Photo insights October '14

Jim Zuckerman’s

PH OTO I N S I G HTS September 2014

• Digital spotlight • Stock photography • Energy saving bulbs • Macro flash • Post-processing course • Student showcase • Photo tours

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4. Digital spot light 10. Stock photography 17. Energy saving bulbs 19. Macro flash 21. Online photo course 22. Whats wrong with this picture?

24. Short and sweet 26. Ask Jim 29. Student showcase 33. Back issues

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On the cover: White rhino, Namibia.

This page: A juvenile giraffe at the Giraffe Manor, Kenya, taken with a wide angle lens.

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hen I suggest to students that they use small lens apertures for complete depth of field, sometimes I’m asked to explain my rationale since small lens apertures like f/22 and f/32 are not as sharp as f/8, especially at the edges of the frame. The sharpest lens apertures are those that are one or two f/stops down from wide open. I know that. But if you want depth of field, f/5.6 or f/8 is not going to give it to you except if you’re using an ultra wide angle lens (like a 14mm) and -- this is important -- if the foreground elements are not within five feet of the lens.

Photography has limitations. The laws of optics, manufacturing constraints, and the way light behaves puts restrictions on what we want versus what we can achieve.

Therefore, we have to work within the parameters of what photography allows. Ansel Adams was in the “F/64 club” because he knew that in order to show detail throughout his landscapes, the smallest aperture had to be used (f/64 on a view camera is approximately equivalent to f/32 in the 35mm digital format).

The only way to use f/8 and have complete depth of field is with the technique of focus stacking. This can only be done with a subject that’s not moving. I will discuss this technique in the next issue of Photo Insights. photos@jimzuckerman.com www.jimzuckerman.com

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Digital Spot L ight

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tudio lighting techniques have been around for a long time. Since the digital revolution, there is a new twist: Some lighting techniques can be created in Photoshop without ever stepping into a studio.

One such technique is exposure. When we all shot film, a handheld light meter was essential for studio work to determine light ratios and precise exposures within 1/10th of an f/stop. Now, it’s a simple matter of taking test shots and determing the light values on the LCD monitor on the back of the camera. In the past, we needed Polaroid test prints to judge the shadows, the light, and the exposure. Now we can use the LCD for the same thing.

A lighting technique that portrait and fashion photographers use is to place a spot light behind a model. To do this, a flash or photoflood was positioned directly behind the person such that it was invisible from the camera’s point of view.

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Additional flash units were used to light the front of the model, and the resulting effect separated the model from the background with drama.

Without all that lighting equipment, and without spending the time as well as devoting a part of your house to be a makeshift studio, you can duplicate this same look using Photoshop. Here are the steps: 1. Select the background. In the case of the little girl on page 4, all dressed up for Halloween, I photographed her against a white background to make it easy for the magic wand tool to select the background. Once this was done, enlarge the photo to 100% and examine the selection to make sure it is accurate. If it needs to be tweaked, use the lasso tool to add or subtract areas to make it perfect. You add to a selection by holding down the Shift key and using the lasso tool, and you subtract from a selection by holding down the option key (alt on a PC) and using the tool.

There are several selection tools in Photoshop (the pen tool, the lasso tool, the magic wand tool, and the quick selection tool), and which one you use depends on the subject and how much contrast there is with the background.

If your subject has hair (note in all of my examples the subjects have their hair covered or the hair is wet and easy to cut around), the only method that works fairly well to separate the subject from the background is Topaz Remask, a Photosho plug-in. In order for this to work, the subject has to be photographed against a plain background such as the sky or a solid color backdrop that provides enough contrast between the hair and the color of the background. A blond in front of a white background can’t be separated well.

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2. Once the background is selected, choose the color of the spotlight and the color of the background. The spotlight color comes from the foreground box color at the bottom of the tools palette, right. The background color comes from the background color box. You can see in the screen capture of the tools palette that I choose white to black, and this produced the backdrop behind the Japanese Kabuki performer on the next page.

In the portrait on page 5, I chose dark red for the foreground color and dark blue for the background color.

You can choose any color you

want by simply clicking in the box and using the color picker. Or, you can use the eye dropper tool (cyan arrow above) and select a color from the photograph. Clicking a color with the eye dropper tool puts that color in the foreground color box. To change the color in the background color box, hold down the option key (alt for a PC) and then click a color with the eye dropper.

Note that it is always best to have the foreground color box lighter than the background color box.

This is because the spotlights are always lighter than the shadows of the background.

