly exposed, but the river that was in the shade way way to dark to show any detail.

So I shot both photographs from the same position with everything locked down on a tripod, knowing I was going to get these two images into Photoshop and make the final image there.

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If you don't want to, or can't bring the images into Photoshop, there is a possible solution for you.  Use a graded filter with a filter holder.  These are made by Lee and can be used to darken down a selected area of your image.

While these filter sets are fun to have, they don't give you the precision that Photoshop will give you and if you are already using a Neutral Density filter to get the water to be blurred, another filter and holder system will most certainly create vignetting on the edges of your image if you use a wide angle lens.

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Here is how the image looked after I merged the two best parts of the two images in Photoshop.  I liked it but, didn't love it.  Next was to bring it into Nik Software's Silver EFex Pro 2 software and convert it to black and white.