How to shoot?

Lensbaby Announces Availability of Composer® Pro for Mirrorless Cameras

Now the Composer Pro delivers ultra-smooth creative control for photographers with Micro 4/3rds, Sony α NEX and Samsung NX cameras too

Portland, OR – April 2, 2012 – Lensbaby announces its popular SLR creative effects camera lens, the Composer Pro, is now also available for Micro 4/3rds cameras (including Panasonic Lumix™ G Micro System and Olympus PEN®), Sony® α NEX, and Samsung NX cameras. The Composer Pro for mirrorless cameras is compatible with the Lensbaby Optic Swap® System and ships with the Double Glass Optic installed.

The Composer Pro, launched in March 2011, refined and enhanced the popular and award winning Lensbaby Composer® by upgrading the swivel ball and focus mechanism to provide professional performance. The Composer Pro’s metal swivel ball design and refined focus mechanism deliver ultra-smooth focus and tilt control. The updated focus mechanism features a fluid and accurate dampened focus ring comparable to the focus mechanisms of the highest quality professional manual focus lenses. This smooth, fluid operation makes the Composer Pro the perfect choice for discerning professional photographers and videographers who want to create ground-breaking creative imagery – and now they can do so with their mirrorless cameras as well.

The Double Glass Optic, a 50mm f/2 selective focus optic, creates a Sweet Spot of sharp focus that photographers can move around the photo by tilting the Composer Pro’s swiveling lens body. The Composer Pro is compatible with the complete range of creative optics in the Lensbaby Optic Swap System including the Edge 80, Sweet 35, Fisheye, Soft Focus, Pinhole/Zone plate, Single Glass, and Plastic. Each optic can be swapped into the Composer Pro to deliver a different creative effect.

The Composer Pro for mirrorless cameras joins Lensbaby’s growing family of lenses, which now includes the Composer Pro for SLR cameras, Composer, Scout, Muse, and Control Freak.

“We’re excited to give mirrorless camera shooters full access to the Lensbaby Creative Effects system. With so many photographers opting for these smaller cameras for on-the-go shooting situations, our one lens with so many creative effect options will make a great addition to their set-up,” said Craig Strong, Lensbaby Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer.

Composer Pro for Mirrorless Cameras Specs:
Refined metal ball design delivers ultra-smooth focus and tilt control
Ships with the Double Glass Optic installed
Compatible with the Lensbaby Optic Swap System
Focus Type: Manual
Size/Weight: 2.25″ (5.71cm) high x 2.5″ (6.35cm) wide / 4 oz (113.4g)
Tilt range of up to +/- 17.5 degrees

Double Glass Optic Product Specs:
Focal Length: 50mm
Low dispersion, high refractive index, multi-coated optical glass doublet
Aperture Type: Interchangeable, magnetic aperture disks
Apertures: f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22
Selective focus optic (creates a sweet spot of focus surrounded by gradual blur)
Focus distance when used with Composer Pro: 18″ to infinity
37mm front threads accept all Lensbaby accessory lenses
Composer Pro for mirrorless cameras is available now from Lensbaby-authorized photo specialty stores worldwide and from lensbaby.com. Composer Pro for mirrorless cameras retails for $300 MSRP.

For the second time in a week, a Paul Buff mod that is so simple I wonder why I hadn't thought of it earlier. This one is via Houston-based photographer Stephen Hébert.

This Home Depot version of the famed Profoto Globe will set you back all of $10. I have seen people hacking these for Profoto lights using SP-systems mounts and/or gaffer's tape. But the fact that they mount right to an AB or Einstein is, like, poetic justice or something.

If you are really slick (and handy) you might want to try to drill some holes around the base for heat venting. And I am guessing the color temp is, er, "close enough."

But having enough money left over from the savings to buy the actual flash (and an additional $130 in other accessories) is icing on the cake.

-30-

©David Daniels

As I post this, we are entering into April Fools' 2012 territory. Believe nothing you read on the web today.

Personally, I love April Fool's. So much so that I would never post one every single year here on Strobist. Oh, I wanna. But I'd worry that we'd fall into that "it's expected" rut as have Google, NPR and the like.