3. Choose the gradient tool (red arrow above).

When this tool is highlighted, five small icons

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UPCOMING PHOTO WORKSHOPS Baby WildlifeWorkshop Hinckley, Minnesota June 26 - 28, 2015

Baby wolves, skunks, coyotes, bobcats, lynx, foxes, bears, plus adult animals.

Frog & Reptile Workshop Close-up encounters with poison dart frogs and exotic reptiles in St. Louis, MO.

April 11 - 12, 2015

The Pantanal, Brazil: Jaguars at the river’s edge plus caiman, giant anteaters, monkeys, pink dolphins, and unbelievable birds.

November 8-20, 2014

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appear in the tool bar in the upper left section of your monitor. Choose the second icon from the left (green arrow previous page). This turns the gradient tool into a circular gradient. You are now ready to place the spotlight behind the model.

4. Click and drag the cursor beginning from the head or upper torso of the model to the outside of the frame. The background is immediately replaced by the spotlight. The size and exact placement of the spot depends on where you began to click and drag as well as the length of the ‘drag line’. If you drag the cursor an inch or two, the spotlight will be very small. If you drag the cursor to the edge of the frame, the spot light will be much larger. In every case, though, it will be round because you’ve chosen the circular gradient tool. The attenuation of the color from the light center to the dark periphery is inherent in what the gradient tool does.

In the picture below, I used a carnival participant from the fashion show in Jember, East Java, Indonesia. In the original shot, she was standing in front of a building and a lot of people. Note that when the gradient eliminated the original background, the model’s feet seemed to be suspended -- in other words, she didn’t seem to be standing on anything. To solve that problem, I used the Photoshop plug-in Flood to add a small reflection at the bottom of the frame. Flood is made by flamingpear.com, and it creates the most realistic reflections.

5. Once the background shows the circular gradient, you can tweak the contrast and color to suit your taste using familiar commands in Photoshop: Image > adjustments > hue/saturation for the color, and Image > adjustments > levels for the contrast. When adjusting the contrast, you will see that as you increase contrast, the diameter of the spotlight decreases. §

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Can You Still Make Money with Stock Photography?

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have been asked this question by many photographers and students, so I thought I’d write about the state of stock photography today.

First, to answer the question that headlines this article, yes, you can. But the amount of money you can make is significantly reduced from the past.

For many years, stock was a great way to make money in photography. If you were willing to work hard and produce excellent images of all kinds of subjects, and you continually submitted sharp, well exposed, well composed and creative images of salable subjects to one or more agencies, you would definitely do well. The picture of the dinosaurs, upper right, has sold to date 170 times (it is my second best selling image). The picture of Florence, Italy below right has sold just over 100 times since 1991. Both pictures have generated many thousands of dollars.

On the next page, the shot of trucks I photographed in Bavaria, Germany (I grabbed a shot while I made a quick stop thinking it might be good stock material) has sold at least 30 times: Once for $9000 and another time for $4500.

Three things changed everything: the digital revolution, the Internet, and microstock.

Even though there is a steep learning curve when you buy a new digital camera, the truth is that a person can use the various automatic functions on a camera and take excellent pictures assuming the composition and lighting are good. This

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means millions of people can now compete on a fairly professional level, and with the desire to make some ‘extra’ money with their camera, hordes of amateurs are vying for sales in every agency. That has diluted the income for the pros (and other amateurs, too).

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When the Internet became fast enough to upload pictures to share, to blog, and to socialize with, billions of pictures appeared online. Many of these can be used, with and without authorization from the photographer, and this has reduced income for the big stock agencies.

The biggest culprit, though, is microstock companies. These companies sell pictures for between one and five dollars, and this means it’s not worth one’s time to participate. Large agencies like Getty and Corbis, instead of buying up the microstock agencies and shutting them down, started competing with them. Prices for stock photos plummeted. When I first joined an agency in 1987, the average sale was $500. Today it’s around $20.

Furthermore, in 1987 the split between photographer and agency was 50-50. Now, royalty free images (pictures that can be used as many times

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as the client wants with no additional charges) earns a photographer 20% while rights managed images (the client is only allowed to use the photo one time) nets the photographer 37% at Corbis and other agencies. For new submissions, most photographers are forced to accept the royalty free license for no other reason than the agency makes 80% on a sale.

When the idea of royalty free first came on the scene, the pictures were outtakes, generic, and less creative than the rights managed. Now there is no difference between the two. The dramatic night shot of the Garden by the Bay in Singapore could easily be sold as a royalty free picture for a couple of bucks.

