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Image Review

I love this dog I think it's hilarious how did you get the dog toe actually like I might have just I don't have a dog with my sister's dog would shake it off like or eat them there's ah rubber band on his head and he's okay with the rubber band not so much that there is a lot of dog treats and peanut butter involved he's hilarious that's ok ok so clearly we are urine light room three okay so I want to explain something with this too that the little exclamation point you see down in the bottom right hand corner next to this picture that tells me you're in light room three because you're using the math from light room three which is two thousand ten and now in light room four they created new math in two thousand twelve and new sliders and all that kind of stuff so live and four has better algorithms and things like that so it creates a cleaner more beautiful picture so light room four is you don't just upgrade because of the bells and whistles you upgrade because they keep increasing th...

e quality of the image as well so I can take this to two thousand twelve or too light room for I could bring it to the future by simply clicking on that exclamation point and all of the information will be updated now once in a while it will change the way the photograph looks so if you love the way your photograph looks and your enlightened for but you adjusted in light from three it's okay you can leave it that way you can still print from here you can do everything you could export it and it still has the math and fact if you look over here in the basic module you'll see that the exposure recovery fill light and blacks that you're used to enlighten three are still there but watch them change as soon as I update himto light room for those things shift and become different now it's exposer contrast highlight shadow whites and blacks but did you see how your image changed yeah right that's because some of the things in light room four are different than things in light room three and so if you've been using the different things it changes him and so that's why if you like the image the way it is you leave it that way don't update it jason don't mass update everything like room for let them be as they are unless you want to update them so what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a snapshot of the way this thing is before and then we will update as needed so right now we'll take a look at it and see what we would have done as for crop I like the crop I think it's great you could probably get a little bit more out of this see how big he is down here it makes his head look small he has a small head he has a small hat so we want to accentuate that because I was thinking you could you could go like this to get a little bit more involved with face unless involved in his torso awkward body yeah his awkward body so that would be my preference is to go for a crop so I would just just come in here and crop a little oops we want a crop if you lock the crop than in a little it'll change see how goes together so the aspect ratio always stays the same so I'm gonna just pull it in like that and that works for me okay so now that we have our crop the way we want it at least the way I want it um I'm going to let's see what I actually want to see what it looked like before okay so pretty close to the same exposure it's just that we added all that stuff to it some undo that get us back now I'm going to update it and let's play around with it a little bit more because I like that with the weird nature of the photograph so I really want to increase the weirdness of the photograph so but first thing we're going to do is take the exposure down so that we get all of that right and I'm going to turn on the highlight exposure warnings so that I can see if I clip something um so I'm gonna take the blacks down all right and I'm going teo you know I really need to increase the clarity of this so I'm gonna I'm gonna increase claire because I want his I want all of this really stand out so any I always bring the clarity up on people with beards to I really want their beards to just you know pop out from an increase that I like kind of the milky nature of this so um if you look at the dark's here see how they're brightening up and so that's creating kind of a softness here the other thing I notice is that you've got some kind of oven yet so let's go down to the effects so you've got a highlight priority vignette going on so if I turned that off see the difference between that and that so you're really you're making this very milky by doing that which I'm fine with I think that's cool but I really think we ought to wait to go really nuts on this and make it weirder all right so let's go a little bit weirder and I'm going to go into a cross process on it so I'm just gonna go find a look on here so let's do like it's really increased the cross process on that notice I've got all these cross processes that I've come up with but I can see them in my navigator so I'm just going and looking for the cross process that I like the most so I'm going to go for something pretty wacky hair like that see I have intensified the greens on the yellows what happens in the cross process those that we get a little bit extra shadows so just bring the blacks up a little bit like that but then what's happening is it's bright here and dark here so I'm also going to make a grady in and I'm just todo es light burn all the way down and watch this is goingto so I'm gonna start here and go and I'm going to keep going and going and going and going and going and going to the bottom so I've actually started a burn here that's one hundred percent and it by here it's nothing but it's burning all the way through the photograph which will help to keep this up here in line and if I start another one on top of that I'm gonna add to it so I'm gonna burn another one so I'm doing you just got to get that they're gonna turn there okay so I grab another one watch see I'm burning over the top of that one and this one I'm only going to go down to about there now do you see how the top on the bottom are a little bit more equal to each other so that pushes us into his face more once we've done that then we can come and say okay now we've done all of the general work that's focus is focusing us in on him now what do we want to do to kind of get him to pop out a little bit more now that's just a matter of grabbing maybe the shadows and brightening him up a little bit see how now he's popping out like like that that's pretty wild and weird and wacky but it's hilarious system that's funny so that's a great I will accentuate weird whenever weird happens so like if I have ah goofy like if I have a groom that's being goofy and looking odd or doing like a supermodel pose or something just for fun I will literally give it across process and I'll just you know ham it up so that looks like something that he's trying to be in a magazine kind of thing so that's a great opportunity to use wacky weird colors and stuff like that when you're trying to go for the laugh and you're trying to go that's funny so so now let's let's look at where it was and I really think that we actually just intensified what you were doing because you are already going for the laugh and so we just kind of intensified the weirdness of it um let's do after on this one hopes not fray after all right so this is before and this is after weii just really and let's turn off the shadow warning because we don't really care of his nostrils have no information you know I mean if you're gonna go crazy go crazy um oh and you know what else you could do this you could my whenever I do a cross process I generally put a film grain on it because film is what you cross process with um so you'll see that but there's no grain here so I can come in and just add some grain to it so I'm just going to add a little extra grain to this so um let's just go to add like sixteen hundred grain there so now you see out when we zoom in it's got this texture to it so now it really feels like a film that the beauty of grain and and this is why add the grain to it if you look up here in these areas a lot of times when you have a really even background like sky or a smooth wall you'll see banding as even on j peg you'll see banding all the time but in raw you'll even see banding as it comes in and you'll see like a stair step happening because it's hard to describe super super subtle changes when you only have a limited number of tones so you see it all the time in a j peg but sometimes you'll see it even in a raw image and if you add grain to it what it does is it it overlays that and breaks up the lines and you won't see the banding anymore so if you have a banding issue that you just can't seem to get rid of just add some grain to it and it'll it'll disappear it's the texture of the photograph that helps toe keep the eye from seeing it so so now this area right here that might have a banning issue will be nice and smooth transition because the I can't follow a line when there's grain breaking it up all right so now let's go to the last one here this is james on we'll go back to the developed module okay the first thing I noticed that james has already put like a post crop vigna on here you see that happening there and there um so you can see these done some work on it the first thing I'm gonna mention about this that to fold first thing is watch this line see that line coming through his head the fact that it ends in this corner and starts in this corner is a little odd it's just it's dividing this photograph directly in half so it feels a little sophomoric so whenever I have a line that's it a diagonal I want that line to hit somewhere away from the edge so for instance