Lessons

Lesson Info

Image Review Part 1

so the first image is made by somebody who's here in the room right yeah um yeah I'm curious this looks like it was made in ethiopia can use a little bit more about it e e where the churches have been carved out of rocks uh and um it was very dark inside this church the priest was accustomed to a lot of tourists taking pictures with flash wanted to put on some sunglasses and I said no I won't use flush so I had to study the camera on a pillar and do a long exposure to get this inside and very little light I think it's very nicely done it has a really nice quality you see the light is coming from the side here backgrounds very dark this's really characteristic of hiss of his faith but the post looks a little bit static you know he's really standing there show he's very aware that your dear I'm not sure what we could do to improve that did you interact hit him it'll did you or were you on yes I mean he was posing for me and other tourist home so I didn't pose him this was gonna pose he n...

ormally struck I think because thie it's it's really nicely done and especially when there's other people around you know you want to be respectful of the man's privacy but I see that there's uneven more interesting images here you know I go to his face I go to this religious symbol here so I think for starters we can probably crop it a little bit as adrian is already doing because this is becoming a little bit incidental we do not want to cut his hand so we go a little bit lower okay something like this and then maybe we want to give a little bit more space to do it right because that is where the light is coming from can you let's see what that does see it begins to get a little bit more intimate so that's what I would do technically speaking I think the exposure is very nicely dumb we might tone down the whites a little bit because they are just a little bit pinched out so we can create a little bit more detail in here but I wouldn't do much so very nice portrait under difficult circumstances so before we go to the next image I would just point out that adobes light room is really d application to embrace when your photographer it's it's quite amazing what they've done in one package or you have a cataloguing program where you can organize all your images you can create a database you khun tak every image with keywords and you can immediately put your images from the library mode where you download um and where you organize them into a development mode if you geo tagged the images there's a map to very you can see where every picture's made you can create impromptu books to slight shells this is the module for printing images and you can publish them directly on the web it's quite amazing there's a lot of bells and whistles some people find it a little bit daunting for starters but there are so many good tutorials of available I imagine that creative life offers courses in life room we certainly do we have many light room and for the shop courses absolutely from some really wonderful instructors a definite check out our library for that yeah so personally I think no photographer should be vidar lied room especially now that apple is abandoning aperture and that was really the only competition in that space so do yourself a favor if you're not using it yet consider it how many of you are using life room actively okay so there's a few more hands to go up the next time we gather here so let's like take a look at the next image so this was made by somebody in the room uh does this look like death valley uh in the jerry list sahara niger okay um and you were der vita that a group of people I just oh god when a friend and then this woman was a friend and um an older gentleman doctor this looks like an amazing landscape on dh you know I like the sense of space I like the sense of serenity um but the what could we do here too yeah could be improved this in any way um yet I'm almost thinking that we could you bring it down a little bit to turn it into mohr of a panorama so we let go of thie thirty five millimeter aspect ratio and just stretch it a bit because there's not that much going on in the sky that really yeah work's velvet a landscape so I think I've had dropped to skied down a little bit more something like that on dh we're not losing anything we're just kind of focusing the interest here on the sand dunes on dh I think that the color can probably improved a little bit because it looks a little flat so we khun perhaps approved you increase the contrast a little bit we can increase the saturation a little bit in the sand dunes let's see what happens there it's a little pink two and it seems like it hasn't the color isn't quite right yeah it was it was definitely not didn't have a smidge minge enter red in there isn't life let's take a look at it there's you know the history graham looks good to see all the you know there's very little that's pinched on the right hand side but uh red highlights are so there's a lot of detail that could be better expressed so I really I invite you to consider this a digital negative on dh just like ansel adams and the other great black and white photographers of that bygone era worked in a dark room you know we work in a digital dark room that r ver that our laptops and yet we do a similar thing um can we see a change commission improvement from that yeah begins to look a little bit better defined and of course you can take this much much further you were there you know what the colors really looked like you were just interpreting after the fact probably disc I can be enhanced a little bit as well and you can work for a long time on this image right I didn't have time to know work on it and the amazing thing is yeah in a matter of a few minutes by just using the sliders here we can make a market improvement and this is light room you're butter using yeah this is all light room so perhaps I can say that you know for references well adobe developed photo shop quite a few years ago and that's become the standard tool full photographers too tweaked their digital images but photo shall became a very complicated application and then the same people who were responsible for photo shop became part of the development team at adobe and they developed their their database cataloging program which includes a development module that is a young greatly simplified version of photo shop so in in our studio where we used to use photo shop all the time we now use light room eighty percent of the time they only take things into photo shop and we really have to do very specialized adjust adjustments in the indie images so it saves a lot of time that's good to know yes so just in terms of space is on that what I love about that is the footprints that you khun barely see leading to the person so I'm just curious about what kind of targeted adjustments you might do because obviously the landscape right gives you such perspective are you suggesting that footprints are eliminated or that their enhanced I guess enhanced I'm thinking I'm curious what you would do though to um I've it I would leave them the way they are I don't particularly need to shed amore profiled you know the person is there we never the person came from I would like to see a little bit more detail expressed here in this area so that your eye can't go all the way to the distance so I said you can work for a long time on this yeah I would like and then the footprints for may depends on what what I use it for because if if I was using it with a group or one ing encouraging somebody too step into life for move forward then the step the footprints would if they were exaggerate are shown more it would uh lead people in maybe yeah I think it's I think it's fine as it is so nicely done and you can see how easy it is to make it even better just have to learn the new software should we take a look at the next one say what do we have here is anyone here in the room yes so you're second image yeah so let's take a look at it let me walk back here so I can appreciate it from a distance the way you're looking at it as well I really liked the symmetry in this seaver breaking the rule of thirds here oh are you broke the rule of thirds and I think that's appropriate for the subject there's a symmetry yeah that issue calls by the perfect reflection here so yeah I think that was the way to do it now could you do anything to make the image even better in terms of composition I don't think so it's made the most of the situation then where could you take it in the development note you could this becomes very subjective because I could argue for making this very graphic and increasing the contrasts that it almost becomes a black and white I could also argue for pulling more details out of the shadowy areas including here and creating a bit more contrast in here see it becomes a very different image as I said it becomes very subjective if we delete a color let's see what happens in works equally well so what do you prefer yourself I couldn't make up my mind when I fiddled with it so I left it as it was shot for you too make suggestions so yeah on bouncing it back to you the one thing I did try as is I increase my darkened the shadows to the point where they were silhouettes and I kind of liked that ah o r I don't know whether I did through the shadows or the contrast I thought about trying to increase the saturation and make it more blue it's a digital negative and you can take it in any direction it's not a specific image it's ah it's a graphic representation so but you could easily do is create virtual copies which is another nice feature in light room so you know you can play that it in one way then you save that copy and the next time you want to play a video in another direction you create a second copy of it no nice thank you so let me look at this from afar then is the maker of this image also in the room so let me guess what this is maybe we can all guess that what this is snow but yeah it it could be yosemite I'm not quite sure um I see a really intricate composition here see the way this river flows in there the snow bank is really nicely profiled here uh this branch curves around very nicely um you know I'm wondering however what happens if we cropped this out there's nothing against your the way it is composed but let's see if it if it gains different character if we crop out the sky a little bit do we like this better no feels pinched okay uh I told you I was going to be subjective right majority rules here that was the one thing that uh then I wanted to try a I often find out then there's a human there's a lot of space in a distance that it takes away from appreciating things that go on in the foreground but in this case will be most of you seem to think that it needs to stay right where it is for the rest I think it's ah it's beautifully expressed I really like the black and mind rendition of this yeah if you start playing with more contrast here than you really lose the subtlety and the scene so had said it's picture perfect toning it down yes you could do a little bit of that but not too much because there's a brightness overall to it if this becomes too great and it doesn't look logical in combination with the snow here but yeah we can probably take it down a little bit good think beautifully done about this one anybody here in the room who recognizes this a photograph I believe I recognise where it was made this is a very special plant that only grows in the hawaiian islands at the slopes off told volcanoes on the big island of hawaii and on the island of maui it's called a silver short it's a gorgeous planted an enormous flowering stalk and it had a curse in his moonscape but there's almost no other vegetation and the photographer did a really nice job here um there's a little bit of flaring in here but that we can feather out in in light room that's a technical detail on what we're seeing here is you know this kind of the star burst in the sum that occurs when you close your aperture all the way can be yeah we see it here f twenty two that's exactly the reason why that starburst is they're so beautifully expressed on dh it looks like the photographer might have used a graduated neutral density filter here you see a very dark line appearing here which is a little bit contradictory because don't on normally there will be more light here in the sky and on this land on this part of the landscape and then you see here so that's actually well done because there's so much contrast that otherwise