That said, in 2010 I came this close to pulling off a duesy... Read more »

While Lightroom 4 came out and was extremely solid, there are always a few glitches that will be found when tens of thousands of people start pounding on it. This release candidate features a number of bug fixes but for new Canon 5D MKIII owners, their cameras are now supported.

Lightroom 4.1 is now available as Release Candidates on Adobe Labs.   The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers.  The final release of Lightroom 4.1 may have additional corrections or camera support.

Bugs Corrected in the Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate

The following bugs that were part the Lightroom 4 releases have been corrected. The team appreciates the very detailed feedback the community has provided on Lightroom 4 and we’re excited to correct a number of issues experienced by our customers. These issues have been FIXED:

• Point Curve adjustments made in Lightroom 3 and before have been restored.
• Lightroom 4 did not properly open external applications when using the “Edit In” functionality.
• Addressed performance issues in Lightroom 4, particularly when loading GPS track logs, using a secondary monitor, and the controls within the Develop module.
• Ability to update DNG previews and metadata for more than 100 photos has been restored.
• This update allows for improved viewing of subfolders and stacks in folders with a large number of photos.
• It was possible that a layout of a saved book could be lost after quitting Lightroom 4.
• Please provide feedback on your experience with the Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate in our Feedback Portal.

New Camera Support in Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate

• Canon EOS 5D Mk III

Run over to Adobe Labs to grab the Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate

Here's an idea that is so simple I am surprised it did not strike me sooner.

It's one of several neat little design improvements in the new Einsteins, but it never occurred to me how cheap and easy it would be to retrofit my old AlienBees. Read more »

Yesterday I went out with the LA Shoot This! group to help lead a group shoot event but unfortunately Mother Nature was not on our side. The sky was gray and boring and it was raining on and off. While I like nice blue skies, there was no hope of getting anything beyond dark storm clouds. My friend Chris Diset was in this same situation a few months ago and used a little white balance trick to change the color of the sky. Taking a cue from his playbook, I used that same trick to help make something out of nothing.

As I said, the sky was just downright ugly with no color in it at all, and worse, it only looked like it was going to get worse. My goal of teaching how to balance flash and bright sunlight was certainly not working out so I decided to show how to make a blue sky of of the drab sky we were looking at.

To start off, I switched the camera’s white balance from Auto to Tungsten. What this will do is to add a blue color cast to the clouds. Here is how the sky looked in both Auto and Tungsten White Balance.

Auto White Balance

Tungsten White Balance

Now that we have some color in the sky, its now time to shoot our model. If we just used a flash, the Tungsten white balance setting would make our subject look more like a Smurf than a human. In order to compensate for the much cooler color temperature we have to reverse that by making the light from the flash much warmer. To accomplish this, I used the ExpoImaging Rogue Gel Kit with the 1/2 CTO (Color Temperature Orange) gel.

Using the gelled flash to light our subject, we get the natural looking lighting on the subject while retaining the blue in the sky.

You can use this same technique with different gels to create more dramatic skies by using the opposite of this effect with a nice sunset. Using a cool (blue) gel and setting the color temperature to a higher temperature will create extremely vivid colors. No lighting kit is complete without at least a few color correction gels.

Michael Grecco's Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait has been one of my favorite lighting books since it was released back in late 2006. That was far enough back to where publishers were not yet insisting on all of the e-Rights. So Grecco has done what any smart photographer would do, and has just co-released LatDP as a multi-platform eBook.

In fact, just thinking about all of the amazing photo books that were published before e-Anything makes me realize there is a huge i-Library just waiting to happen. And in a way which will see the royalties go where they rightly belong.

On top of that, we can support photogs directly (no offense, 90%-taking mega-publishers) while toting around a bucketload of inspiration on our tablets, phones, pods, etc.

In honor of the new LatDP medium, I asked Michael if he would give a little extra BTS on one of my favorite images from the book. You know, a lil sump'm sump'm just for us.

And he did… Read more »

You've already seen the post mortem and final pics from this year's Gulf Photo Plus shootout. But now the official videotape version of Martin Prihoda and yours truly getting our butts kicked by Mr. Heisler is live, for your entertainment.

Oh, and hit the jump for a slideshow of student work from 2012... Read more »

Over the past 24 hours the blogosphere has erupted with both praise and condemnation to new website by David Jay with his 10 Step Guide to Starting a Photography Business. Blog posts, tweets, and Facebook posts are mostly railing on David for some of his points while others are claiming it is about time somebody wrote a simple guide like this. Gary Fong even responded with a post about unqualified people who are trying to teach. I certainly have my own opinion and will both address some of the points David made with my own spin on them.

Step One – Friends are the foundation of your business

No, CLIENTS are the foundation of your business. Many of you may not have a lot, or any, friends that need wedding or portrait photography. I do believe that being friends with other photographers is hugely beneficial because it opens opportunities to learn, grow, and gain experience, but do not expect that a large portion of your work will be from other photographers. Your best clients will come from vendor referrals, if you can get them. You need to knock on a lot of doors, make friends with venue coordinators, florists, DJ’s, and every other vendor in your area.

Step Two – Go Ahead, Step Out In Faith, You Can Do It

David says you don’t need much equipment and you can probably borrow what you don’t have. The truth is that you do need a certain minimum of equipment if you are going to make sure that you capture every moment of the most important day in somebody’s life. You need to have at least two camera bodies and a variety of lenses to make sure you can capture the right shots. What if you drop and break a body or lens? What if you have a mechanical failure? What if something else goes horribly wrong? Equipment is not just an investment, it is insurance to make sure you can do what you were hired to do.

Step Three  – Service is your true value. It is the way forward in the industry & you were created for it.

Providing service is certainly the key to customer satisfaction and I don’t think David really make any real point in his section on this except to shoot for the sake of art and not care if you get paid or not. There is certainly a truth buried in there that you do not have to be a great photographer, you just have to be good enough to deliver what your clients want. Secondly, you are selling yourself and how you treat your customers that often is more important than the product itself.

Step Four – Use the hourglass approach

David suggests you offer free service to 100 people and try to get 10 jobs. Once the jobs start coming in, you start charging for it. I can’t begin to disagree with this enough. If you shoot for free, your clients will put zero value on your work. Those free clients are not going to refer high dollar clients to you because they will not value you at all. A quick check of Craigslist will show dozens of “professional wedding photographers” in almost every major city offering complete wedding packages for $500 or less. The only clients that are going to call those photographers are ones that have to because of their budget and they fully understand that their expectations are going to be inline with what they are paying. The act of giving your work away is not going to make your phone magically start to ring with paying jobs.

Step Five – Get your photos organized, edited, and safely shared, It’s not magic, it’s workflow

Talk about a wild over-simplification here. David says to import your images into Lightroom, use automatic settings, and then your his own Lightroom preset to create great images. Lightroom is a great tool and it is my tool of choice for editing weddings, but I would never simply import, use auto-tone, run a single preset, and export the finished images. Every image should be checked for color balance, sharpness, focus, exposure, cropping, framing, awkward faces, and much more. Simply running them through a set of presets is not doing any justice to your work or to your clients. Here is a link some of David Jay’s wedding photos, you might want to check these out before taking his advice on this topic.

Step Six – Honestly and authentically you. Market your brand proactively for the best first impressions

I absolutely agree that you should be honest and authentic. However, David says you should also be cute, well dressed, and talk about your dog. David does make some good points about important pieces to have on your website like your phone number, your prices, and a video. Having a little promo video is really a good idea as it can give your potential client some insight into what you are like and how you work. David also goes into a lot of detail about using Facebook, and when done correctly, I do agree that Facebook is a great marketing tool.

Step Seven – They pay you to be prepared. Get ready

This is probably the best set of information in David’s guide. You should have checklists, you need to have your gear ready, you need to have backup equipment (or as David suggests, friends with equipment that will gladly let you use their gear)…and of course, you need to buy David’s website tools to create a custom website for your customer. Ok, I am on board with almost all of that but I have yet to have a couple that wanted their own website for their wedding even if I was giving it to them for free.

Step Eight – It’s your time, Get in the game

I can’t actually fathom that David would suggest shooting a wedding with no experience. A wedding has a flow to it, it has a cast of characters, it has a specific timing. If you don’t fully understand the nuances that are involved you will not be ready. You absolutely need experience with weddings, and a good number of them too, before you try to be the main photographer for such a special event. You should intern with existing wedding photographers, work up to being a second shooter, and then work into getting to be the primary while an experienced photographer is your second. Would you like to have a doctor that has never practiced an operation before doing a surgery on you? A auto mechanic doing your car’s brakes who is “just winging it”. If you wouldn’t trust an inexperienced person to handle your important work, why would you think it is ok to risk someone’s wedding photos? To even suggest that you should just shoot as many pictures as possible and hope for a few good ones is simply ludicrous.

Step Nine – Your clients want you, not your prints

Yes, you do need to understand what you are selling and often we are not selling prints anymore but what we are selling are memories. If you cannot capture the essence and spirit of the event, and if you can’t freeze those important moments in time that people will treasure for the rest of their lives, than you shouldn’t be doing it. David does suggest that one of the best products to sell is a customized website, using the products that he sells, again along with a $29 a year recurring fee for hosting their images…surely all of your clients will pay you for many years to come to have their images online.

Step Ten – Let client demand decide, price step

Just follow David’s simple tips and be making $120,000 a year in your third year of business. You built a huge demand for your free wedding services and now its time to get rich. Forget about vendor relationships, advertising, marketing, just build up demand by not charging, then start charging and you are all set. I’m sorry folks, if it was this easy, we would all be rich.

What’s not in David’s Guide

What is not in David’s guide…in a word…reality. Let’s face some facts here, not everyone is going to make it as a wedding photographer. I am not trying to blow anyone’s dreams or aspirations here but the harsh fact is that not everybody has what it takes. First off, you need to be a good photographer and this means having both creative and technical skills and that is just not everyone’s skill set. I know extremely creative and artistic people who simply can’t take a good photo and I know highly skilled technical photographers with no creative ability to get great shots. Secondly, you have to be good at business. The business of photography requires scheduling, meetings, accounting, planning, time management, and many other real business skills. Again, not everyone is cut out to run their own business. You will likely spend 90% of your time running your business than actually shooting and this is a harsh reality that people like David will never tell you about because its not exciting, its not sexy, and its not going to motivate you.

If you want to have a successful photography business you need to understand that it is going to take a lot more than a cool website and some basic equipment.

One last point, to address Gary’s post, I may not be a hot, fabulous woman, but I do love my LensSkins on my 70-200!

Wearable point of view camera are all the rage right now with everyone that is doing any kind of action sport strapping cameras on to give the viewer a sense of what he/she was seeing. a newcomer to this field is Midland Radio….yes…I said Midland Radio…the same company many of us older folk knew and loved back in the CB radio craze. (yesssum, that was before all these crazy internets). Those of us who chose Midland gear did so because the stuff just worked so when I saw that Midland had an action camera, I just had to get my hands on it and give it a test drive.

Did Midland score a win with the XTC300VP4? There is only one way to find out….put it to the test!

Features

There are not a whole ton of features, settings, dials, inputs, outputs or really much of anything to the XTC300VP4. The camera is what it is, and what it is, is a video camera. There are only three settings shooting modes:

• 1920×1080 High Definition @ 30 FPS (16:9 Aspect Ratio)
• 1280×720 High Definition @ 60FPS (16:9 Aspect Ratio)
• 848 x 480 Standard Definition @ 60FPS (16:9 Aspect Ratio)

There are only two controls on the entire camera, the on/off slide switch and the video resolution switch. There are no menus to dig through, cryptic codes to remember, just set the video resolution you want and turn it on to start filming.

I acquired my first spill-kill reflectors by accident. There were two, included in a set of used Profoto Acutes I bought from a dentist. (One of them is pictured above, at left.)

My first thought: These things are useless. Should I throw them away or try to sell them on eBay?