this is fine that is not but then when you put the two of them together it just becomes a dividing lines you have a triangle here and you have a triangle here and so it's just really really simple geometry and we want our photographs to have more complicated geometry to them so if I were to crop this image I could change the way that looks by coming like this so now it's a less simple geometry it's a little more complicated and you'll notice that by doing that we've taken him okay um so by doing that we've taken him out of the center of the frame too because when we're here when we're just up here like this he's in the middle of the frame we call that like bullet or target uh composition is just right in the middle um and generally speaking you'll find that grandma always shoots this way do you know why grandma shoots this way your grandma will always put you in the center of the frame unless she's like marrying brooke or someone that said like a great photographer if your if your grandma was just a normal grandma and you give her a snapshot camera she will always put you in the middle and that's because she loves you but see I don't love this guy e right I don't care about him and so I will put him somewhere else not in the middle of the frame the reason people who love you dearly put you in the middle of frame is because there's a little circle in the middle of the frame this has put the person that you love here seriously that's why they do what they think that that's the target to put it over the person's face because that's where they're supposed to go and they on lee or thinking about you and your precious face and how much they love you and any time you're thinking about the person that's in front of you and you're paying attention to him and you're really you know loving that person and okay I have to tell you this story I ty talk college for a long time and I would get these there were women and men that would come to our boys and girls that would come to this class you know so they're eighteen to twenty five ish and they would come and the girls would do a great job taking pictures and whatever the boys whenever they were photographing a girl their composition sucked that's because they were totally thinking about the girl and how hot she wass and they weren't thinking about anything else so they're just stare it was like they had permission to stare at a girl and so they would just stare at the girl through the camera and they didn't pay attention to anything except girl girl you know that's all they were thinking and so they don't get the composition right well that's what grandma's thinking girl are not girl crown was thinking I love you you're so wonderful you're the greatest and they're not thinking about composition and so you get things coming out of heads and whatever so if you think too much about the person in front of you then your composition will suffer so my methodology when I'm photographing anybody including my own children once they're in front of the camera they're objects there nothing different than a stone or a building or a rock or whatever they are the same as whatever else is there so if there's a curtain and then my son it's a curtain and a and a thing an object I love them when the camera's down but as soon as I put the camera up I think about them in the matter of an object how does that object react to the other objects and how do I position that object for maximum effect you have to think of things that way if you want to be a great photographer yeah you're trying to capture moments and stuff but really they're objects that air colliding right that's how you pay attention to composition and so in this case we're paying too much attention to him and not enough attention to his him as an object so we're going to go like that and then suddenly we have a much better frame we don't have that issue of splitting the frame in half and he is now over to the right side of the picture instead of right in the center so solved a lot of issues just by zooming in on it that's the first thing I noticed the next thing that I would do is I would come in here there's a his that here it looks pretty good on this screen but those people out in the audience on online will see that it was a little bit too has a little bit too much green in his skin so I'm going to take the tent up and add a little bit more magenta on it so now the green and his face is gone and he has a much more natural facial tone his his skin tone is correct so that's the first thing I'd do is add a little bit magenta to it the other thing that I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to remove your vin yet because I don't I don't like the way that vineyard is is uh is working so notice over and my presets whenever I design a preset with a vigna I always design a preset that removes live in yet so you do that simply by creating a vignette that zero and then recording it as a pre set so that you have a zero vignette it removes them and yet so I'm going to actually remove that vignette so that we no longer have it's a normal vigna so okay so I've just removed the the post crop vignette from here I can add another vigna and see if it comes up better so like this one that's a little bit better but still it doesn't quite something's weird about it and so let's just remove the vignette um so I I prefer this without a vignette I like the sky the way it is just let it let it burn out here if we hit j we'll see that that's totally overexposed but he's fine he's doing great so the exposure here is great this is just over exposed now let's see what we can recover it is a rye image after all so let's see if we can recover so I'll start with the whites and pull him down and we can see that we're coming a little bit there and we could recover a little bit more by going to the highlights and bam we got the whole sky in there that's the advantage of shooting raw ceo now I've got the shapes that air coming up above those got a lot more shapes now he's a little darker because we've taken out some of that stuff so we can come back in here and just bring up the shadows a bit and that lightens him up but now we've got totally printable whites in here then if we add any grain to this it will help to even make the sky mohr present in the photograph so if I wanna add a little bit of grain to this just not very much just you know like two hundred or something then when we zoom in well actually see that we have let me turn off the shadows and highlights so if we may not be able to see that but let me just add more grain and you'll see that the grain kind of flows into the highlights now the one thing that light room does with grain which is different from it's a plug ins will talk about tomorrow light room has a very specific methodology with grain that it does not put grain in the brightest whites because the brightest whites in film would have been paper and so there would be no grain on the paper and so they followed that methodology to say that if it's white white white white white I'm not gonna put grain and I'm gonna let it slowly transition into the paper the way it would in film if you go to nick's software and do some work there which will talk about tomorrow then you can actually include the grain in the highlights so that you get a better transition there so it's less like film would be but it sometimes helps to make the image a little bit better and have something actually tangible inside those whites so that's that's a good skill to know about the difference between the grain here and light room and the grain in sane iq software so the other thing that I would probably do with this photograph once I've once I've gotten it to the you know the amount of brightness that I want on him then I would probably go in and do a little bit of diy saturation on it and then warm his skin up just a little bit more but otherwise I think it's a nice a nice shot so but the crop I think was the huge thing for that shot and getting rid of that from the vineyard okay so thank you guys those were great yes james did you have a question as on mine when I do just like that you can bid on ranging on bedrest how can I minimize that orange right okay so let's go here and talk about this french first because that is a fringe see that that green fringe so inside of light room for there's different jing in lightning three but the deed fringing and lytton for us far better so if you go into the lens correction area and you go into the sea the color you can remove chromatic aberrations so when I click on it it does a pretty good job see that did you see the difference so there's there's the fringe there and I'm going to remove the chromatic aberrations and it just automatically finds those and remove them so that's pretty good now you're talking about these over here and if I undo that you'll see that there's a bit of a fringe there the green but when I remove it doesn't remove the yellow because the yellow is actually a spill of light over the like it's it's it's the transition between the sky and the and and when you blur an image it softens the transition between the hard building and the sky and so you know what you're dealing with his kind of a blurry a blurry transition between a hard object and soft object and has the color to boot that's transitioning from brown too you know like orangish yellowish sky and so you're not going to get rid of that with different jing if you want to get rid of that then it's time to go into photo shop and remove it there you're just not going to get that larger transition light rooms looking for small fringe is like this it's going to look for hard edges and get rid of those hard lines not the soft ones now if you come across something that you can't quite get rid of like the fringe doesn't seem to go then that's when you use this little color picker and you actually point it at the color you want to remove and when you do that it will more remove that color now it doesn't remove the entire thing here but it will remove the very specific color along that edge again it's always going to be looking for a very specific hardage not some large you know transition so but this is much more acceptable that yellow fringe there is more acceptable than a big green line so removing the crime chromatic aberration is very very useful so whenever you're in a situation where you have someone with a dark shirt and then a sky behind him you probably see a fringe you want to turn on those chromatic aberrations so ok any questions out there since we're always okay uh not really sure troll all had asked what point do the highlights and the shadow sliders become recovery and phil mode as compared in light room three or that's that's a great question and I'll answer it right now but we will talk intensely about tomorrow so you'll notice that back in light room three you had fill light and recovery there two knobs now you have these highlight shadow whites and blacks which are very different knobs on dh everybody freaked out when they change from light room three delight room for and by the way if you're in light room for and you decide that you just can't handle the future and so you want to live in the past you can always go back to the camera calibration and then the process area click on two thousand twelve turn it back to two thousand ten and now lo and behold you have gone back in time so now you are back in two thousand ten happy with your exposure recovery fill light and black knobs and you can live there all day long if you want to live in the past so but we're going into the future's so we're living in the future here and we have highlight shadow white black now the question is what what has what is now recovering and fill light both so your highlights and your whites both actors recovery in their particular areas most of your what you see is recovery in the old software is going to happen during the whites like in that area right there so most of that recovery is gonna happen in this knob okay because it's the hottest one up here but a lot of the times you'll find that most of your problem the brightness is is actually in the highlights and it will pull a big chunk down too and you'll start recovering stuff by pulling down the highlights so most of the time when I when I have a recovery issue that needs to be done usually it means I have to pull the highlights down about halfway and the whites down about halfway if there's a big recovery to be done both of them come down and it helps but you so both of them in their respective field will recover and the same thing with shadows both of them in their respective areas add fill light so it's intelligently just deciding we need to fill this area in uh photography eh a z is wondering it does re sizing in a program as on one maintained pixels after cropping okay so if you're an online software probably there in the old genuine fractals I think it's called it's now called perfect resize used to be genuine fractals now it's called perfect resize um in inside of their software if you're cropping something you're over on the panels it has similar panels like this over in the panels you're telling it I am going to crop here and then you would tell it I want a three hundred dp I at these sizes and what it does then it is actually adds pixels to the photograph and and kind of raises up the file and it does a great job so perfect resize is a fantastic tool so if you have ah file that complaint eleven by fourteen at three hundred d p I and you need it to go upto you know thirty by forty perfect resize is the perfect tool it'll re size that up a fairly large and still maintain a pretty good look without looking all pixelated now that's not to say you could take a four by six image and making a forty by thirty that's not gonna happen without looking like a painting um but I will say this for light room on its own I khun taken image that's you know straight out of my mark three that can print almost sixteen by twenty on its own and I can raise that up from light room teo twenty by twenty four or even a twenty four by thirty without going to anything because I can tell it when I'm exporting I can go into the size here image size and I can just change the long inches are the long side two inches and say I want this to be thirty inches in with at three hundred d p I and as long as I'm not trying to do something heroic and like go from a four by six to a sixteen by twenty it does a pretty good job and I've I've actually compared perfect resize too increasing the size of an image inside of light room just exporting it bigger than it is and as long as I'm just going like one major size up I can't tell the difference if I'm trying to go larger than one size up so if I'm taking a sixteen by twenty two twenty four by thirty I'm fine in light room but if I'm trying to go from like an eleven by fourteen to a thirty by forty I need to go to perfect resized so good question yeah um you noticed them I beg you I had then yes that is a part of my signal to look uh well my van towed signals I'm I'm victor yeah we're doing brain from putting a claim I'm pictures every big toe over their visions I see so if you have a signature style of kind of been yet ing every image that's great I have no problem with that I think that that's an interesting style you know I mean I knew this photographer who was really um who is who is super famous and like the nineteen fifties and forties and he was like in vogue magazine and all this any and he was working as a swedish photographer he was working in paris and uh he was he was doing his own for todd he was working in a photo studio and then he's doing his own photography on his own but he was basically stealing chemicals from his employer by going in and public and working on his own work after hours and he was shooting on square medium format you know hostile blood photographs but he the lens that he his employer would lock up the lenses to the s o he had on ly one lens that was his that he could put onto the enlarger to print this stuff and the lens was the wrong millimeter lens for the type of film use shooting so all of his images had a signature vignette to him not because he wanted it but because he only had the one lens that would always been yet and then he would take his him hey didn't want his employer to know that he was stealing and so then he would he would take his films while they were still wet and hang him over the handlebars on his motorbike and drive home and they would flap in the wind to dry and so then when he came back to print him they had like crap all over him and you know they're scratched and hair and whatever so when he printed these images they were really gritty and they had like vignettes on him and all this kind of stuff and in the end everybody loved his work and they thought he was this avant garde crazy cool photographer and had nothing to do with his intent it just was that's the tools he had he had a bad lens that wasn't right for the film for the enlarger and he was flapping his stuff in the wind on the way home but but sometimes the choices that we make are intentional and other times they're just its equipment we have but it sets the style and I understand that so having a style is very important and you maintain your style so I showed you what I would do to it but if that's your style then you need teo to stick with it and and yeah it's absolutely you need a style and you should stick with your style however be aware and that if you put a vignette on a four by six crop and then someone crops a day by ten they're gonna lose that crop so they might crop off this whole vignette inside and then you would have a half vignette image so you have to closely maintain your image is so ifyou're vignette ing your images like that then it's it's very dangerous to give someone a disk of the pictures and let them print him because they'll goto you know costco or something like that and print an eight by ten and they'll crop it over to the left side and now you'll have half vignettes on this side and the other side no vignette so if you have a signature style that includes a vignette you better maintain real good control over the images so that people aren't printing your image is outside of the scope of the vignette so that's all I would say on that just just be just be aware that people may change the intent of your image if they have access to the printing of the image so any questions out there um there's been a lot of questions about the presets I just want everyone to know that jared's presets are included with the purchase of the course it's not just for the enrollment I think there was some confusion around there okay so well let me let me clear that up further so my presets the comprehensive collection of pre sets for light room are available for purchase at platte store dot com some people are getting them for free because I'm giving them like all of you get a disc and then someone out there in internet land is gonna win one the the other priest sets that we may be talking about like the shuttle pro too those pre sets are settings rather that we don't really call him presets would calm settings so my settings for the shuttle pro too and also for my walk I'm tablet if you purchase the the course they are available for download so that you can use the same settings I'm using but the presets themselves for light room those are our super valuable things they're things that you can create on your own but they are on sale for fifty percent off by the way if you use the code and the code is uh uh live d for