It’s alive!

In the best “Dr. Frankenstein” style my first design creation went live!

OK, the story behind. I, as probably 95% of the people that work in front of a computer, have back problems, mostly lumbar pain. At work we gathered a group and hired a trainer (Margit Dürr) to give us twice a week “Back Training” sections over lunch break. Well, the training is quite intense for the most of us and we get considerably tired.

As a joke, a colleague suggested that we could wear a sticker after the training similar to the ones you get when you give blood in the USA “Be Nice To Me – I gave blood”. Well, as Barney from “How I meet your mother” would say “(Photoshop) challenge accepted!”.

Nothing I haven’t seen in photoshop tutorials, but it’s always great to put it in practice! Concentric circles making a doughnut, gradient in diagonal, text on a path, trainer’s picture in the center and the quote “Be Nice To Me – I was at the Back Training”.

The final product is this one.

Back Training Sticker – Little photoshop exercise.

One day, after the training, we all appeared with the sticker printed and presented it to the trainer, who seemed to have enjoyed the idea. I sent her the logo and to my surprise last week she showed up with it printed in a T-shirt!

There it is!

Margit Dürr wearing the nice T-Shirt with the sticker

Nice design exercise, fun with trainer and colleagues and a cool T-shirt!

Harsh light, soft light

After one starts to learn the basics of photography, you really have to take care no to become obnoxious. I’m far from being a great photographer, but I spend time studying and shooting, at the moment I have this large amount of nice classic images in my head and I’m struggling to recognize potential shots and to materialize the ones I identify into what I see in my head.

Coming back to being obnoxious Several times you see things like people shooting a monument with a pop-up flash, or other non-sense stuff like this. One that seems a common knowledge among people that don’t really is into photography is the relation between taking a picture and the direction of the sun.

It has happened to me, more than once, and coming from people you’d “expect more”, that I’m asked to take someone’s picture (usually on the street) and the subjects places itself facing the harsh sun! Once I’ve heard a “let’s stand here in the sun so it looks better!”. OMG!

The idea for this post came from the latest happening when I was suppose to record some words for an event and the person in change suggested me to stand with the sun right on my face. I was force to say “no, this is the wrong light” and not to my surprise I had “no, the bad light is being backlit!”. STOP! Let’s go and talk about light

Direct sun light is terrible, for anything, unless intended! It’s very harsh, it leaves very defined shadows and blows away any detail where it hits. Apart from the fact that your subject (or subjects) will be squinting, what is not flattering to anyone (do you know someone that looks good squinting???), they will have very dark defined shadows on their faces and the rest will be very flat! Recipe for a horrible shot.

Example of harsh light with very hard shadows. (photo: luxurytravelmagazine.com)

This link is a nice example on how harsh/soft light looks like on someones face, in a nice article form Kevin Ames.

The softness of a light source depends on it’s size. To be more precise and astronomical, on it’s angular size, not the physical size. The sun is huge, but at our distance it’s not more than a small disc in the sky, therefore very harsh. When it’s cloudy, the sun is still the source, but now behind the clouds the size of the diffuse is way larger, therefore very soft (you don’t see defined shadows in a cloudy day).

Of course there’s more to it than that, actually a lot more, but this is for other occasions (like when I learn it properly ). For the moment keep in mind, don’t pose people in direct sun light! Take them to a shadowy place!

Tweaking Panos in Photoshop

This is actually a question, not a tutorial. In any case I’ll integrate the answers I eventually get to the text, so scroll down if you’re interested (sometimes comments are not indexed by google and I’ll also spread the question in other medias).

Photoshop has a great tool for stitching photos together and them making panoramic (panos), as long as you have overlapped them about 20% and … but sometimes you have to tweak them and that’s when the problem starts.

To explain the problem I’m having, I’ll take the opportunity to show a bit of what photoshop is doing.

Example: small pano in Venice, Italy. Three shots put together and to make my case visually clear I have exaggerated the tone difference between them. Left is 1.5 stop darker and very low saturation, middle is “normal” and right is 1.5 brighter and high saturation.