Ok, so that’s the bad news. The good news is that there are still sales that generate several hundred dollars per image. And the more pictures you have on file, the more sales potential

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there is. If you want to spend the time organizing your pictures for submission and/or shooting specifically for stock, keywording them, cleaning them of dust speces, etc., then you can make extra money with an agency. The amount you make depends on teh agency you join, the quality of your pictures, the subject matter, and the quantity of accepted images. You should have at least 1000 images with an agency before you expect a monetary return.

kinds of shots and you might get lucky with a sale. But the odds are against you.

What not to submit to an agency

Submit color, not black and white. If you really love a b & w shot and want to see if it will sell, then submit the original color version, too.

The pictures that will likely not make money for you are the ones that everyone likes to take -- landscapes, flowers, travel icons (like the Eifel Tower and Statue of Liberty), sunsets, doors and windows, and nature details like a palm frond pattern or a rock texture. There are already so many of these kinds of images that yours will get lost in the crowd. You can still submit these

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Painterly images tend not to sell well compared to photographs.

You should not crop your images into a square or some other shape that doesn’t matter the 2 x 3 ratio that comes out of the camera. Let the client do the cropping if they wish to.

What pictures to submit Conceptual images always do well, such as pictures that say stress, friendship (such as the picture below from India), motherhood,

global communications, leadership, love, etc. If creating images for these kinds of ideas appeals to you, do visual research online with various agencies. Use a keyword such as caring or management and search large online stock agencies to see what they have already accepted.

People pictures sell the most in agencies. People doing things, working, laughing, having a barbeque in their backyard, playing sports, exercising and keeping fit, shopping, disciplining a child, and so on. There are endless scenarios.

If the pictures are done well -- meaning attractive models, non-distacting backgrounds, perfect exposure, sharp, and well composed with enough room for text for an advertiser to write a messge -- they will sell. These are not the kinds of pictures most of us enjoy taking, but they

consistently make money.

I did a model shoot with a male model in his mid-20s working on air conditioning units (below) and water heaters -- not something I like to shoot at all -- but for that one afternoon’s work I made several thousand dollars over the course of about four years. These kinds of pictures have little competition because no one likes to shoot them.

The agency I recommend for easy acceptance and better-than-average percentage of the sales going to photographers is Alamy (alamy. com). They are based in England. I’ve been with them since 2003 and I consistently have monthly sales based on 2300 pictures uploaded to their site. §

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Become a better photographer with

eBooks

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Energy Saving Light Bulbs vs.

White Balance

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hate the new generation of energy saving light bulbs. I’m sure they save homes and businesses money, but the color they give off is garish, unattractive, and uncomplementary to pretty much everything. As much as the manufacturers try to simulate natural light, it just never looks right.

When photographing something lit by these obnoxious bulbs, the color is never accurate no matter what color balance you try. The mannequin at right dressed in an outrageous outfit in a lobby of a hotel in Indonesia is an example. I tried daylight white balance, tungsten (or incandescent), florescent, and auto white balance. None of them looked good.

The best color I got, which was still too sickly-yellowish/reddish, was by using the tungsten WB setting.

row below left) reveals individual color choices. I first chose yellow and then moved the saturation slider to the left to desaturate just yellow. I followed that by choosing red and doing the same thing. This brought back the correct color which is shown on the next page. I added a new background, a reflection using Flood plus a young woman’s face and hands, but the colors are as they should be because I desaturated the unwanted colors. §

In order to deal with this, I opened Photoshop and used the pull down menu command Image > adjustments > hue/ saturation. The submenu that pulls down within the dialog box (purple ar-

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CHINA PHOTO TOUR

Ethnic minorities sculpted rice terraces Shanghai dance

J a n. 1 3 - 2 7, 2 0 1 5

Stunning Shanghai from a 100th floor observation deck 19

Macro Flash I

just finished conducting another frog and reptile workshop in St. Louis, and as usual everyone took great images.

I begin the workshop with a 45 minute presentation on macro photography, and a big part of it how to get consistently good exposures with flash when photographing small subjects. I thought I would share this with you here.

With very few exceptions, macro photography requires as much depth of field as possible.

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That means you will be using small lens apertures, and I recommend either f/22 or f/32.

That in turn means the light reaching the sensor will be low, hence the need for a flash. A long exposure is fine as long as a subject isn’t moving and you’re using a tripod. With small animals like frogs, a 1/2 second or more doesn’t work. The flash does three things: (1) It provides enough light for a good exposure with a small aperture, (2) it eliminates the need for a tripod, and (3) it replaces the need for a fast

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shutter speed because the brief flash duration freezes any movement.

Correct exposure The technique for obtaining good exposures when doing macro photography is this: 1. Set the flash to ETTL for Canon, iTTL for Nikon. This is the automatic exposure mode on the flash.

2. Set the camera on manual exposure mode.

3. Choose the lens aperture you want for extensive depth of field. As I said, this should be f/22 or f/32.

Your exposures will now be accurate or very close to it. If the exposure still needs tweaking, as if very common with flash for many

reasons (such as the reflectivity and color of the subject), use the flash exposure compensation feature to tweak the light output in 1/3 f/ stop increments. Even with decades of experience, it is impossible to predict exactly how the exposure is going to look until test pictures are taken. So, consider your first couple pictures tests until you tweak the exposure to perfection.

This technique works with any kind of portable flash. The picture of the chameleon, below, and the poison dart frog on the previous page were both taken with a ring flash because I like the way the light envelopes the subject.

When you use a normal portable flash, such as a Canon 600EX or a Nikon SB-900, with small macro subjects that are physically close to the lens, the light will pass over the subject illuminating the top of it while the bottom portion will be in shadow. ยง

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Learning to See online course

The ability to ‘see photographically’, to really grasp how your camera and lenses capture a subject or scene (which is different than how we see with our eyes) underlies successful picture taking. It is the bottom line that you’ve been looking for to take that quantum leap forward in your photography.

The great thing about online courses is that they can fit into any schedule. Life gets in the way at times, and Jim puts no limit on the time you can submit your work for his critiques. Read more about this course HERE. 22

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NAMIBIA PHOTO TOUR Largest dunes in the world primitive tribes wildlife

June 22 - July 3, 2015

What’s wrong with this picture?

I

put this composite together when I first bought Photoshop in 1991, and it’s terrible. Why? Because when images are combined, the lighting has to match. If the lighting is just a little bit wrong (for example, both the subject and the background were taken in sunset lighting, but the direction of the sun isn’t identical in both elements) many people who look at the composite may feel there is something wrong but they just can’t put their finger on it.

However, in this image, the colors of sunset don’t match the color of light from the oncamera flash I used. In addition, the sun is behind the Jackson’s chameleon but the reptile is lit from the front. Could I have actually taken the picture like this? Yes, absolutely.

With daylight white balance set on the camera and by balancing the exposure between the flash fill and the landscape, I could have taken a picture exactly like you see here with one shot. But it wouldn’t look natural at all simple because the lighting would look artifical. It would look like a set up that was done badly.

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With few exceptions, when I photograph animals in captivity and under controlled conditions, I try to make the pictures look natural. Even fill flash isn’t ideal in my opinion because it looks artificial -- assuming one wants a completely natural look. We all know that in low light circumstances we often don’t have a choice but to use fill flash, and in my opinion -- unless you are trying to achieve an unusual artistic effect -- nature images shouild look as natural as possible. If fill flash does have to be used, I typically reduce the flash exposure by at least 1 1/3 fstops and sometimes more.

In the composite above, the new background is a shot of a tree that I captured out of focus.

I switched off the autofocus function on my 70-200mm zoom lens and simply moved the focusing ring until I liked the degree of abstraction. The chameleon has obviously been exposed with flash, but the color and the very natural background looks a lot better here than in the original composite on the previous page. § 25

SHORT AND SWEET 1.

Extreme wide angle lenses, when used with flash, usually produce pictures with vignetting. Some of the newer flash units have a zoom setting to deal with this.

If you use a 14mm lens, like I did here, then zoom out the setting on the flash as wide as possible.

2. If you fly through Chicago’s O’Hare International

3. Mannequin heads make great subjects to manipu-

4. To balance flash on a nearby subject with a huge in-

late in Photoshop. I photographed this head in a store window in a mall, and then I mirrored it and added a colored texture. I feel that mannequins with no hair work the best, and I also prefer chisled features. Often the available light is all you need for a great shot.

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Airport, keep your camera handy. There are some very cool things to photograph -- wild neon lights, graphic architectural details, colorful patterns and graphic designs, etc.

terior room and have extensive depth of field, use aperture priority and ETTL (or iTTL) on the flash. Set the aperture to a small opening, like f/16, and use a tripod.

The tripod is a must because the shutter speed will be slow . §

Photography Tours 2014 - 2015 POLAR BEARS October 28, 2014

JAPAN February, 2015

BOTSWANA/SOUTH AFRICA June, 2015

BURMA (MYANMAR) Sept, 2015

THE PANTANAL, BRAZIL November, 2014

CARNIVAL IN VENICE February, 2015

MADAGASCAR August, 2015

CUBA October, 2015

CHINA January, 2015

NAMIBIA June, 2015

VIETNAM, CAMBODIA, LAOS Sept, 2015

ETHIOPIA November, 2015

For a complete list of all the photo tours/workshops Jim is conducting, go to his website: www.jimzuckerman.com.

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ASK JIM

Every month Jim will answer a question from his online students, from people who participate in his tours and workshops, or from subscribers to this magazine. If you have a question you’d like Jim to answer, please drop him a note at photos@jimzuckerman.com.

Q:

Jim . . . I took this picture on our American Southwest tour, and I want to know if I should I eliminate the lens flare? If the answer is yes, how can I do that? I tried and it’s not so easy.

Dr. Terry Allen, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

A: Yes, the flare should be eliminated. In this kind of situation, there is a lot of subtlety in the way the lens

flare partially obscures the image beneath it. You have to consider the striations of the rock, the rock’s color, and the gradation of light. I really wasn’t sure exactly how to fix this until I worked on it. But the essential tools you need to get rid of lens flare are: clone tool, healing brush, burn and dodge tool, lasso tool, and the hue/saturation dialog box.

I started by selecting each one with the lasso tool and desaturated the color with hue/satuation, then darkened the area with the dodge tool. I then lowered the opacity of the clone tool and cloned surrounding area over the flare, and finally did a little touch up with the healing brush.

© Dr. Terry Allen 2014

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Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos photo tour

September 13 - 28, 2015 Culture Ancient ruins Great people photography Temples

Ta Phram Temple, Angkor Wat, Cambodia 29

Get professionalcritiques critiques of yourof work Get professional your work with Jim’s online courses with Jim’s online courses Betterphoto.com betterphoto.com Learn composition, exposure, Photoshop, beginning fundamentals, techniques in low light photography, flash, and more at your convenience and on your schedule.

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Student Showcase

Each month, Jim features one student who took beautiful and inspiring images on one of his photography tours or workshops. It’s really fascinating how photographers see and compose such different images even though we may go to the same place. Everyone gets great images on my trips.

Alan Raphael, West Los Angeles, California, Burma, Ethiopia, Carnival in Venice

Š 2014 Truman Holtzclaw

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Student Showcase, continued

Š 2014 Alan Raphael

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Student Showcase, continued

Š 2014 Alan Raphael

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PHOTOSHOP WORKSHOP in my home

Sat. & Sun., December 6 - 7, 2014

Photoshop is a photographer’s best friend, and the creative possibilities are absolutely endless. In a personal and ‘homey’ environment (I have a very cool classroom setup in my home), I start at the beginning -- assuming you know nothing -- but I quickly get into layers, cutting and pasting, plug-ins, using ‘grunge’ textures, modifying lighting, and a lot more. I promise to fill your head with so many great techniques that you won’t believe what you’ll be able to do. I go over each technique several times to make sure you understand it and can remember it.

creative ideas that will inspire you to produce amazing images with the pictures you’ve already taken.

Photoshop instructors approach teaching this program from different points of view. My approach is to be as expansive in my thinking as possible in creating unique, artistic, and compelling images. In addition to showing you how to use the various tools, pull down menus, layers, and so on, I spend a lot of time giving you

Contact me if you would like to participate in the workshop and I will tell you how to sign up (photos@jimzuckerman.com). All you need is a laptop and a lot of your pictures. If you don’t have a laptop, I have two Mac Book Pro laptops I can loan out for the duration of the workshop. §

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I live in the Nashville, Tennessee area, and if you fly into the airport (BNA) I will pick you up. If you drive, I’ll give you my address and you can find my home on Mapquest. For the $450 fee, I include one dinner in my home (prepared by my wife who is an amazing cook and hostess) and two lunches, plus shuttling you back and forth from my home to your nearby hotel.

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PHOTO INSIGHTS®

published by Jim Zuckerman, all rights reserved © Jim Zuckerman 2014 email: photos@jimzuckerman.com snail mail address: P.O. Box 7, Arrington, TN 37014 37