december two thousand twelve so it's I think I think that's what the code is I think we'd have to pull that up why don't we have some pull up that slide so that people have access to that code because it is fifty percent off on the web site if you go on purchase um between now and december okay we'll get we'll get the code to everyone out there definitely good clarification okay thank you for that um I just have a question here from tim our athens how do you make precepts that are cumulative versus hard settings it's a good question um you can't um what you can dio is you khun you can accumulate settings over like you khun if this slider is the only thing using a preset and then this sliders in a different preset you khun add them to each other but the important thing to understand about a preset is that when you push it it's changing the the exact positioning of a slider or ten sliders and so if you have a pre set that changes ten sliders and then another preset that changes the same ten sliders to something else it will overwrite those settings the way I designed presets is very different than most people I designed them very specifically so that when I'm looking at an image let's say I'm I'm doing james's image once I normalized the image then I would go in and say I want it to be black and white so it changes to black and white and then I also wanted to have see few with aged paper and then I also want to add a little bit of extra grain to it so I would do that and then I also want to add a a little bit extra tone curve to it and I also want to add a finn yet because we want to maintain james's style so we add the vignette to it but notice how they're cumulative but that's because I'm every time I design a preset it's designed so that it doesn't overwrite other things but if I were to choose a different than yet it would overwrite that then yet because they are the same slider that it's affecting so that's a different vigna than the heavy edge burn which is that effect or I can remove that like that so just just for you because it's your style I'm keeping that actually looks really good I like that let's keep that okay good um I wanted teo I wanted to talk then about some exercises that you khun due to become a better photographer and the one that I alluded to before is not shooting and I'm gonna tell you a story okay so story time so get tucked in your bed and I'm gonna tell you a story when I was in graduate school I was the type of student who didn't like duo to class and I didn't like to take classes um which is why I am a photography major instead of a math major or something like that but I was so much the classes that I would have I would generally do as independent studies so almost every class that I took when I was in college was an independent study especially after I got past like three hundred levels and I would just kind of move in and out of different professors classes that I liked and I would take them on an independent basis and one of the professors I had his name was eric kron and gold and he was this really cool hippie kind of guy like you had the long tail you know ponytail gray hair but long pony to eli's older gentlemen and I just really really liked him he was a great guy and he was a really interesting artistic photographer very artsy stuff like nothing he shot was normal it was very artsy stuff and like he would never have taken portrait's of people he takes weird pictures and he actually built an entire um thing that exposes its like before photoshopped existed eric chronicled was doing photo shop and I looked at this stuff and I thought what what what did you do in photoshopped to make this because I didn't make that photo shop he had pieces of glass and he would sandwich negatives or things even three dimensional objects into photographs because he would have these like twelve layers of glass and then it's his camera was mounted here and he would shoot through the glass and he could like each individual pane of glass differently so he's making things that I looked at this stuff and I thought for sure he was using photo shop was looking and thinking I don't even know I mean I would because it's time it was photoshopped like two or something like that we didn't even have layers and photo shop and he had layers and so I was trying to figure out how he's doing the stuff he was doing and I said what do you how are you doing this he took me to his house and it's this huge contraption is bigas a room to take these pictures so amazing stuff but a very artsy anyway so I'm sitting in his room and I told them in confidence I said I don't want to shoot anymore I'm bored tired of shooting I'm burned out and he said good don't shoot he says I do not want you to take one picture put your camera down and don't take a picture and I only want you to take a picture when you have to so you wait until you have to take a picture until you're driven to take a picture you wait until that moment and then take it and we went through an entire semester and I didn't take one picture I was in a photo class didn't take one photograph for six months well formed four and a half months and we just we met once a week and we talked about religion and politics and what we had for lunch and we talked about you know just whatever we want to talk about for an hour we'd just talk and then I go away and I wouldn't shoot and I wouldn't do anything for the class and then I would come back and we talk again and I thought this is the coolest class planet right on I got an a in the class because I showed up to talk all right so it was like a couch session or something well in the end when I picked up my camera I was a better photographer now ask me why that's true because being a photographer has nothing to do with taking pictures being a photographer has something to do with being curious about life and so when I had to take up that picture when I grabbed that cameron I felt like I had to take a picture I was a better photographer because I had something to say because I have been talking about religion and politics he had been training me internally in those conversations in conversation about things and he had been asking me to divulge things that I normally wouldn't talk about and so as I came back to photography I was better because I had something to say when I took the picture so your composition is one thing but what you have to say is more important and so I realized that if you were a photographer who makes money you can't just put down your camera and not take a picture I realize that but you could go with your family to disneyland and leave the camera home don't even take an iphone picture just enjoy the kids just do something fun right go go somewhere with your wife and I and I learned this lesson again the hard way when I was in italy with my wife we were taken were running around these amazing places and I kept taking pictures and my wife at one point said look you've got to be on vacation with me too and so we literally left the camera home and I didn't take a picture and it was art I mean I was in sienna which is an amazing place and I was walking by things that I have never seen before and I was like I got to take but I didn't so I was able to divorce myself and just enjoy life for a bit and when I got back to taking pictures the next day or two days later it was more fun is because I had experienced life without the camera and so sometimes you is a photographer have to take the time away from the camera and do something that you would normally and I'm not talking about going to dinner I'm talking about do something that you would normally take a camera don't take the camera and just experience what your client experiences when you're shooting them experience life and when you come back to the camera you will be better at taking pictures of people because you will have actually lived a life because right now you don't live a life because you're a photographer you sit and watch other people live life and sometimes you've got to experience life and that we have this weird sick drivers photographers toe always capture every bit of life on behalf of us go to dinner and we have to take a picture of our food we don't eat it we take a picture of it that's crazy just leave the camera home and go do something without taking pictures of it for once and see what it's like and I can guarantee you once you've done that you'll find that you have something better to say because you've experienced the other end so that's that's a tip for becoming a better photographer and it means putting down the camera so another test that you can do is to just choose one lens on walk away with that letter and don't choose a zoom lens because that's a lot of lenses together she was one lens take a fifty millimeter and go travel with it literally I went to china with two lenses eighty five and fifty that's all I had that's what I shot with okay that was good and it was fun we had a great time so actually no I think it was the fifty and a hundred anyway I had two lenses that's all I had a longer and assure that was it and I had to choose a lens and then I had to walk in to the place I wanted the picture if I had a mountain over there and I wanted to closer guess what I had to do at a hike and I've got some exercise in the process it was good but the even better thing is that when you hike in to take a picture of the mountain on your way you might find a little road or ah an interesting piece of equipment that you want to take a picture or a person who's doing something interesting or as you're writing in to take a picture of that mountain because you can't get it from a zoom lens from the road you're going toe wander upon a group of people playing a weird card game that you've never seen and so I spent twenty minutes watching these chinese guys play a card game and I have no idea what they were doing but it's fascinating they have these little wood chips that they were betting with and like it was it was weird and then I also found this guy that was like it looked like he was riding on a ledger you know and he was this old bearded man with this long beard you know I can't show you the picture but long beard and and he's he's riding on his tablets and stuff and it was great I got in close and got to photograph him but I couldn't photograph from from a long distance either because I didn't have a long lens so I had to actually try and talk to them which they couldn't understand me I couldn't understand them but the act of choosing a lens before you go and and committing to it means that you as a photographer will change during the course of your photographs because you've forcing yourself to go out into a different place and to find new things and to get in close to people and get to know them and enjoy them that's that's what photography is it's about the subject and so just having a fifty millimeter lens will change the way you experience your photographic process and that will change who you are so there's a lot of little things like that that you could do that or very simple that you can practice in your head while you are just doing normal things so uh on the download on the pdf download I have a couple other tips like that just things that you could do they're just normal and easy to do that will change the way you shoot yeah I just want to bring the chat room in in here they love their contribution as well and they're absolutely loving what you're saying I think they're getting a lot of inspiration from this I just want to read a couple of things that people have said mike huff star stutler says I'm traveling next week and we'll only carry one body and a thirty five one point four and he said that is my absolute favorite tip to give anyone including myself and also I just think people are really really appreciating this at photographic l says prime lens equals manual zoom with feet yes which I love right foot zoom I think symbol and says I have one hundred millimetre macro my cam right now and I haven't taken it off been trying that out so that's great people are really and that's the way to do it I mean your composition gets better but you really do experience life differently because you you have to move to the subject and I can't tell you how many times I have left the road and gone in to take a picture of a barn or whatever I saw and on the way I stumbled upon the thing that I was posted photograph it's like the universe has a photograph for you but if you're lazy and you stay at the road you don't get it it's the photograph of the bar that I saw from the road that's somebody or something telling me there's a picture they're stopping me but they're not just handing it to me at the end of the road there's something else out there and if I go to get it I'll tell you another story I was I was taking a class and my professor I I have been in a church meeting so I had like a suit and tie and and nice shoes on you know and I and I was driving by I saw this beautiful sunset in this barn and this little pond and stopped and I ran to the edge of the fence and I composed it and got this picture and then I put out an a slide film so we had it up on the slide you know on the slide projector and he said that's a nice shot but it would have been better if you had been you know like ten yards in and you would have gotten closer to the bottom you know get like into that lake so that you have the lake kind of comes up to the edge of the frame and whatever and I said I had my suit and tie on that was money I would have I would have sunk down to my knees and he goes well if you're not going to try what are you even in this class for if you're not going to be interested in taking good pictures and he just through the slot like I'm done he was he was angry with me because I wasn't willing to get dirty for the photograph I can clean a suit but I can't get that shot again so it's a matter of moving in because somewhere in there there's a photograph to be taken but you've got to pay the price to get it and it's never the first photograph it's never the thing that captures your attention that's perfect it's the thing beyond that uh other questions air anything out there or should we move um comment here which I I may have lost but basically someone had said that you're their hero okay how about a little bit of inspiration for the internet um asia is wondering what do you recommend for someone who stays home a lot and is in a rut question um if you stay home a lot and you're in a rut I would say that these are the most inspiring things that you can run across these little kids so if you have children they're the most inspiring things you can run across and I'm not talking about just photographing them I'm talking about living with them and doing things with him and and really especially if they're young and talking to him and they come up with the weirdest things so my wife sent me a message and um my older son was saying that he hadn't seen one of his friends fathers he's like this friend of mine I've never seen his father why haven't I seen his father does he not have one and my my wife tells him told him no I think he works at night and sleeps during the day so you never see him because he works at night sleeps a day and my younger son says he's nocturnal like he's apparently has just learned about what nocturnal animals are those I mean that's funny s so if you really talk to children and you mean if you're home and that's what you're doing talk to your children and write down the weird funny little things they say and then take that as inspiration for things that you could shoot because they will come up with things that are fresh and new and new perspectives that you would never come up with another thing that you can do and I love doing this is take your children out to photograph with you and let them do the photographing you hold the camera so that the way is taken off and let them photograph and they will do some very interesting things they'll photograph things that you would never think of and once you see them photograph you might then take that perspective and say okay now I know what it's it's like to be a child and what they're interested in let me see if I can actually photograph that in a real way see it from their eyes but you gotta let them experience and let them do the photographs first we'll give him a snapshot cameron have them go with you to shoot you know so these are things that you could do with if you're if you're a mom at home and that's what that's what you do and you're always at home and you're kind of in a rut hand handsome of that creative juice over to your kids and let them lead you and I think you'll find that you'll you'll get a new perspective on the way you shoot and try and take what they shoe on their little snapshot camera and reproduce it in a really great way in a professional way that's a great thing to do like trying to see something else another thing that you can do if you're in a rut and you're home a lot go to the go to the bookstore and buy a book that is completely opposite photography of you so if you do children's and weddings and stuff like that go by some kind of like aa book on on a tabletop photography or or by a by a photographic book of like history or go go get a book of like world war two photographs or something like that like find something that's completely opposite of you if you do love find war photographs you know go office it and take those home and look at those and appreciate them for what they are and ask yourself what they did right and how you could take that war photograph and turn it into a photograph of an engagement session and I'm not talking about you know how the bloody up the people or whatever but what is it about the composition and the lens choices and the things that the photographer did to make an amazing stunning image how could that be then translated into your world yeah I can't remember the speaker but um I said w p p I once and he talked a lot about um classical art and how important it is to take time to study art on look at the compositions and lessons and I that totally changed my photography and I don't know that I spend enough time doing it I mean I get real busy and everyday life but I mean if you have time and you're in a rut just studying some of the master masterworks you know it's just a means well and look for opportunities to study things that aren't you so if you're if you're a photographer don't study photography study sculpture now yeah I'm talking about painting do really different and what you do I don't I actually don't look at wedding photography I don't I mean there are a lot of great people out there that I really think do great work and when they show me their work I will look at it but I don't I don't stop people's blog's I don't look at other people's wedding photography because I don't want to steal it and so I'm a lot of musicians who this way they won't listen to their genre so if you do jazz you'll listen to classical or you'll listen to blues or whatever and so a lot of musicians won't listen to the type of music that they create because they want to take their influences from elsewhere and bring them in and they're also afraid that they'll steal without knowing it because you can hear stuff and then also in you'll be singing a tune you think you made it but it's not it's someone else's tune and so I kind of followed the same uh methodology and that is I look at things like historical photography I look at basically anything before nineteen twenty is where I get my inspiration photographically because I I refused to look at modern stuff because I don't want to be influenced by it I would rather do my own thing and so that's not to say you shouldn't look at other wedding photographers to try and learn how to do it I think they're great inspiration for understanding lighting techniques or posing techniques or something like that but don't get so ingrained and looking at other people's work in trying to copy it learn how to do things but then look for inspiration somewhere else whether it's paintings or sculpture or even movies are great I love watching movies because it's so influential on my work also across art forms I'm a writer as well and there's a great it's a little box called a writer's retreat or writers or take the box and it's a siri's of cards that have writing prompts on the back meaning it's just two or three words like someone is calling your name or painting yourself into a corner or things like that that are used by writers to get ideas but they're also very visual so it's a great wading pool of those cards out in the morning or you can look up online just look up writing prompts and you get a little sentence and then you could assign that sentence as what you will focus on and and let your mind just go with that and shoot something based on a little piece of language or your favorite poet like sharon old this a fantastic writer very visual so cross about forms is fun too that's right and you add to that um reading is a great way to come up with ideas I mean I read all sorts of books and I'm always playing in my head while I'm reading the book I'm I'm seeing it visually and so take scenes from your books and try and make those into photographs and try and describe things with photographs that they're describing in in text but but more and more importantly reading means you're doing something outside of your visual field and so you've gotta have something in here you gotta have something in your head that you care about and you've gotta have ideas in your head for your photographs to be of value otherwise they're just pictures of random objects there's nothing in them so we need ideas in the head and those will in translate into beautiful images I have the revenge you off um and this is no work I think you know better than me at times and that we loved and done get me and you know what and against them to get the grappa guess well vogel is better than mine bam I mean how do you come back fast you don't you go with it because guess what there are so many people that are better than me so many people and I'm friends with a lot of them and there's such fantastic photographers and there's so much better than me but guess what I'm faster than they are you know I'm saying like that I have certain qualities and I have the ability to get something done quickly and I have ability to get good images I like my images I think they're fantastic on the people that I shoot for like my images so that's enough for me that I'm willing to let someone else be a better photographer as long as I'm as good as I want to be right now and I'm continually increasing what ideo making it better so as long as I'm in bear this is my rule as long as I'm embarrassed by what I did two years ago I'm improving enough okay so when you look two years back if you're not embarrassed that's when you should worry about it but if you look back and you say you know last year I was really poor but I'm much better this year that's all you need to worry about because you're on the right trajectory up that's what you need to worry about yeah they're always be someone better than you always I guarantee it even the people at the top there's someone better than them and in the end the very best photographer in the world can't compete with what god already made so it doesn't matter there's always someone better don't worry about that just be better this year than you were last year and that's enough so what I'd like to do is I'd like to talk about some imagery and why what I was thinking when I make them and then why they became what they became okay so let's just go in and talk about several images um so like let's start with this image so this image was actually shot on film so it's not a raw image it's film on guy shot it um because simply because of this every time I see clouds you just think god is speaking right it's like uh you know and you've angels or coming down or whatever and so anytime I see something like that I immediately go to the idea of the vanity or something like that but but more importantly without this the image would be a really bland image it wouldn't be all that interesting without this one element and what I've learned about photography at least in my estimation is that they're always has to be a subject otherwise it becomes a very boring photograph and if you look at ansel adams he shoots pictures of some amazing landscape but if you look at the pictures there is still a subject and too many people go to a landscape and take a picture of a beautiful landscape and it's beautiful but there's nothing of interest and so it's it's literally wallpaper there's gotta be a subject so this becomes the subject if you go here this is a nice landscape but that's the subject so if you go here this is a really beautiful lane but the lanes of no interest until you put a subject in it soon as you if I take the subject out of there the lane is just a lane and it's kind of boring and so we put the subject in it now on this photograph particularly when I was photographing it's very fall colors so I walk into a certain circumstance where I have you know reds and yellows and whatever and they're and they're all these falling leaves and the and the yellows are really kind of muted yellows and but then she's got these nice big red boots on and so this image had to be changed from the normal color that it would have had to this color because I need these red boots to be the same color tones is all of these so we mute the color and warm up the underlying color and that gives us this this kind of half color tone you can also see that she's got like little moretz and her hair and those of the right red color and so I want everything to be muted because I don't want her to stand out too much so full color image on this doesn't work it's got to be uh an image that she's gotta fit in it otherwise she stands out too much um so uh when I when I'm doing something that's full color so like here here's a great example of using color to your advantage because now you've got this color here that's really vibrant beautiful and it comes around her neck but then it's contrast id to the softness of her skin and the softness of the hair and so so then we leave this in a in a much more full color but notice it's still a little muted still a muted read because I don't want to overtake the image so when I'm when I'm looking at an image like for instance this image this is a color image but it was changed to black and white and the reason has changed a black and white is that the variations in color between a kind of brownish horse and a kind of greenish background the colors aren't important anymore you can barely see him anyway so what we really want to do is we want to accentuate the fact that there's all this white snow and that the trees are obscured and quite frankly if you see the trees green then they are they're less obscured so we could even go to this image and take a look at it in color so if we just reset the image really is that a great image now even if we were to take this image and you know get the snow bright the way it is and then bring them it's still not as beautiful as it was when it was black and white and the reason it's not as beautiful is that this is all about shapes it's all about the comparison between this dark horse and then all of this lightness around the horse so so when you're looking at an image you gotta look at the image from a pre visualization standpoint so for instance ansel adams when he would take a picture out you know he set up his tripod and look at the picture and he would pre visualize in his head how he wanted things to look I want this to be bride I want this to be dark I want this to be you know in the foreground and he would pre visualize that and he would photograph for that and then he would come home and he would develop for that and print for that so he already knew what his image was gonna look like from the beginning when he took the picture so that by the time he got there he had the right information beforehand so I'm doing that as well when I'm at the camera I'm thinking about images and a lot of people say oh well I shoot pictures and I look at them and I I study them for the book you know and I plan out the story in my head and I need this picture in that picture and that's great someone who's telling a story and it's all about the album um it's important to keep that in your head and I've got that in my head generally speaking in the back of my head I need a couple verticals and horizontal tze and I need something of them getting ready and I didn't you know this moment in that moment I got that in my head what what I am interested in is that particular image in this particular image is this going to be a black and white is this going to be a color is this do I want to meet this person and I want them to blend into the background or do I want them to pop because a lot of the decisions I make at the camera are very critical to that we've already talked about lighting right lighting is very critical if you want the person to stand out and pop and you want them to be vibrant than you've got to light them in a different way than if you want them to blend in to the background and so a lot of the decisions you make it the camera very critical to the way the final image turns out so I'm always thinking how is this image going toe look later when I'm printing it so when I'm looking at this horse I'm not looking at beautiful colors or anything like that so I immediately say this is a black and white image and if you think that way in your head then you will make better images because you already have a pre planned purpose for the image sometimes you grab a snapshot you just grab something that's you know you're walking through like here this image I love this image I have this hanging on my wall in my own house I just this isn't uh in hong kong and I'm walking through the streets and I just see this building and it's just a weird building and so I take a picture of it but I had no idea in my head what was going to really become of the image I was just snapping things that I saw that were weird and different and strange and so I get home and I see how amazingly green these tiles are you know how much uh uh contrast there is and all that and then I realize that there's someone up in one of the windows looking out do you see him there's someone in there looking out the window and it's creeping me out so now I've got this person looking out at me and and every time I walk past the photograph it's creepy you know no I'm not going to show it to you there's someone in there and he's staring out right and he's kind of obscurities hyatt yeah I don't know if he's looking out but it certainly looks like he's looking out so there's this person in there and you really have to get into the print to find him but it's but it's an experience so sometimes you don't know what you have until you get home but the beauty of our experiences that photographs don't happen at the photograph photographs happen through the process so your process of being a photographer doesn't start and end at the camera it starts when you start reading books and looking at paintings and talking to your professors and having experiences with your kids or whatever that's where it starts it's and that's what installs the information in your head and then when you come from the information in your head to the camera that changes the way you shoot and then when you shoot that changes the types of things you see when you're selecting and when you select that changes the type of things that you'd get to adjust and when you adjust it changes the initial picture that you shot a long time ago and that initial picture that you shot a long time ago is adjusted by the things that you installed your head before you photographed and the way you think and the fact that you're creeped out by some guy staring out of the window right so so all of those things encompass the act of taking a picture so does it matter what you do with an image in light room absolutely at mass others it matters how you do it and what you see in the image but hopefully the entire process is one thing you and uh you know I taught a whole three day workshop on editing images quickly and getting through him but one of the big points in there is that we need to find a way to treat every aspect of photography the same so when you're shooting you need to be thinking about the image and how it will finally be adjusted and when you're selecting you need to think of of selecting as the same processes shooting and treated the same and do the same type of activities so for instance one of the things if you want to select faster is that you on ly select images by positive selection not my rejection so if someone at someone out there is rejecting images while you're you're going through the cooling process you're doing it the wrong way you pick so I don't ever use the ex keyed to reject I used the pic key the peaky to pick him and the reason that we do that is because we want to be selecting in a positive way not only does it make us feel better about ourselves I mean you notice yesterday when we were selecting images with our model we only picked images we didn't reject them we just looked for the ones that jumped out at us and those loans we grabbed well that's the way you photograph when you're photographing you don't reject things you pick them you look for something that you find interesting and then you take a picture of it you're picking by positive selection so now you need to translate that into the way that you select the images by positive selection so when I come down and we didn't shoot a lot of images this morning of our couple but when I when I look at a set of images say you know this set of images and I and I and I browse through them I'm just looking for this one because that one pops out so I pick it and the rest of these air unimportant and so I move on to the next set of images and so I highlight all of these and I say okay well which ones of these air interesting well I like this one and I pick it now some of them sometimes you'll run into something like I like this image here I don't know if how his face looks let's just kind of go in there and make sure it's fine I like this image but it doesn't look like anything right now does it it's not all that interesting right now but let's go into the develop module and let's just look at this one image and there's something to be said for being able to see remember I'm asking you when you're shooting the picture toe have some kind of idea of what you're going to do with it in the end right but when you get to the selection process you should also be thinking that so when you see a picture that's not so great right now you should be able to think beyond that and say what is the possibilities in your head you should be coming up with possibilities for it so in my head I'm interested in this is a black and white I'm interested in brightening it up here I know that it's I mean I don't have to think I already when I selected and I know how I wanted to look in my head I don't have to come in here and fuss around and make three or four decision options and I just wanted to be a beautiful black and white with really rich lines over here and I just need to cross a crop it so that I get them nice and straight there on dh oh you know I'm also going to crop it here I don't like that little line down there so I'm gonna bring it up like that on pull it over like that and I'm done but I I I see what I want out of it when I'm shooting it but if I come across something that I didn't anticipate when I select it I need to start thinking in my head what do I want to do with that momentarily said oh that's that would be a great black and white keep it even though it's under exposed or it it's not quite the right colors or whatever keep it because you you've got the underlying structure that you want now it's a matter of you getting to go in and kind of I call it polishing turds but you you know you can you can take something that's not all that great and make it look good so you need to be able to see beyond what is to the possibilities which is the same thing that you have to be able to do when you're photographing right I mean there's plenty of times you go out and you go to photograph something and there's nothing out there well guess what you're paid to make something out of it so here's the adage there are no boring places just boring photographers okay so if your if your images are boring it's not because you're in a boring spot you don't need to go to italy to take great pictures you can make some pretty cool pictures at your house in your backyard even if you just have block wall and cactus in your backyard you can still make something interesting there so another great activity is to just take three photographers and have one go out in your backyard and take some pictures and then have the excellent come and then and then he comes in yes close the blinds while you do this and send the next one out and have them take pictures and come in and then the next one goes out comes in and then you look at the pictures and see who wins and you'll find that every person that went out into your backyard went out to a completely different backyard because they'll see your backyard differently and they'll be interested in different things so pre visualization is very important to the entire photographic process and it starts reading those books and doing interesting things with your life so that you've got something to say and that only ends after you've adjusted the image and after you've presented it to the client and by the way speaking of live books the reason I chose live books from the beginning to be my website designers is because they you know that photograph is king they're not trying to put schmaltz around it and make you think it's all about the photograph and to me that's the most important thing and so I don't want something around my photograph to take away from my photograph so I mount my photographs in white matte board with a normal frame I don't do any kind of blue mats and you know mats with swirly things on and I just don't do that because to me the photograph is king and I want to present my photograph that way so all right can we answer some questions on the tail end of today and then tomorrow we will get into light room we'll go into all of these every setting that's inside the develop module get into that we'll talk about all the things we could do choosing the right tools for the right the right things that we want to do and then we'll go in a photo shop and then we'll do some of the work of the audience out there on the internet and then at the end of the day we're going to show you how far you really can go in light room we'll do some really tricky stuff on some pretty difficult images okay manny clicks from massachusetts is asking well digital images ever approached the certain something beauty film images have and me personally I'm wondering about your pre sets I know you have some film grain presets is that doesn't achieve the same quality as film yes currently with digital help those images that I shoot I could put a print of a film and print of a digital together and you would always choose the digital so that certain something can be mimicked effectively in digital and we'll talk a lot about that tomorrow especially with nick plug ins and stuff we can really make them look exactly like film and so as long as we have a really good capture we can do a lot to a to an image to make it look and feel just like that film so I think we're there at that we at this point we're there when you combine a camera and the digital light room um and and some plug ins and stuff were to the point where imagery looks as good and has the same quality of film s o I think we're at that point now and it will only continue to get better because now we'll start to get more latitude involved and there's a lot of the cameras the forty thousand dollars digital backs have latitude that's as good as film so even digitally speaking when we take a picture we can get the quality of film now I think there's very little doubt in my mind about that so it's really hard to go back and ask technical questions when we've kind of been ending on this big picture note so I'm just going to stick with the big picture questions everybody doesn't mind okay there's lots of there's tons of techno toe technical tomorrow okay tons of it okay so all morning long its technical and then all afternoon well first thing in the afternoon it's another review and then its technical and so we got more technical to come so we can do those two it's hard for me to talk about focus points when we've gone so into the philosophical okay this question is from rez forty two o who asked what some advice for a portrait photographer that shoots all day every day and is completely burned out yeah I hear you um so I shot um a lot of weddings one year and I was burned out on weddings and so what we did while we were shooting those weddings is that we had contests between the photographers and so we would we would especially during the reception's they're just boring and so we would kind of converge and then we would set our watches and say okay you've got ten minutes to get an interesting either super funny picture or we would assign like a beautiful picture or something out of the ordinary or whatever like some odd angle or whatever and we would just go to town and try and get the best and then we'd all converge and show the back of our screen for the best photograph and that's how we would kind of step up and do something fun while we're doing something that we did all the time and so that's one thing that you can do but obviously when you're doing portrait every day all day they just they get to be the same over and over and I think that's when you start adding something new to your repertoire so you say you know what I'm going to start offering a new new portrait opportunity for people and let's do something completely different than what I'm doing so find something that scares you that you think you could never do is a portrait or something that no one would ever pay for because too expensive or whatever and then take a couple of your portrait clients and say hey I'm offering this new portrait line of whatever whether it's you know we do something crazy and fun or we do something you know that's old school or something that you just don't do and sell a couple clients on that or just find a couple people that are willing to do something different and go do something different and take a chance because in the end if you do the same thing every day all day you've got to find something to break up the monotony and sometimes that's just a cz muchas doing a personal project so I have a ongoing personal project and and and that ongoing personal project is I go home to my home town of st john's arizona and this is the smallest little town it's like it is surrounded by farm and ranch land and it's and I grew up there and I worked on my grandfather's ranch and you know it was like slave labour out there on his on his ranch and and uh but I was it's an interesting place it's a small little town it's the town that barely got a stoplight when I left aft so and it has a stop light now on lee at lunchtime during school otherwise it's just a blinking caution light or something so it's a very small town and I go back there and I just I don't even visit anyone when I go back there I just drive into town and I drive around and I wait for something to come out and strike my interest and the thing about me is I have a horrible memory I can't remember anything from my childhood I don't remember half the people I knew and I don't remember anything about these places so I just drive around the town and something strikes me and so I stop and I take pictures of it and then I have to go home to my mom and say why do I think this is interesting what is it about this photograph and she'll go oh you and your dad used to go visit an old lady that lived up in that top floor of that house and so I'm learning stuff about my childhood and about what I did when I was a kid by going and taking pictures of things that I have no idea why they strike my interest but they do there's something about this thing or that thing that strikes my interest and I take the picture and I do it in an interesting way and trying to do something interesting with it artistically as well but I mean that's out out that I don't do that professionally and I just do this on occasion I'll just drive through town and do it for like two hours and then I'll be on my way to somewhere else and I'll just go and it's an interesting activity I've learned so much about who I used to be and what I did and I've learned I've gotten some memories back from just taking pictures of things that I have no idea what they mean to me and so but yet that my mom who under remembers the stuff in orderto make it happen so anyway that I think that's the way to get out of ruts his personal projects or finding something that you're afraid of doing and doing it you really think that school there was a guy in the chat room named phil g who right before you started talking about personal projects asked can you talk about some personal projects that you like to do and how do you keep it fresh so there you go that's my ongoing personal project that I do all the time like it's just constant I go back to a little bit more and go back to a little bit more in fact I got to show you now this is um uh I do okay so this is this is one of my images from st john's this is this is the tree in the middle of the road as you come up to st john's the road looks just right so that when you're driving up you think you're going to run into the tree but it's really just on the edge of the road and that's how we as kids knew we were going to be home is that tree so we because there's lots of hills that you go over and we could never tell which tree was wit are which hill was which but when we saw the tree in the middle of the road we knew we were almost home and so that's why that tree was you know struck my fancy and I took a picture of it but that's the tree in the middle of the road um let me see there's another picture I wanted to show you just of um oh it's down here that's why hold on where is it question well yes please ask question while I'm finding it just that was such a beautiful image and I was just wondering if you if you shoot for publication or if you if what your thoughts are our own stock um either shooting for stock or submitting your work for stuff that you've already shot that's not specific to a wedding or whatever what what do you think about that um I I love the idea of stock photography thing's fantastic um if you have imagery that you can use I say use it and sell it for stock it's a great sideline I it's hard to make it as a stock photographer I know people who do it and it's tough because it's cutthroat business now used to be that stock photography paid quite a bit but now because of getty images and all these other there's just it's a commodity now but it's fun a lot a lot of people will go out and so I know commercial photographers who will do an entire siri's for stock and they just choose a topic hire a couple models and go out and shoot something interesting and throw it up for stock and it's a great way that's a great way to do something different make a personal project of it and say you know what can I do with this let's and pick something that you want to do like back to school or something and then get a couple kids together and and tell the moms look if you'll let if you'll all sign a release I'll give you prince and whatever and let's just do a back to school whatever and get kids with books and get kids you know running around on playgrounds and stuff and make stock photography fun full day of photography and the parents get lots of pictures and you have stuff that you can sell it's a great way to do things make stock photography of your own kids you know put him up there I think that's a great way to do it I've never really gotten into stock photography but I think it's a good option on dh as you get more and more imagery that you have releases for and you get but the key is you gotta be organized if you're not organized don't get into stock photography because you've got to be organized enough to know which images you can sell in which you can't so for instance you can come in and you can tell this image you can actually sign it and say I do have a model release so that in light room you could search for show me all the images that I have light uh model releases for and then you can see them those are the ones you can sell those are the ones I can use on creative life I can't use the other ones