Photoshop will blend them together light this

Pano of Venice with three shots and exaggerated exposures and saturations.

It will use parts of the images and mask the rest, as we can see here.

Masks made by photoshop to stitch the shots together.

If you notice the sky you’ll see that the plane track in the sky doesn’t really match.

Sky problem from stitching photos together.

So the option is to get the whole track from the same shot. And the way to do it is to hide and show in the respective masks. The problem is that photoshop is applying a color match only to what is visible through the masks.

If you deactivate the masks that’s what you have.

Sky problem from stitching photos together. Masks deactivated and color difference.

And when you try to bring the hidden part back the colors really don’t match.

Sky problem from stitching photos together. Sky color difference when tweaking the masks to solve stitching problem.

The question here is what is to be done in this case??? Auto-blend will not help, it will basically rebuild the masks as they were in the first time!!

Another example is here, the missing part of the boat and the canoe that I want gone from my nice Venetian pan (canoes and Venice … really?) and if I just play with the masks, colors might not match properly.

Unwanted or missing parts of the pano.

Problem with color while removing or bringing back parts of the pano.

One option is cloning luminosity, color, the whole thing, patching it content aware … in some situations it works, but in some others, I already have the proper content, all it’s needed is to repeat the color matching that was applied before.

If you know the answer! Please, let me know!

Fear for the gear

This holiday season we went back “home” (to Brazil, though as a friend always says, home is where you have you bed) and I took my gear to shoot Christmas, new year’s, birthdays (mine and my son’s) and the general family shots. Even more this year that my brother was also around with his newborn daughter, the cutest kid (after mine ).

Bird eye view of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (photo from totaldecadence.com).

This period I even did some portrait and head shots for my brother. Great learning! I need to do it again immediately. I could not direct him as well as I wanted. Gotta practice this!

Back to the topic. Yes, gear for indoor events. The protected way, from home to the place, by car, back home. I really did not have the guts to take the gear on the street and photograph something! Not saying I didn’t shoot anything at all, there’s always a small point-and-shoot in the pocket, but the outcome is nothing compared with a dSLR would have done.

Amazing, isn’t it? Is the land I grew up, a place I’m supposed to know how it works, and probably this is exactly what prevented me from doing it!

Every time someone I know goes to Brazil I get a call/email asking for information and tips. I would probably do the same if I go somewhere I’ve never been before. The information I pass along is “don’t be alone, don’t be distracted, go as unnoticed as possible”. Wallets, cameras, phones and other devices attract attention from the thieves. Fact! So basically going around one the wonderful places cities like Rio de Janeiro (and why not some parts of Sao Paulo) have to offer would be a violation of my own rules!

On the one hand, there are several photographers who do that often and “survive” the experience. On the other hand is very common to receive “someone stole my gear” kind of information, from friends or their friends.

The matter is not only the material side. It’s hard to think of the gear I worked hard to buy going to the hands of someone that didn’t earned it, but the problem is more than anything your physical and psychological integrity. If you’re not physically hurt when robbed, how will your mind deal with the gun you had in your head while your gear was being stolen?

I’m really not into taking this chance.

The additional problem comes with the extrapolation of “where would I go with my gear??”.

To go to Paris or to Venice, for example, I gaffer taped all brands of my gear, to keep some mystery and try to divert attention, but those places are not dangerous places to go, they are just not as safe as Munich.

But I think, I would love to shoot exotic places like Egypt, Turkey or India. Would I dare taking my gear around while visiting it? Would I be a easy prey while shooting?

Still wondering … I put some more thought (and probably get an insurance) when I have the change of doing it.

Suggestion to watch carefully

Sorry for the absence. Coming back from vacations is being quite hard with all the winter sicknesses related to it

There’s a lot to tell, not much to show (a post about it will come).

Today I ran again into a video that is totally worth watching.

Scott Kelby’s Crush the Composition. Is a Kelby Training class that was given live at the Google+ for Photographers Conference last year and made public in youtube. Is mostly the same as the paid Kelby Training class and worth watching with full attention!!

Enjoy it!!

I’ll be back soon with regular posts