Yep, that was me last night and much earlier than usual. So, instead of the typical pithy witty, jovial, humorous, enjoyable, and informational material that you are used to seeing – let’s take a day off and call this a “No blog post” day. Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
Ever wonder why we’ve heard photographers say that when taking your picture? Think about what happens when you do – your facial features open up, your mouth opens slightly, and you get a little upward curvature in the corners of your lips. (Unless of course you concentrate on specifically not doing that.) Whoever thought this up eons ago was well ahead of the curve, because knowing how to take good portraiture encompasses entire volumes of books on the subject.
Volumes exist on what lenses to use, how to light, depth of fieldand much much more, but perhaps the most valuable information on how to take great portraits comes not just from technical awareness, but from personal interactions, and how to get people to act natural yet emotive and to let that come through in your work. While no blog post could entirely exhaust the subject, here are ten quick tips on taking better portraits:
So, there’s ten nuggets. I tried to be brief yet have some detail, but you can never have enough time or space to really cover something with so much to talk about in a short blog post. With that in mind, what about your thoughts on portraiture? Add to the pool! Got any ideas, DIY tricks or nuggets that work for you? Share them in the comments or via email.
Before signing out for the day, I’d like to give some special thanks to a few people. First to Derrick Story for the helpful link from his blog post today about the tethered shooting write-up. It’s always nice to get what I like to call “a nod from the Gods”, but not only did he write a post about my write-up, he also submitted it to the Imaging Insider, who subsequently included the write up on their site. Second up, I’d also like to throw some NAPP-Love back to Karen from “Pursuing Photoshop” (a.k.a. Mitzs in the blogosphere, also a member of NAPP) for her link back to the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom contest currently running here on the blog – thanks Mitzs!
Oh yeah, and finally, don’t forget the Photoshop Lightroom contest I announced in last week’s podcast – it’s running over in a thread on Flickr, and the images are starting to come in. Some really nice ones so far, but there’s plenty of time left in May to enter! Good luck to everyone! Well, enough content for one day, so happy shooting and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.
I’ve not seen much coverage of how to shoot tethered using the Canon proprietary software, so for today’s post, I thought it might be useful to offer the Canon perspective here (since the blog bears the moniker of my camera vendor of choice). For those who are Nikon shooters, I would highly recommend reading the post Scott Kelby did a while back that shows how to shoot tethered into Lightroom. While he walks you through the Lightroom element, he then discusses the Nikon approach… the counterpoint here is to take a look at the Canon approach.
To start off – a little explanation of what tethered shooting is would be helpful. Tethered shooting means you have your camera connected to your computer or laptop (usually a laptop for portability purposes). This allows you to shoot straight into the computer with direct saves. There are a couple advantages to tethered shooting. First off, you don’t need any media cards, because the camera is transferring straight to the computer. Second, regardless of what size LCD you have on the back of your sensor, nothing will compare with a 15″ or 17″ monitor. You can see greater detail, see a broader tonal range, and get a much better handle on the finder points of composition when it comes to things like posing, lighting, and minimizing distractions that you could likely miss when using a 3″ LCD of your camera.
Okay, so now that we know when and why you would shoot tethered, and given an appropriate nod to Scott Kelby for his coverage of the Nikon version, here is a Canon-centric approach to tethered shooting. Since the Lightroom component is already pretty well covered, I will just be limiting the discussion to showcasing the settings, screens and considerations to take into account when configuring the EOS Capture Utility.
When you first start the EOS Capture Utility, you get a rather unassuming window that doesn’t look like much:
It’s pretty straightforward – the top button would be used to download images if you are importing from all your images off a CF card. The second button would enable you to select which images to import off a CF card. More relative to this content is the Camera Settings/Remote Shooting button and the Monitor Folder button. I’ll get to those in a minute. Lastly, it’s helpful to draw your attention to the Preferences button on the lower right – this is the one I’d like to take a closer look at now.
When you click on the Preferences button the window will change:
From here, you now have access to all the details of how you want to configure your tethered shooting options, starting out with the basic settings (see the drop down menu in the upper left). This first setting tells the EOS Utility what screen you want to show when you first start the software. This really is a matter of personal preference, but I would recommend the main window so that if you want to change your preferences, you can do so easily and quickly – often with software preference settings will require you to restart the program, so if that must happen, it’s always best to do that at start-up.
Moving right along, let’s take a look at the other preferences settings:
The Destination Folder Preferences
This should be pretty self-explanatory, but in the interests of covering each aspect, this is where you can specify what folder you want to save your images to on connecting your Canon camera to your computer. For the purposes of this demonstration, I created a folder called EOS Capture and put it on my desktop to use as the destination folder. To point the EOS Utility to your destination folder of choice, simply click the browse button, as shown:
Note that the EOS Utility does a nice little thing here – it creates a subfolder by date so helps to keep your images organized whether you are downloading images, doing remote shooting (tethered shooting), or set a monitored folder for some third party application (like Lightroom). If you are going to be doig remote shooting, here is where you would likely select the remote shooting option so that when the camera gets connected, that specific task will create a subfolder and get you ready that much quicker. Here, since I don’t have the full hardware connection, I am just going to leave it on the default setting and select the folder I created on my desktop:
File Name Preferences
If you want to change your image names from the default of _IMG_1234.jpg to another more descriptive naming convention (say JamesSmith.jpg this would be the place to do it. The options are shown below:
If you choose to modify your images, you can elect from many options, including the option to customize for your needs – just click the drop down menu to select your options. By default it’s set to Do Not Modify so I’l just leave that here to show your options for filename formats:
The next option here in your filename conventions is where you can define custom naming conventions, either by subject name (JamesSmith), event (SmithWeddding), or whatever convention works for you:
Feel free to customize these as you prefer for your own shooting conditions and, well….preferences! Moving right along now…
Download Images Preferences
Here is where you tell the EOS Utility what to do with images as they are generated. It’s pretty straightforward… the options are:
Remote Shooting Preferences
The remote shooting preferences here are also pretty straightforward: Do you want to save your images to a card or not? Do you want the software to rotate your images if needed to show the right orientation? Depending on your preferences, check or uncheck these boxes:
Linked Software Preferences
Last but not least, do you want to use another piece of the Canon Software family of products to work on your tethered images , whether it be Digital Photo Profesional (aka DPP) or ImageBrowser:
Since my work flow incorporates the Adobe product line (Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.), I would suggest choosing “None” here, but again, that’s why these are called preferences.
Once these Preferences are set, go ahead and return to the main window, then click the Monitor Folder option, because there is two last items that merit discussion here:
The Monitoring Folder
Note that the folder has been specified for me, but Canon has generously recommended that I take advantage of a specific Canon hardware connector to connect the camera and computer – the WFT-E1 Wireless Transmitter. These are available from most camera retailers and e-tailers, but I like B&H so that is the one linked (and the price is fairly reasonable at $999.99, so if you get one, let me borrow it to review here on the blog! 🙂 ). Basically what this allows you to do is shoot “tethered” to the computer, but without the tether…pretty cool stuff!
The Software Version
I created this post using the older version of the EOS Capture Utility, primarily because I had not used it since I owned my XT. As with any software though, as camera bodies are added to the vendor family of products, the software must update too. On capturing all the images for this post, I did not think the software would be what updated, only the camera drivers. Clearly, that was not the case as the software itself has undergone a colorful transformation since then, and is now at its most recent update as of just last month at 2.6.1 You can download it and update via the 40D web page here (where I got mine just earlier). The upshot though, and why I am keeping the original screen shots, is because functionally nothing has changed – there are just more camera drivers added to the library. To get your own drivers for other Canon cameras to use with the EOS capture, go to the main page here and select your camera…
Finally, I wanted to share a very short video from what the new interface looks like and how to use it when shooting in “tethered” mode:
So, there you have it! My down-n-dirty summary of the Canon EOS Capture Utility – with photos, text, and video! A virtual cornucopia of media to look at the feature set. Enjoy the material! I’d love to hear your thoughts, hear your feedback and get suggestions (other than checking the software for updates before I write the post! 😀 ) on future material that may be useful. Don’t forget too – that contest to win a copy of Adobe Lightroom (which you can use to edit shots taken in tethered mode!) is going on through the end of May, so don’t delay – get those contributions in today! One shot could be worth a free copy of Adobe Lightroom! That’s it for today – have a great one, Happy Shooting, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the latest in photography composition.
Next up in my gear bag is the Sigma 70mm Macro lens. This is one sweet lens. With an aperture that goes down to f2.8 this is legally classified as “fast glass”. It’s got some super nice bokeh, and has an impressive range for it’s sweet spot – ranging from roughly f2.0 – f11. Seriously, it’s tack sharp through that entire range. It’s got the characteristic touch and handling of all Sigma lenses with its brushed matte black coating.
Other features include the manual on/off switch for auto-focus, which is typical for most lenses these days, but one thing I particularly enjoy is the limiter. While this is also characteristic for macro lenses, it helps to keep you within a certain range of focus so it doesn’t have to search as long before finding that tack sharp point. This toggle can be turned on or off any time, so it really helps when you are in Macro mode or shooting portraits. Oh yeah, did I mention this does a nice job at portrait work? The 70mm fixed focal length means I don’t have to get too up close and personal like you would with a 50mm lens, but I also don’t have to be as far away from the subject so it’s still fairly easy to interact with subjects.
If I had to list downsides, they would be that without the limiter on, it can take a while to focus, and that it is somewhat noisy when it is searching. I am very spoiled by the USM features of Canon bodies, and wish I had the Sigma equivalent (HSM – Hypersonic Moter), but that was just not available in this lens at the time (and don’t think it is to date…). Lastly, I don’t like how the lens shade prevents you from capping the lens when out in the field. If the lens hood is on, the cap simply cannot be in place.
As with any fixed focal length lens, it forces you to compose with your feet (if you want a tighter shot, step forward a few paces, and if you want to go wider, step back). But it does give you tack sharp results each and every time.
Here are a few sample shots I took with this lens, both in normal mode and in macro mode over the weekend for this post. My in-laws were in town so we did the tourist-y thing. First off, we visited the Hammonds Candy Factory where pictures are not only welcomed, but encouraged – so, my camera in ahd with 70mm attached (intentionally only went out with one lens each day…), I got some good samples of each category, except Macro (you need a tripod most times when shooting Macro work – at least I do in anything but the brightest light!):
Still Life
Some of the wonderful candies at Hammonds
Weights and Measures
Portrait
There you have it – the 70mm Macro f2.8 from Sigma – the third lens in my bag. Coming up next week, the 70-200L f4.0. it’s an oldie but a goodie! What do you think? How does the Sigma 70 Macro stack up based on what you’ve read here? Like it? Love it? Hate it? What other macro lenses do you have experience with? Share your thoughts in the comments! Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!
Don’t forget about the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Contest announced over on Learning Digital Photography! Win your own copy of LR by sharing images in the Flickr thread here!
Happy Saturday all. It’s a rare weekend post here – since Friday was silent. Two things – first off, Happy Mothers Day to all the mothers out there! Second, as the podcast on Tuesday announced, don’t forget the first ever Learning Digital Photography Contest is under way – all during the month of May, submit your shots to the Flickr group (2 entries per person) for your chance to win a copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0! Not only is it a great chance to win this wonderful program, but a great way to get increased visibility of your work and to network with others.
Information is available in the podcast, but you are welcome to just submit your entries directly to the Flickr group. This is a prize package worth $300 retail, so definitely one worth entering! Good luck and happy shooting!
Hey all, just a couple notes and bits of maintenance for everyone this Thursday. The first ever contest for the Learning Digital Photography podcast is now underway, so be sure to post your images in the thread over at Flickr in order to participate.Some lucky listener will win a copy of Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 2.0. You do have to have a Flickr account to post images there, but registration is free (and if you have a Yahoo account, you already can get into Flickr). A couple links to make note of:
In some other maintenance notes, the podcast has gotten a few more reviews at iTunes and Diggs over at Personal Life Media – thanks to those that have shared their thoughts and feedback, your support means a lot and every little bit helps. Here’s the links for those that would like to add to the support:
Last but not least, it became official the other day that I will be in attendance at the Lightroom workshop here in Denver coming up on May 20th Being led by none other than Scott Kelby, of NAPP fame, I’ll be getting even more up to speed on how to use Lightroom as the primary means for my photography work flow. I’ll likely have a few posts worth of material to share with the readership shortly thereafter. (Who knows – I might be able to snag a pic or two out of it too!
So, that’s it for today – sorry for the lateness of the post. Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!
When looking at image composition, many of the things we use as our foundation are the typical rules of the trade – things like the the Rule of Thirds, Sunny 16, Golden Mean, etc., etc., etc. While these rules are all well and good, and they definitely are some of the fundamentals that we all incorporate as we see to create beautiful images – they do not constitute the entire picture (pardon the pun). As photographers, we should also be challenging ourselves to look at things in unique and new or innovative ways.
For instance, take the Eiffel Tower. This particular piece of architecture has been around for so long now that photographers have had an opportunity to capture this from pretty much every angle and in virtually all lighting conditions. You would be hard pressed to come up with a new angle or an unused lighting style for this monument. So, what if you take a trip to Paris – should you not even bother with a picture? Of course not! Snap away, be a tourist want and get your other half mugging next to the Tower.
The same could be said for the Sistine Chapel, the Venus de Milo, or any other of thousands of historically significant and/or interesting works. And seriously – what do you think would happen if you went on a trip to Paris, came back and said “Nope, no shots of the Eiffel Tower, been taken too much already, no sense in taking yet another shot of it.” If your family is anything like mine, people would look at you and wonder – “But, you’re a photographer!”
The point here is that you don’t always have to be “on” and looking for that next great shot. In fact, the minute you stop trying so hard to find inspiration, in general, the faster inspiration finds you. Let the boring snapshots happen – they’re fun, and a great way to connect with others. Imagine being at some social function and you’ve got your camera. Are you looking at the light, wondering what aperture/shutter settings you can feasibly hand hold at without over cranking your ISO, or are you enjoying the time spent with family and friends? Before you answer that – answer this – which circumstance do you think will provide more inspiration and creativity?
Just the other day I was delivering some computer stuff to another building, which happened to be 14 floors up. Sure, I have my camera with me – and I looked out the window. Aerial photography has always intrigued me, but I had never given it another thought – until the other day. So, didn’t really think much and pointed my camera out the window, just having fun and taking a few snaps of the scenes:
Quite the boring shot eh? Certainly not even close to being on par with something like the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Venus de Milo, or anything like that. It’s pretty much a scene of nothing. But from nothing, and from not even trying to always be “on” you can find your creativity and inspiration. This shot was taken only ten seconds apart from the previous one:
Okay, so it’s still not as breath-taking as any of the other historical monuments, but you gotta admit, that curved line of the building receding into the distance is kinda neat, eh? This isn’t really looking for props or accolades though. The point here is to not let yourself become too preoccupied with achieving your next great “hero” shot on every capture. That is only setting yourself up for failure because no one can attain that. Sure, it’s important to try and stretch your creative muscle, and try new captures, and experiment with new styles, using different lighting and all the stuff that goes hand-in-hand with being a photographer, but remember, before you can be a photographer, you gotta be a person!
Enjoy photography, but don’t forget to live your life!
Don’t forget to pick up the feed for the blog and the podcast – all during the month of May, you could be shooting to win a copy of Lightroom! One of the best ways to do that is to just go out and have some fun. Forget about the details from time to time and just enjoy life – because that is when you will most likely get your hero shots – when you least expect them. So, just enjoy life, and enjoy photography – the rest comes naturally! Happy living and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
Just last week, I had the distinct honor of interviewing Tom Hogarty, Senior Product Manager for Adobe Lightroom. Needless to say, I postponed the podcast for a few more days so I could include the interview. He really gave a good breakdown of the function of Lightroom, what to expect from it, how to incorporate it into your work flow, and what (in general) we can likely expect to see in the future of image processing development. We spent a good deal of time going over the nuts and bolts, so under the general heading of Software discussions today, I’d like to introduce you to Adobe’s Lightroom.
Lightroom is a very different way of handling your images. Rather than taking a single image at a time through something like Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom allows you to not only address single image edits, but also manage an entire library of images. The key here is management, because that’s what Lightroom really does – it takes the idea of asset management and incorporates it into a program so that you don’t even have to think about it! Rather than belabour the point here though, it would probably be best to encourage everyone to just download the podcast and give it a listen. Not only do we discuss Lightroom, but we also take a lot of listener questions, both specific to Lightroom and general photography questions too – and, oh yeah, a contest!
That’s right – Adobe was kind enough to donate a copy of Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 to some lucky listener. At an estimated retail value of almost $300 ($299), this is by and large, the best contest I’ve could ever come up with! It’s very exciting! I’d love to share the details here, but if I did that, you wouldn’t listen to the podcast. So… want to know the details? Listen to the podcast! In the meantime, here’s the show notes on the things we discussed and where to get the latest and greatest info on the product:
Be sure to stop over at Twitter and start following these folks, because they are the ones who you can really learn a lot from! Then don’t forget to listen to the podcast for your chance to win a copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0! Happy Shooting and good luck one and all!
Oh yeah, here’s the teaser link for the contest: Learning Digital Photography Flickr Group
Many of us as photographers are also gadget hounds, and the ability to accessorize our cameras with the latest and greatest gadgets and doohickeys is both a boon and a curse. It’s a boon because we have so many options available to us, and it is a curse for the same reason – because we have so many options available to us. A perfect example of this is the development of GPS attachments.
GPS (Global positioning system) units allow us to add the longitudinal and latitudinal information to the meta data of our digital images. This can help us locate the picture on a map, find the location later, and adds another type of data that we can filter for when managing our images. As the technology has advanced, the price has come down to the point where the ability to incorporate such an accessory is much more feasible.
Here are some of the more popular GPS units on the market these days. While I have not tested these, coming from the article Jack neubart wrote in the May issue of Shutterbug, I would suspect that these are some of the more well-known devices available:
I was able to get some pretty detailed reviews on each of these devices, along with their respective software components by performing a simple Google search of the device name, and rather than regurgitate all that information here, suggest that those who are interested in learning more detailed information do the same.
Special thanks for the collection of all this data to Jack Neubart over at Shutterbug magazine for his very informative article and summary on all of these devices. If you’d be interested in the summary, be sure to pick up a copy or subscribe to the magazine today – it’s one of the better resources on the internet! Happy Shooting and we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the Software Review – very exciting one too, so be sure to add CB to your feeds!
Well, yesterday I had a great conversation with Tom Hogarty, senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for inclusion in the upcoming podcast. In my excitement to finish the post production side, I came downstairs at 3am to my man-cave, and found that Jason Moore had finished an article I sent him for possible inclusion in his “Workflow Friday” series, and posted that out there. Egads! Thanks to Jason for that outlet as well.
What’s kind of exciting about that article, is that not only did Jason find it interesting enough to include with the collection of folks that have been featured thus far on his blog, but the good folks (Hi Dave!) over at Photography BB have released their latest free online magazine, and the article was included in there as well! (I must be doing something right! *grin*) Be sure to download that magazine as well, because there really are some talented writers and photographers sharing their perspectives. I’m also honored that Dave has included the CB Learning Digital Photography podcast in his list of favorite online media sources for photography (we’re #1 in the audio section – woOt!).
When it rains, ir really does pour! However, because of the interview with Mr. Hogarty, the podcast is thus delayed again, because the two themes of Listener Questions and Answers and Questions with Adobe seamed together pretty well. I may have it compiled early enough to post before the weekend, but don’t expect any miracles there. More likely that will be published next week Tuesday under the software heading of the new schedule (since it’s about Lightroom – there’s also some great links you’ll want in the show notes).
For today though, I do have a little maintenance announcement as well: for those of you picking up the blog via Feedburner, you will likely be getting a double dose of images, because as promised, I am also uploading the images from yesterday’s post to share on Flickr, so you will likely see some repetition there. It’s also a little exciting to share that the feedburner subscription hit an all time high not once but twice this week of 691 listeners/readers. So, thanks to everyone that has signed up – it really means a lot that so many have found the CB resource useful!
That’s about it for this first Friday in May – have a great weekend everyone! Happy Shooting and we’ll catch you back here on Monday for the latest in the hardware reviews. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite selections from this past week in the What the Duck series:
