Four Variations

The day following possibly the hottest day in San Francisco so far, we headed out to Ocean Beach for a sunset maternity shoot. What a fantastic maternity outfit! The skirt reflection elongates her figure, or she appears to be on a pedestal; a rather Goddess-like quality. I've actually been day dreaming of a sunset maternity beach shoot - the lighting is perfect for showing off silhouettes, the background faded by haze, foreground subject richly lit. In the above pic, I tried to bring out the blues, purples, warm red tones - very obviously sunset. But if you prefer subtlety, the below photo has a dreamy, morning-ish feel. Glowy yellow light, melting the colder blues away.

Perhaps your tastes are more cinematic. A dramatic black and white, sky pushed to white, shadow pushed to black, features sharpened and contrast increased. What does the yellowy background of the last photo do? I think it sets the scene in another era, an ancient time, I wonder if there is a story behind the image.

On Recognition

This is from the 40D camera, and gosh, it does a good job. The nice thing about 5D is that it does much better with white balance. This picture turned out pretty blue (taken in the shade) and I had to de-blue it.

And now for something unrelated to this baby or camera bodies. I recently photographed some baby 1st birthday parties. Lots of area Moms come to these parties, and it's not unusual to see one or two families that I've photographed in the past. Sometimes this is great, to see a familiar face who will say something nice like: We loved your pics!

But then, there are the ones that Don't remember me. One such Mom spotted me as the Party Photographer and asked: So, do you do private in-home baby sessions?
I went along with things and said: Why Yes, I do.
She said: We did that once when our baby was three months old, and then we tried a few other sessions since then and they went badly.
Awkward.
If I hadn't previously been her photographer, I'd have asked what she'd liked improved upon, and made sure that she got my contact info. Instead, I was digging through my brain files: Did I do her 3 month photos??? And I pretended to see something I needed to photograph and ran away. I have since checked my photo archive, and indeed I did do her 3 month photos (it's the other sessions that went badly, right?)

Well, my husband says, it's not quite the same thing, but I wouldn't recognize say, our plumber if I saw him on the street. True true. I recognize my clients, because I focus on them for an hour, and then further burn their faces into my retinas with several hours of photo editing. Meanwhile, while people may be looking at me during photos, the camera blocks most of my face. They probably make eye contact for 5 minutes during that whole hour. I should be impressed that any clients recognize me at all.

Just Married

A friend on a honeymoon road trip swung through town with his wife, so I offered a Baker Beach sunset shoot. Really, there's no more a romantic place for couple photos than BB at sunset, and what a quintessential view of SF - what better souvenir of the city?

We got started late. New Camera Challenge: Twenty minutes after sunset! There were distractions between the parking lot and the beach - a broken bottle of ($$$) Sonoma wine that fell out of their car when the back door was opened - Smash! Strangers congratulating them after seeing the Just Married scrawl on their car windows... meanwhile I was vividly conscious of the darkening sky and trying to herd everyone towards the beach.

The scene looked a whole lot darker than these photos. 5D functioned in low light remarkably well. If you zoom in to the couple, they're not crisp, but given the subject matter/ photo aura, that the softness is appropriate. Oh yes. I did bring it to the beach; how could I resist? My new rule: No Lens Swapping while on the beach - that is truly how the grit gets into camera bodies. And now with 2 camera bodies, who needs to swap lenses anyways? With 50mm f/1.4 you can see the wonderful bokeh effect - foreground in focus, background lovely and blurred. We don't need to see the bridge clearly to know it's the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

Composing photos with the GGB - where to place the GGB in relation to people? Ideally, both towers are visible in the pic. Centering everything - ie, placing bridge in middle of pic with people in between towers, is just too predictable. Usually I wind up putting people to the far right of the bridge, so that there's an expanse of water, rather than sand, in the photo. I like for the bridge to bisect people around the shoulders - then the GGB either frames or points to the heads. At this distance, certainly never put the bridge above heads. Ugh. The huge advantage of showing up post sunset is that the beach is practically empty. Below: fake last rays of sunlight.

Upgrade

As with the acquisition of any new camera equipment, I test it out on my ever unwilling model, who most often is roused from a contented nap to do me such modeling favors.

It was going to happen sooner or later - I caved in and got myself the Canon 5D Mark II. It's UPS delivered arrival is anticlimatic, as the battery is yet to be charged, straight out of the box. For my purposes, the main advantage of this camera body over my existing 40D is low light performance. Conveniently, my model lay snoozing in the north-facing living room, excellent low-light conditions in which to do a quick comparative test. Same 50mm f/1.4 lens on both cameras.

The first obvious difference is the Full Frame-ness of the 5D, as opposed to the 1.6 crop factor of the 40D. Crop factor (I think) results from a smaller sensor (what I imagine to be the panel that takes in the image). So when you slap a 50mm lens on a 40D, in fact is it more like using a 50mm x 1.6 = 80mm lens - you get that much more zoom. Thus with a 5D and other Full Framer bodies, you get a wider frame. The practical application for me is that I don't need to back up as much to fit in more dog/ baby/ family. Oftentimes there isn't enough space to back up into. But there is an advantage to having instantly more zoom - one can maintain distance from a snot spluttering child, for instance.

Second obvious difference was the clarity of the playback images on the back of the camera of the 5D. This matters because I can see right away and for certain if things are in focus. On the 40D, I'd reason, it seems focused enough, and hope for the best. Usually it turns out fine, but it is nice to have this reassurement.

On to image quality, and the 2 photos above are a poorly set up experiment, as she's refused to maintain the same lounging pose for the 2nd picture and only bothered to turn and glower at me over her shoulder. You can see the diff between Full Frame (1st pic) and 1.6 cropped frame (2nd pic). These are unaltered pics, aside from cropping into squares. In this low light, you can see that the resolution of the first is much better than the second. Focus on the eye in both cases, and in the 2nd, struggle with low light is pretty obvious.

Ah, and so begin my adventures with my 5D! Poor 40D, what will become of you. I think I may use 40D for beach shoots, which fill the camera with dust. And definitely anytime I need rapid firing of shutter; 5D is notoriously slow - ie. not for sport photography. And I've yet to even venture into the world of VIDEO with my 5DII.

San Francisco Reality

Why yes, that is the Golden Gate Bridge in the background! The weather... sigh, the weather has made GGB shoots extremely difficult for the last 3 months. Most people who want GGB shoots come in from other parts of the Bay Area where there is sun in the summertime. I give ample advance warning - there is a good chance that we won't be able to see the bridge At All. Often I do combo shoots, at the GGB then caravaning inland to a warmer location in the Golden Gate Park (below). I try to warm up GGB photos so that it looks like maybe a hazy day rather than a cold and gray day.

So you will know more than ever will be useful about Ultimate Club Competition, and then some notes on Ultimate Photography.

Northern California Mixed Club Ultimate Sectionals this past weekend. For those of you of whom that didn't make much sense, let me explain. NorCal is easy, and Ultimate is Ultimtae Frisbee. Mixed means teams consisting of men and women (with a ratio of 4:3 on the field). Club is a division of play; there's Youth (highschool, and younger), College (college and grad schoolers), Club for anyone out of college, and Masters for "anyone over 33" but it tends to be those who have been playing for some 20 years - the pioneering generation of ultimate players now 40+.

Divisions don't necessarily indicate competitiveness (mentally and physically) - many college teams are definitely more competitive than easy going club teams. However the best ultimate players in the US are in the highest ranking club teams. Perhaps divisions are more loosely based on age. Moving on - Sectionals is the first stage of competition for teams to head to Regionals; so winners from NorCal and SoCal sections move on to South West (I believe) Regionals and then the top seeded go on to Nationals.

Club team intensity ranges from those with tryouts and mandatory practices/trainings to those consisting of friends which are thrown together casually at the last minute for fun. The latter describes Our team, Tonic! I rented a long lens to try my hand at action shots. The hardest part is definitely being at the right place at the right time. I wish there were 4 of me, to stake out 4 corners of the field. I could run up and down the sideline following the action but really, I only had so much motivation.

There is some predictability with certain players as to what they will be doing (handlers and deep cutters). Mostly I just hoped that the action would happen not too far away (as my lens only zooms So Far, and the further away the action, the more likely other players will be in the way of the shot) and that players would not have their back to me.

Timing is hard. The best photos I think, are immediately before a person catches the disc, or immediately after throwing, so there is this momentum. In the second pic, taken just after the apex of jump, already has downward momentum, you see - not as dramatic as it would be a split second earlier. Also, people tend to blink when they've caught the disc, but before catching - eyes are very open, as you see in the 3rd photo.

Perhaps the best thing to do is a series of machine gun shots, like the first picture. I don't know why I didn't do more of these - this is a more effective story-telling layout. In the last pic, we don't know whether he caught the disc or not, and we are forever left with a cliff hanger.

With ultimate pics,  I think it's important to fit the whole body in the shot, which is completely different to my baby photos where I do all sorts of cropping. And not only the whole body, but also the shadow on the grass, to show height of jump. And, including opposing team players shows what we were up against. Well, as with any type of photography, it takes years of practice to become very good. I learned here that 2 years of intensive baby photographing only minisculely prepares one for ultimate photography.

Fun Times at Wildcare

It was the kind of event where a random person could call out "Look! There's a Northern Blue Stockinged Crested Bog Heron!" And everyone would turn and Ooooh in appreciative unison. I am not myself a birder (Birders, if you don't know, are a whole different species of human in themselves, and I mean that affectionately! A whole 'nother division of geekery). But, I did have Wild Animals and Natural Places are Cool attitude like everyone else.

While I have left my Bug Teaching job, I still show up for events. In this case, my Bug Boss at SaveNature.org, Norm Gershenz was the recipient of the 2010 Terwilliger Environmental Award at the Wildcare Center in San Rafael, Marin. SaveNature was much more than bringing bugs to schools - it is about raising funds to purchase (and thus conserving) areas of biologically rich ecosystems - and Norm has raised 3.9 Million over the many years, to do just that.

Wildcare most famously rehabilitates injured wildlife, but also teaches and advocates living with wildlife. For example, instead of calling an exterminator to take care of (ie, catch and kill) the bats that have nested in your attic, they will employ methods to encourage bats to leave on their own - by means of leaving predator poop in their presence to make the attic undesirable. Then they seal up the entry ways.

A nature painting - what a fantastic award gift! In the next photo, the youngest of Norm's nominees for this award. The birds - a hawk of some sort, and a brown pelican below. Brown Pelican I can remember! All taken with Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L which I in fact rented for photographing Ultimate this weekend, but happened to be useful for birds and award giving too. Wow this lens is awesome. Too bad it costs, well, haha! As much as the 5D camera body I have a crush on. I rented it at $35 for the weekend from ProCamera.

What Occupies My Brain

I have been agonizing about upgrading to a Canon 5D mark ii. This means I pass hours typing "Canon 5D vs 40D / 5D comparison with 4D / 5D low light portraits / 5D review" and such keywords into Google, and then pore over all the results, read expert and lay person reviews, look at photo examples, and I forget to eat.

I am also trying to figure out - have I maxed out the photo quality on my 40D? Have I done everything I can do - both on camera and in the process of editing - to make the best possible picture? I can't answer that with a confident Yes, because Photoshop offers endless capabilities I could never hope to fully master.

The main attraction is the 5D's low light shooting power. I use natural light as much as I can, and if there's not enough light, resolution on the 40D can get speckly.

The deterrent is of course, cost. But then I remind myself - this is not some expensive hobby. I'm doing this professionally. I am constantly aiming to take the best pics possible for my clients and myself.

Cameras are returnable. I could buy, try, and return if dissatisfied, though all reviews assure me that once I get my hands on a 5D, there's no going back.

Argh.

Color Tweaking

For cute baby/tot pics, try putting a blanket over their head, and let them peek out. Totally cute. And note the home-made polymer clay buttons!

The original photo, out of camera to the left. Pretty bleah, in terms of colors. A small pic, so you won't dwell on it for long. It was a gray day, and colors are washed out, her face is a bit dark - just looks smoggy. Hooray for photoshop! I recently learned a new way to fix colors (both Intensity Increase and White Balance) by watching some youtube videos about photoshop - there are plenty out there. This is just one of many ways to fix colors - using Lab color mode and Curves. I suggest you look for videos yourself if you're interested in attempting this.

First change color mode from RGB of CMYK to Lab Color. I have no idea what Lab Color is. Next, go to Adjustments -> Curves, and you'll get a box like that to the left. The diagram somehow quantitatively describes your photo. I don't really understand how. Anyways, change Channel to "a" which represents your greenish to reddish colors. If you pull the bottom left tiny square to the right a bit, the pic becomes greener. Bring top right tiny square to the left, the pic becomes redder. Tweak them along the X axis until you strike a good balance. On Channel "b", you'll tweak your blue-ish to yellow-ish colors. Revert back to RGB to do other edits.

If you get adventurous and start tugging on points that are not on either end of the line, or move along the Y axis - good luck.

I used this method (plus other edits, sharpening and such) to get the pic above from the yucky-colored original. It's a portfolio pic for sure!