Let’s say I come back from a family trip and go through the folder of images to do a rough edit, selecting all the decent shots with the “Pick” (shortcut P) flag.  Then I would filter for that flag, select all, and make a collection called something like “trip selects to print”. Then I would go through that collection more carefully, using “Unselect” (U shortcut) to remove some images. What was left is what I would export for printing. All those flag changes in the collection wouldn’t affect the flags that were in the actual image folder.

Now with global flags, every time I “Unselect” a particular image in any collection it is Unselected in the original image folder. This drives me nuts. From looking around on line it seems that people are split down the middle on this feature. I understand that they wanted to make all three selection processes; Colors, Stars and Flags global but this is one that is going to change my workflow.

We shot several setups, knowing that one of the shots would be used on the building and the others would be part of a billboard and bus campaign. This photo of a group of Y members was the one chosen for the big sign. There were several changes and repairs to be made.

Quite often on discussion groups you’ll hear people get snarky and say something like “I would have just shot it right in the first place instead of spending so much time in Photoshop”. The people who take that attitude may not have shot in a live, slightly chaotic location with a dozen people waiting to have their picture taken. With paid models you can sometimes take a little longer getting things “right”, but you don’t often have that luxury. Also, what’s “right” may not have even been decided yet!

We shot this group of people near a railing, in front of a glass wall with the basketball courts in the background.

Once the shot was selected it was time to clean it up a bit: (from L to R)
- Stretch the top part of the frame to match the aspect ratio of the sign.
- Repair the woman’s eye which was hidden under her bangs. I found another eye from a different shot.
- We didn’t have a good shot of the second man looking at the camera so decided to replace him with a woman from another setup.
- Replace the logo on the man’s shirt with a Y logo and change the shirt color.
- Remove logo from the red jacket.
- Remove logo from shorts.

The idea was to have some good background action happening on the basketball court. I had the actors step out of the frame and I shot a couple dozen frames of court action at 1/8 sec to get some blur. Keeping the camera locked off made it a little easier to composite the background elements:

- The woman with the blue shorts was used in place of the man from the original image. I had to first clear out a space for her by cloning over the edges of the man to give her some extra background. Then the adjacent actors were masked and she was placed behind them. Shadows were painted in to match the lighting from the left. The client also asked to add some color to her shirt.
- The basketball court was placed into the main shot, along with background action from three shots.
- The last inset shows a photographer friend of mine with the Lastolite Easy Balance card for white balance. (Wiley is his name and you can see his work here.)
- My client sent over the background graphic as a Illustrator file and I dropped it in as a Smart Object and needed to do some masking around the actor’s head
- Then there was skin retouching, some clothing repairs, local and overall color balance, hair trimming, sharpening. . . the usual ;-)
- The file was sized up to final print size at 50dpi, which is the native resolution of the XL Jet printer.

Here is the final composited shot after about 3 1/2 hours of work:

A raw shot from the balcony with just the overhead fluorescents on:

I turned on a 2K (2,000 watt) tungsten light, widened the beam and just blew out the cyc wall behind them. That gave me some interesting contrast and solved the dirty floor problem since now the light is skipping off the surface of the floor instead of showing all the dirt. I did a little toning, tinting and negative clarity in Lightroom and go something we all liked.

I like shooting handheld, with the camera in my lap, so I can still watch the display and enjoy my surroundings. I started out by putting the lens on manual focus and setting it on infinity so I didn’t have the problem of the camera seeking an object in a dark night sky. I played with exposure until I settled on about 1sec at f8 at 200-400 ISO. I jiggled and spun the camera during the explosions, which gave me some interesting patterns.Where it got really neat was purposefully defocusing, holding the zoom barrel in my left hand and twisting the camera body on axis, zooming in during the explosions. The result is the almost aquatic looking images toward the end (my favorites). Even defocused, at the widest end of the zoom the light trails are relatively sharp. As I zoomed in they softened. The only processing I’ve done to these images is changes in exposure, fill light and black level in Light Room to bring out some of the trails hidden in the darkness – a very good example of why shooting RAW can really help.

 

If you know anyone who is interested, or you just want to take a look, visit the gantryrobotforsale.com website I’ve put up. There are lots of photos, specs, drawings and some videos. This rig would be perfect for someone doing industrial plasma cutting or welding, or an artist doing intricate work in metal, wood, or anything else you can cut through.

UPDATE: The robot was sold to a special effects house in Chicago.

I spent about an hour talking about panoramic images, discussing why you’d want to shoot them, how to make them and then looking at the amazing software available to automatically stitch several images together into a seamless photo. I’ve been using AutoPano Pro for a few years and just love it. There are dozens of programs out there, many of them free or inexpensive. Panorama Tools has been around for a long time and has some great front ends like PT GUI. If you have Photoshop CS4, you already own a great stitching program, but I still far prefer AutoPano for its flexibility and ability to detect and extract panos from a folder of images.

I think panoramas are one of the coolest and most satisfying techniques to come out of digital photography. The images are wide format, more closely matching our natural field of view. You can create big impressive prints with even a low resolution pocket camera since the resolution of each photo is added together into the stitched final image. They look beautiful hanging on a wall and are easy to print at home. Watching the software assemble the images is really amazing.

At the meeting I showed some panoramic sequences from recent travels. I also did a live demo, shooting hand held with a little Pentax pocket camera and dragging the images into the AutoPano software.

These are the raw shots:

This is the result of the panorama stitch, processed using the “Spherical Projection” setting. This has the best relationship of sizes of the people in the room, but the most pronounced curvature of tables, which were actually in straight, parallel rows. This is what the shot would look like if taken with a scanning film camera like the Widelux or Horizon:

The same panorama, using the “Planar Projection” setting. The tables look better, but the people at the edges are stretched, as they would be using a traditional super wide angle lens:

This is the same Planar projection as above, but taken into Photoshop for some warping. I did a Select All, used Transform:Warp, and pulled in the sides. There is less of a stretched feel, but you start to loose the wide format of the panorama:

I highly recommend shooting some panoramas. With AutoPano, and others, you can shoot multi-row panos, and even shoot any group of images covering a subject, without them having to be aligned, level – or even all horizontal or all vertical, as long as there is overlap in the images the software will find the pano in there.

While I was trying to get some HDMI problems solved (another day, another rant!) I asked John Johns, the video wizard at In-Sync, Inc. in Dallas, what he would recommend. He referred me to Gefen, a company that makes a crazy array of video conversion boxes. On their website I found a little box called the DVI Detective and an explanation of what the problem was with my monitors (and my HDMI troubles). Both of those connections transmit an EDID code. According to Wikipedia: “Extended display identification data (EDID) is a data structure provided by a computer display to describe its capabilities to a graphics card. It is what enables a modern personal computer to know what kind of monitor is connected.” As with many things electronic, that doesn’t always work out in practice. What was happening was the EDID wasn’t being picked up and weird things were happening.

The DVI Detective goes inline between the computer and the monitor. You power it up with the included wallwart, push a tiny button on the little box, a light flashes telling you the code is being received and stored, you flip a switch to lock the setting – and you’re done. The power can now be unplugged. I was hesitant to spend 2 x $60 (from Buy.com) on these little gizmos but my problem is completely solved. I love these things.

They are tiny boxes and come with nice, stout turn around DVI patch cables. A solid product that does exactly what it claims to with very little setup. This is what the mess looks like behind my monitors until I dress this up a little:

UPDATE: 7-4-09
I’ve been using the Gefen DVI Detective boxes for a few weeks now and I can happily report that they have completely solved the problems I was having! Money well spent.

]]> http://spotstudio.com/2009/06/gefen-dvi-detective/feed/ 0 http://spotstudio.com/2009/06/moldy-cameras/ http://spotstudio.com/2009/06/moldy-cameras/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:05:32 +0000 headmaster http://spotstudio.com/?p=932 I have a collection of toy and cheap cameras that I started about 30 years ago. My rule for the first couple of years was that I would’t spend more than a dollar. Sometimes I would find 5 or 6 at a thrift store. Then my family started looking for them. I still get a bag of garage sale cameras every Christmas from my brother.  I now have probably 500-600 cameras stashed in cardboard boxes on some industrial shelves at the studio.

For a while there has been a tiny leak in one of the concrete studio walls and I was dutifully collecting the water in a bucket. When I went to the studio yesterday during a downpour I discovered water dripping from a new place, right under the shelf that holds my collection. Turns out a trickle of water had been going into one of the boxes for the last few months. Unwrapping the cameras was gross and sad. I had to throw away about a half dozen, including a nice small wood view camera that had fallen apart. The biggest shock was this Argus C3, which was in its original box. The box was a black, sodden, smelly mess. I’m guessing that the combination of water, darkness and the leather case made a perfect breeding ground for mold and mildew.

A few more photos: