Not My Normal Self Portrait - Part 3 "The Post"

Hey everyone, here is the third and final instalment of my "Post Apocalyptic Corporate Headshot" series of the "The Shot," "The Shoot & The Gear," and "The Post."

Here's the video that shows how I created this image in Photoshop.

Cheers!

DC

Not My Normal Self Portrait - Part 1 "The Shot"

Hey everyone, here we go with another instalment of "The Shot," The Shoot & The Gear," and "The Post."

Now, there is a back story to this image. While I was at Photoshop World in August one of the tidbits of advice I picked up about pushing your creativity is doing something the complete opposite of what you would normally do. Well, if you look at most of my portfolio you'll see that this about as far from my normal as I think you can get! LOL!

This was also a way for me to work on generating a concept, planning the various elements, figuring out how to light it and shoot it, and finally how to bring all the elements together in Photoshop and Lightroom. I'm definitely not a Photoshop genius, but I've picked a few tricks here and there, so it's always fun to try new things.

Stay tuned for Part 2 "The Shoot & The Gear," where I'll walk through the concept, the planning, lighting, and shooting.

Cheers!

DC

I'm Now Up Over on Instagram!

Blog has been quiet for the past little bit, but I'm getting things back on track starting with announcing that I'm now on Instagram! I've been a very late adopter to Instagram, so I thought I would give it a try. I'm always looking for ways to share my images, and so far I'm finding Instagram quite fun.

You can find me at @darrenclarkphoto. I'll be posting every couple of days so check me out and start following if you like what you see.

Also, stay tuned for another instalment of "The Shot," "The Shoot & The Gear," and "The Post," coming up shortly,

Cheers!

DC

Travelling with Camera Gear? (Canadian Version)

Are you a Canadian photographer who travels? Do you know what a Y38 is? You probably should.

Ok, I live in Canada so this information specific to Canadians; however, if you live in another country you may have similar regulations so you may want to check out your local requirements.

A Form Y38 ("Identification of Articles for Temporary Exportation") is a document issued by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). If you haven't heard of this before I'm not surprised. I had never heard of this form until few years ago after driving back across the border from a trip to the US.

I went down to St. Louis to see the Flashbus Tour featuring Joe McNally and David Hobby a few years ago. I live in Ontario fairly close to the Niagara Falls border and at times have traveled out of Buffalo due to cheaper flights. As usual, when I travel I take some of my camera gear, and have done so for close to 10 years with nary an issue. On this occasion it was a little different. When I returned to cross back into Canada I expected the usual questions, where have you been, how long have you been gone, what are you bringing back etc. I'm always honest with the CBSA agents because I have no reason not to be. So when I said that I was attending a photography seminar (the Flashbus Tour) I was questioned about my camera gear; essentially how do they know that I didn't just buy all this stuff in the US and was trying to sneak it back across the border without declaring it. The CBSA agent wanted me to prove that I purchased everything in Canada...easier said than done when all of the receipts were at home over an hour away at the time.

I showed the CBSA agent the gear I had with me, and after additional questioning she relented, but told me that I should have obtained a Form Y38 before I left Canada. Suffice it to say I was a very bad person for not knowing about a form that no one in the past had ever mentioned to me, but we all know ignorance is not defence. I guess she thought I was honest enough because her attitude changed slightly and she explained it to me in more detail.

After I got back I went searching for a little more information on how to do this, and found that it's a pretty simple process. Here's all you need to do:

1) Make a list and itemize all of your gear, I mean all of it, with make, model and most importantly serial number;
2) Take all of you gear, plus your full list to your nearest CBSA office (click here for a directory);
3) Explain to them that you travel frequently with your camera gear and understand that a Form Y38 can help when coming back into Canada.

In my case I went to the Hamilton International Airport as it was closest and not that busy. The agent there was extremely friendly. He took my list and checked out all of my gear, including verifying all of the serial numbers. He filled out the Form Y38 (it's actually a small green card), and attached it to my larger list, where he also noted the total number of items and that he had checked the serial numbers. He signed it, I signed it, and we were done; it took about 5 minutes.

The Y38 does not have an expiry date so it's good for as long as you have your gear. Even if you only travel with a few pieces, as long as they're on the list covered by the Y38 you're good. The only caveat is if you add more gear or change things out you will need to get a new one. I updated mine last year, which involved updating my list and heading back to the CBSA office to get the revised list signed off on a new Y38. However, this is probably the most important part...you need to remember to carry it with you when you travel.

So it may seem like a bit of an inconvenience to do this, but consider the alternative... getting into a dispute with a CBSA agent, getting frustrated about something you knew nothing about, getting pulled off to the side for further questioning, having to pay duty on your own gear, having to gather all of your receipts after the fact and head back to a CBSA office to prove your case. I know I may be exaggerating just a little, but how much easier would it be to drop a Y38 on them once they start to question you? You'll probably look like a pretty smart cookie, the CBSA will likely appreciate that you took the time to get informed and make their job a bit easier, too.

Happy travelling!

Cheers!

DC

Photoshop World 2015 is Almost Here!

Last year was my first Photoshop World in Las Vegas. There was so much that I missed as there was so much to do. At the end of the conference I mentioned this to Scott Kelby and he looked me right in eye and simply said…”dude, come back next year!”

 

There's also a bunch of Pre-Conference workshops and I attended the Concert Photography workshop with Alan Hess (an amazing concert shooter), and Scott Diussa from Nikon Professional Services (also an amazing concert shooter). You get some classroom learning first and then the really cool part…you get to shoot a real band! Yup, you get the whole experience with a live band, a loud band, lights, dry ice, like you’re at a real concert, and basically you are albeit a private concert for photographers only. The band last year was called Rebel Soul, a classic rock band with a great sound who totally rocked it. It was hard to separate my wanting to shoot, and my wanting to just sit back and enjoy the show.



The other really cool part was after the workshop all participants were asked to submit 1 photo of the shoot. The instructors would then choose the top 3 images to be presented at the Keynote Address (yeah the one that kicks off Photoshop World that everyone attends) for a chance to win great prize from Nikon, thanks to Scott Disussa and the NPS Team. The crowd cheers would choose the winner. To my total surprise my image (at the top of this post) made the top 3! Unfortunately, I didn't win, but I got a tremendous amount of positive feedback from so many people. It was an amazing experience.

The Pre-Conference workshops fill up fast, however, it looks like the Real World Concert Photography workshop still has some openings so definitely check it out.

The whole conference was a great experience. I learned a lot and made some new friends.

You can check out all of the details and register here:

Photoshop World 2015 – Las Vegas

Cheers!

DC

Our Zipline Adventure in Whistler

My wife and I were in Whistler, British Columbia last weekend for the North Face Half Marathon. While there we also went ziplining with ZipTrek Ecotours, which was a very cool adventure. 

My wife has a bit of a flare for storytelling so I'm turning today's post over to her to tell the story in the way only she can.  

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“You want me to do what?!?” I would have looked back at him, but I was much too afraid to turn around.

“Step down to the third step,” he repeated with the patience of someone who is well accustomed to being asked dumb questions by tourists.

I looked down at the metal steps in front of me; the ones that had no railings and suddenly dropped off into nowhere. And I mean nowhere! From that last step was a 750 foot drop off into the valley below.

“When you feel the wedgie, you’ll know you’ve gone far enough."

I would have thrown our 20 something year-old tour guide a withering look at that comment, but I was too busy trying to keep my breakfast where it belonged.

Suddenly, I had a flash black to 4 months ago when I first found the advertisement for this Zipline tour online. “Hey, Darren! Look at this! We can do this when we are over there for the half-marathon. What do you think?”

He had agreed with me then. Probably because we were both visualizing the easy experience we had ziplining at Turkey Point back home. Somehow, now that we were standing on the platform towering above the valley in Whistler, it suddenly seemed like a VERY bad idea.

Oh, well, if I die today, I won’t have to do any more call, I thought as I took a deep breath and stepped down. Another two steps and I felt the harness grip me in a way that was way too familiar. 

“Okay, this is as far as I can go.” I imagined that my voice sounded calm and collected. Like it belonged to an experienced health care professional who was used to making life and death decisions. Sadly, I am pretty sure I sounded more like a squeaky 6 year-old.

“Ok, then just sit back into the harness, step off and you’ll be on your way.”

Our guide still sounded way too cheerful for my liking.

“I’m only on the second step and the harness has me. Do I have to go down another step?” Was it my imagination or was Darren’s voice a notch or two higher then it usually is too?

I glanced over at my husband cinched up in his matching harness a few metres away from me on the same platform. Apparently, we were going to have the dubious honour of ziplining together.

“Just step off and go!” our tour guide called out to both of us.

Suddenly, the scene from Indiana Jones when Indy had to take a leap of Faith by stepping out onto nothing (when there was actually a bridge that blended in completely with the canyon wall) flashed through my mind. Here goes nothing! I thought as I took my own personal leap of Faith.

And then I was flying through the air. More like a terrified-seated-woman-clinging-onto-the-strap-of-her harness flying than soaring like a bird flying, but flying nonetheless. I can’t even describe what if felt like as I sailed across the valley, the trees whistling by below me. It made me want to laugh and scream at the same time.

I saw Darren zipping on his line out ahead of me and picking up speed. I was wondering how I could possibly catch up to him when for some reason I started to spin. Ok, zipping forward was one thing, but making me zip backward was just mean! Fortunately, a few seconds later, I spun back again. And then as my pulley hit the brake line and my feet hit the wood of the ramp on the receiving platform, it was over. My flight was over. Darren was there ahead of me and showed me his slightly shaking hand. I grinned at him and said, “That was fun!” He laughed and said “Terrifyingly awesome! Let’s do it again!”

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Here's the group shot with our guides Keir and Aldo, from Ziptrek, and the two Heathers, our adventure partners for the days.

Photo credits: Ziptrek staff photographers.

Cheers!

DC

Lightroom Exposure Recovery Tutorial

Do you have a horribly underexposed photo? Not much of an issue for Lightroom. This was my experience with one of my photos from our trip to Hawaii earlier this year.  This video tutorial shows how I got to the after version.

Cheers!

DC

Project Feline - Part 3 "The Post"

Welcome back to Part 3 of Project Feline, "The Post." The post processing in these photos was so simple, and it was all done in Lightroom (at time of process was LR v5.7). Below are the screen shots of my settings, where I started and how I moved from one shot to the next.

The first shot is my reference image with a grey card in order to set a correct white balance. With 2 cats that are black and white this was an important first step. All I did with this was grab the white balance eye dropper tool inside the Basic panel and clicked on the grey card...simple and straight forward.

Next all I had to do was sync this white balance setting across all of my photos, which is as easy as selecting the reference image, the grey card shot with the WB adjustment, then selecting my target images that I want to sync. When you do that the Sync button shows up at the bottom of the LR Develop panel. Click Sync and then choose the settings you want to sync, in this case WB (I also kept the Process Version checked to ensure the same version is used) then click Synchronize and you're done.

So then I went to my first image to edit. The first thing I did was some cropping and then a few simple adjustments in the Basic and Detail panels. You can see all of the settings below.

Now I used the Sync feature to match the WB setting across all images to start, but after that I tend to only focus on editing one photo at a time, so I don't usually sync all settings across all photos the same way. What I do use is the Previous button (see red arrow in the image above). When I move to the next image that I am focussing on I hit Previous, which applies all of the settings from the previous image to the one I'm working on. From there I make any additional adjustments that I think are necessary and then move onto the next image. In this case the cropping had to change for each, and I made a few small tweaks to the other sliders as necessary. My goal here was consistency across the shots as they were all companion pieces.

Basically this was it for post processing. Really simple touch ups that took about 2 minutes or less per image. Lightroom is some powerful stuff.

Thanks for dropping by again. I hope you enjoyed this instalment of "The Shot," The Shoot & The Gear," and "The Post."

Cheers!

DC

Project Feline - Part 2 "The Shoot & The Gear"

Part 2 in this series is the behind the scenes look that shows how I got the shot, and the gear I used to make it happen.

First, here's the list of gear that was used:

• Nikon D810
• Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 Lens
• SB900 Speedlight
• SU800 Commander Unit
• 32" White Shoot Through Umbrella
• Lastolite 5 in 1 Reflector w/Reflector Arm Attachment
• Manfrotto Background Stand Kit
• White Seamless Background Roll (60")
• Folding Table
• Cat Toy
• Cat Wrangler (aka my wife, Lori)

Below is a shot of how everything was set up. Lighting set-up was pretty simple with one SB900 at camera left on about a 45 degree angle to the set, and on the right side was the white reflector. This was shot in my home office and you can see there's not a lot of space. The SB900 was obviously my main light and the reflector was close enough in on the right to get a good amount of fill light. I also shot this at night so the light spill from the window behind was not a factor.

Camera settings were full manual mode - 1/100 @ f8, ISO 640. SB900 was also on manual at 1/4 power. I've always tended to lean toward manual flash as opposed to using full TTL. I also wanted to have a lower power setting so the flash would recycle faster.

Now the fun part...getting them up on the table, and trying to get them to cooperate! This is where my wife, Lori, my "ace cat wrangler" came in. Her job was to get them on the table, keep them on the table and try to get them to face in the general direction of the camera...and she did an amazing job!!

Here are few unedited, and uncooperative, outtakes. Lori managed to get their attention long enough for me to bang off about 10 to 15 shots each, and I was lucky to get a few keepers.

So there you have it, Project Feline Part 2 "The Shoot & The Gear."

Stay tuned for Part 3 "The Post," where I'll walk through how I post processed the final shots.

Cheers!

DC

Project Feline - (Part 1 - "The Shot! or Shots!")

Here we go with another installment of "The Shot", "The Shoot & The Gear," and "The Post."

The background goes something like this...my mother-in-law wanted some photos of our babies (i.e., our fur babies).  My wife went out and found a frame with 3 4x6 slots in a portrait format, which was perfect as we have 3 cats. So now I had 2 options, 1) scour my Lightroom catalog for existing photos, or 2) shoot new photos.

I did take a look through Lightroom, but I didn't see anything in a portrait format that had any consistency between the three; all of the backgrounds were different and I shot a lot of them in landscape orientation. So it was option 2...shoot new photos!

Stay tuned for Part 2 - "The Shoot & The Gear," where I'll review the lighting set-up among others things.

Cheers!

DC

In the Nick of Time!

You have less than 2 minutes to capture a perfect sunset...don't screw it up! 

Sometimes you see a gorgeous sunset, and it’s always slowly slipping away. This was the case for this image…and I almost missed it! 

My wife and I recently vacationed in Maui. On this day we had just returned from visiting Pearl Harbor on O’ahu and were driving back from the airport. We were heading west along highway 30 and the sun was slowly going down. We were on the twisty turny section of road between Maalaea and Lahaina and there was not really a safe place to pull over.

We continued to watch the sun going down and I was getting a bit anxious because I wanted to pull over and grab a few shots before it left for the day. We had just come out of the twisting section of road, and just as the sun was almost touching the horizon a left turn lane presented itself…like it was saying here’s your chance take it or leave it! 

Now for the record, being safe should always be paramount to getting a photo. I mean there is a sunset every night so it’s not worth causing an accident. However, judging by the way others were driving some just don’t care about safety…sigh!

So we pulled off (safely) and I scrambled out of the car, grabbed my camera from my bag in the back seat, and moved quickly to find a spot (by the way the sound silencers on the Think Tank Photo Retro 7 make it easy to get into your bag quickly). By this time the bottom of the sun had already started to drop below the horizon. Just to give you sense of timing my first shot was at 6:23:36 pm and my last shot after sun dropped below the horizon was 6:25:25 pm, so less than 2 minutes. This shot was taken right in the middle at 6:24:38 pm.

I was shooting with a Nikon D810 with the 28-300mm lens. I really didn’t check all of my settings because I was moving pretty quickly. But I do remember doing 3 things…on the run…AF switch on, check (it can get moved going in and out of the bag), VR on, check (shooting handheld with 300mm lens), and I also switched off bracketing mode that I was using earlier. 

I began shooting and made a couple of exposure adjustments on the fly. But I totally forgot to check my ISO so it was still at 100. Aperture was at f6.3 and I had dropped the EV Comp by 1/3 of a stop. When all was said and done I realized that I got away with 1/400^th shutter speed…whew! This shot was racked out at 300mm so having turned the VR on earlier was helpful for additional stabilization.

Sometimes you have to move quickly and make adjustments on the fly, and then hope that you made the critical choices. I was lucky that I got away with it…this time!

Cheers!

DC