this part of the frame would be blown out so I'm not sure what else we could do here to improve the composition I see a little bit of sense or dust that is something you want to be really careful with yeah we all have automatic censor cleaning modes on our camera and I I really recommend that you use that regularly but of course after the fact you can spot that out not sure what else we could do here who yeah there's um cider a ufo or something that doesn't belong there let's see what else we can do on no very nice landscape beautifully done and this looks like it could be very close to that silver sword it looks like a humpback whale and I know those uh those occur off the shores of hawaii every winter and this is one breaching it's a classic pose it's a great moment shout that eight hundred of a second on dh which is really the minimum shutter speed you need to capture that motion very crisply and even here in the room recognise this image okay um but look at this I saw one hundred on if I were out there in about because that's where the photographer probably wass yeah I vote if boosted my eyes out of four or five hundred because that would have increased the chances that you actually get it sharp because it's quite unpredictable they come out of the water and they're gone again and they do not pre announce when they're going to do this so eight hundred at five at s o five hundred you could've closed the aperture down to eleven and more chances said you get more sharp frames out of it it's picture perfect I don't know what else tio he could do here on it's beautifully exposed maybe saturated a little bit but then it almost looks overdone nice frame all right how about this frame is a pam I said peg so could you tell us but could you tell us a little bit about it was this in your backyard to visit out on the trip that was taken at the rifle bird sanctuary but you just told me a billion probably the first day or two that I had my one hundred of four hundred uh lands so I didn't know what I was doing okay so ah long glands aperture close down to fourteen um and we've gotta be on the on the flowering there's still here were you by yourself yes okay because if you had somebody with you I would have suggested that you would have handed whoever was with you a reflective it'd defusing panel because that could have really improved the lighting here it looks like it's open sunlight and it just looks a little bit harsh if you put one of these translucent defusing panels between the sun in the subject it would have just become very nice soft lining but obviously you can't hand hold a one hundred four hundred and at the same time you know bring in a defusing panel from the site so it's a really a two person job so when we do these things during our workshops you have the you know we use the buddy system everybody spent some time helping someone else illuminate their images and then betrayed over and you know the yeah the assistant becomes a photographer in the absence of ah ah of more diffused light I am not sure what you could've done better um f fourteen seems like closing down the app mature a little bit much but you did it really well you know there's nothing too distracting in the background but in general but I prefer is to blur the background as much as possible so I probably would have chosen aperture of something like five six or so thank you all right scratch that mike that's telling her how I think you and what could you tell us where you made that image and what the circumstances are so I took this in northern canada churchill manitoba um the sun was setting I just come off of ah beluga whale watching trip and uh this little female red fox was sleeping and a soon as she saw us she got up beyond and then trotted away so five seconds ten seconds of interaction you had one frame not quite like floating with harbour seals and outgoing slew no but but you had your beluga whale encounter earlier in the day I didn't go so well okay so at least you got this this frame right yeah so this is very nice you know it's really clean I love all the color and the texture in the lycans there so it's not just a portrait of that fox it's a it's a landscape with a fox in it um but what if we drop the sky a little bit and we turn it into more of a panorama maybe could we bring it down a little bit more and now that may be a little bit pinching it a little bit much um so when what we think about that do you like that better no no uh uh you want to sky in it huh well yes specifically because the rockets so the rock is so smooth and then I've got that one dip on the left and I don't normally like center composition with her mouth wide open I thought she deserved to be in the center okay and it's the only frame I got so it's okay if you want to keep her right there okay so I told you earlier this is a ll becoming very subjective I personally you know if it were my image I would crop it a little bit and I probably would pinching a little bit from that side as well just to get her out of the center a little bit but so that's the that's the cropping adjustments but uh what I think also cries out to be done is you know for that likened to be expressed a little bit more because that's really gorgeous so you can uh uh increase the saturation a little bit maybe increase the contrast a little bit the exposure's right on the money let me back up what are we thinking do you like this I like it huh so okay we'll leave the fox in the centre want to us how long you were stalking that fox to get that incredible along with his mouth open and now you're running huh so I was coming up this path ese boulders are a good ten fifteen feet high um and we just saw her sleeping in that little dip down and one of aa one of one of my students that I was with saw it and screamed fox fox stopped the car and we all piled out and um assumed she saw she woke up looked at a stretched iand and then trotted away one magic moment you just happened to be that the right spot well tom it's one of these telltale signals that that you could be mindful ofthe that uh certain animals when they begin to young when they begin to stretch that is sometimes an indication that they're going to split that leopard's the rule is after three yawns they come out of the three