But these days, I generally do not stick a studio head into an umbrella without one. Read more »

Canadian reader Eros Peterson tweets:

I type in http://www.strobist.com from work, and I get forwarded to http://strobist.blogspot.ca(?) Office firewall blocks says it's an XXX site!

Alas, we are still PG-rated here. But you are running into Google's new country-specific redirects, which your company's IT department is misclassifying. (Imagine that.)

For foreign readers, here's what's going on -- and an easy workaround if your corporate IT folks are blocking the site. Read more »

Photoshop CS6 Beta Now Available on Adobe Labs

First Major Release since April 2010 Packed with New Features and Huge Performance Enhancements

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe Photoshop CS6 beta, a preview of what’s to come in the next release of the industry standard in digital imaging, is available as a free download from Adobe Labs. Customers can download the beta, try out the experience and provide feedback to the product team. Packed with groundbreaking new innovations, features and incredible performance enhancements, Photoshop CS6 beta is available for the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows platforms. The final release is expected in the first half of 2012.

“Photoshop CS6 will be a milestone release that pushes the boundaries of imaging innovation with incredible speed and performance,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. “We couldn’t wait to share this beta of Photoshop CS6 with our customers and are looking forward to hearing from them and seeing the ways they are incorporating the beta into their daily creative workflows.”

New Features in Photoshop CS6 Beta

Photoshop CS6 beta demonstrates Adobe’s focus on huge performance enhancements, imaging magic and creativity tools that offer customers a new experience in digital imaging. Key features include new additions to the Content-Aware tools: Content-Aware Patch allows greater control by letting users select and duplicate an area of an image to fill in or “patch” another. Content-Aware Move lets users select and magically move an object to a new place in the image.

Customers will experience incredible performance, powered by the new Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine, enabling near-instant results from popular editing tools including Liquify, Puppet Warp, Transform and Lighting Effects; and a refined, modern interface featuring dark UI options to make images pop. New and re-engineered design tools make creating designs faster and more efficient. Vector layers allow users to apply dashed lines and gradient strokes, searchable layers help quickly zero in on any layer you need, and new type styles let designers quickly apply type treatments to their designs.

 

In addition, the Photoshop CS6 beta offers all the features of Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended, such as new 3D editing features and quantitative imaging analysis capabilities. These features will be included in the shipping version of Photoshop CS6 Extended when it becomes available.

Pricing and Availability

The Photoshop CS6 beta is available immediately as a free download in English and Japanese. At installation, users will be required to provide an Adobe ID to complete a one-time login and online product activation. For information on how to install Photoshop CS6 beta visit http://www.adobe.com/go/photoshopcs6. Customers can submit feedback via the Photoshop CS6 beta forum: http://www.adobe.com/go/pscs6_forum. Users can also connect with the Photoshop team via the community-powered site: http://feedback.photoshop.com; on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Photoshop; YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/photoshop; Photoshop.com blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/; or via Twitter: http://twitter.com/photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Family

Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Extended are at the heart of the Photoshop family, joined by solutions for users at every level who want to bring out the best in their digital images either at home, in the office or on the go. Coupled with Adobe Photoshop, the recently released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 addresses the workflow needs of amateur and professional photographers, helping them create, manage and showcase images in impactful ways. Adobe Photoshop Elements provides consumers with powerful yet easy-to-use tools that organize, edit, create and share photos memories. For mobile devices, the Adobe Photoshop Touch app transforms images with core Photoshop features custom-built for tablets; and Photoshop Express is a free app for simple photo fixes and enhancements, and sharing to social networks.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Of all of the things that I have learned from McNally, I think this is the one has stuck with me the most: Cameras open doors to new experiences and friendships. Or as Joe likes to say, "It's not a camera, it's a visa."

A few years ago my camera allowed me to meet two people who would go on to become good friends. Fast forward to last Sunday, when the three of us found ourselves 8,000 miles from home, meeting new people with our cameras all over again. Read more »

After reading the Lighting 101 post about lighting for glasses, Z9Girl asks:

"What if I were photographing an older couple for their 50th wedding anniversary and they both wear glasses? Of course there's always the natural light option, but if it has to be indoors with soft boxes or flash, what to do?"

Read more »