Steve Losh

I just bought Lightroom 2 a few days ago, and it's great.  It runs a bit slow on my laptop, but hopefully I'll be able to buy a new computer in the near future and editing photos will be snappy again.  Anyway, to celebrate my purchase I decided to show an example of a photo that I processed entirely with Lightroom.

This is Corinne, at Flat Iron Cafe.  Flat Iron is a great place to dance but has absolutely awful lighting for taking photographs. The best I could do was sit her in a char next to the soda cooler which has one fluorescent bulb running vertically up the middle of it. It's not pretty or flattering at all; her great skin is turned magenta and purple by the other lights in the room. This is the original photo that I had to work with, and since the lighting is so tough I decided to do more drastic processing than usual.

First, I applied a custom preset I made; I called it "Hot Tone" because it's based off of the "Cold Tone" preset that ships with Lightroom.  Basically it messes with the camera calibration settings to blow the picture almost entirely out of the water, then uses the white balance, vibrance/saturation and HSL controls to pull it back.  It's fun to play around with and presets in Lightroom are so easy to preview (just roll the mouse over it) that they can really help you work a lot faster, or try out effects you might not otherwise spend time trying.  The settings that the preset affects are:

• Camera Calibration - Red Saturation: -92
  
• Camera Calibration - Green Hue: +100 
• Camera Calibration - Green Saturation: +100 
• Camera Calibration - Blue Hue: +71
• Camera Calibration - Blue Saturation: -100 
• Basic - White Balance: 14000 K 
• Basic - Tint: +87 
• Basic - Vibrance: +40 
• Basic - Saturation: -75 
• HSL - Saturation - Red: +94 
• HSL - Saturation - Orange: +65 
• HSL - Saturation - Aqua: -100 
• HSL - Saturation - Blue: -100 
• HSL - Luminance - Red: +38
• HSL - Luminance - Aqua: -98 
• HSL - Luminance - Blue: -98  

 
That does a lot to a photo, and it definitely won't work with every photo, but it's worth a try sometimes.  In this case it desaturated everything quite a bit while making it almost monochromatic; the only tones left are hot and warm ones.  Already the photo looks better, but there's still a long way to go. 

It's been just about a year since I got my first SLR camera and started studying photography with any degree of seriousness. I've come quite a way since then, and it hasn't been exactly what I expected.

RIT has three main areas of photographic study: fine art, advertising and photojournalism. If you had asked me on the day I got my camera which of those three I thought I'd be most interested in (even though I wasn't majoring in photography) I would have said "photojournalism." When I first started shooting I hated using flash and was mostly only interested in capturing musicians and dancers.

Since then I've learned a lot. I'm pretty comfortable with hot shoe flash and studio lighting. I know how to develop and print black and white film in a darkroom myself. I've discovered how wonderful a certain degree of abstraction can be and I'm slowly but surely getting more artistic as time goes by. I think my answer to the previous question has changed; right now I see myself becoming more and more of a fine art photographer. I certainly don't consider myself good at that yet but it's the path I've started down and plan on continuing. There's something really special about planning, visualizing and not just taking but creating a photograph that I've fallen in love with.

I'm going to be updating my site to reflect this shift. Obviously the layout has changed a bit, but I've also removed the galleries of random photos that I had posted previously. From now on I'll only be displaying photographs with a cohesive idea behind them. I'll still post tons of random haphazard photos to my flickr site, but the galleries on this site will be for showing off what I most enjoy and am really proud of.

Jam Circle

This past weekend (April 25-28) was Northeast Girl Jam in Rochester, New York. Girl Jam is a swing dancing workshop weekend that focuses on classes for the followers. It was a huge success; we had a lot of people attend and everyone seemed to have a great time. The dances had a ton of energy and the late night parties were wonderful (as always).

I took a bunch of photographs over the course of the weekend, mostly during the performances and competitions. Once I posted them I got a bunch of questions asking me how I did it, so I figured I'd write here about it in more detail. I used different techniques each day so I'll go through them one by one.

Friday

My goal for the first two nights was to get images with the dancers sharp enough to recognize but with enough blur to convey the feeling of movement and energy in the room. I started playing with this technique at the blues parties in the past and I think I'm really starting to get the hang of it.

Solo Jazz Contest

On Friday I only had one of my flashes with me, so I had to make some tradeoffs. I bounced the flash from the ceiling to get more even lighting (directional light from a bare flash is usually too harsh), but since the ceilings in Tango Cafe are so high it took a lot of power. I wound up shooting at ISO 1600 and 3200 for most of the night so that my flash could be on a lower power setting and fire faster. Even at that ISO the noise isn't really that bad since the photos are exposed well (thanks to the flash). This photo was shot at ISO 3200 and I don't think the noise distracts from the image much at all.

Swingout!

I was using a wide angle lens (18mm) so that I could get entire bodies into the frame. One of the things I love about Lindy Hop is that it really uses the entire body which this photo really shows off. Cropping off huge parts of people in every single shot makes that much harder to see. I set the aperture to about f/4 and that gave me enough depth of field to get most things in focus at 18mm. I set the shutter speed depending on the amount of ambient light; it varied from 1/30 to 1/4 or so.

Late night, back porch.

The trick that really made a difference in taking good photos is that once I set the exposure I stopped looking at the camera entirely. I didn't review my shots as I took them and I didn't even look through the viewfinder to compose. Using a wide lens meant that I could just point the camera in the general direction of the dancers and still get them. I took this photo at the late night and the camera was held against my ribs as I did.

Why did I do that? I can perfectly compose an image but if the dancers aren't doing something interesting it's going to be a boring photo. I've been dancing long enough that I'm starting to be able to predict when something cool will happen in a dance, but that only works if I'm paying complete attention to it. Messing with the camera distracts me and I can only get the most obvious moments. Ignoring the camera and watching the dancers means I can pick up more subtle parts of the dance and capture those (as well as the obvious ones).

Saturday

On Saturday I brought along two flashes to the dance and had Sergey hold one while I held the other (thanks Sergey!). Two flashes means twice as much light, which means I can shoot with recycle times twice as fast and have more even light coverage.

Carl and Nina.

Since I was able to shoot twice as many photos I was able to experiment with getting up close. Using a wide angle lens let me get most of the dancers in the frame when super close and allowed me to play around with really interesting perspectives. This photo is one of my favorites from the weekend. Getting really close to Nina means that the distance between her and Carl is exaggerated and adds to the sense of tension. Once again, the flashes freeze the dancers and the ambient light burns in a bit of blur to add some movement. This photo was also shot at ISO 1600 but the noise is definitely not the main focus of this picture. As long as you don't underexpose noise is usually not a problem in these kind of photos.

Swivel!

Not only did I try getting up close, I also tried varying my angle more than I usually do. I usually brace the camera against my ribs when taking these kinds of photos for a few reasons:

• It's a safe height that will get the whole dancer in the frame.
• My ribs are vertical and so aligning the camera with them means that it's not wildly tilted up or down and I don't accidentally get ceiling- or floor-only photos.
• It keeps the camera close to my body where it's much less likely to be whacked by a stray limb.

Getting lower and higher gives me different perspectives that can have really nifty results. The problem is that it's much harder to know if the subject is completely (or even mostly) in the frame when the camera is in an awkward position. To get a photo like this I probably shot four or five at strange angles that I deleted.

One other fun thing to notice: you can see Sergey holding the flash right to the left of her hips. I probably could have closed out the flare in Photoshop but I don't think it really detracts from the image much at all.

Sunday

Solo Jazz Class

On Sunday I shot at a few of the workshops since there wasn't a dance. A workshop has a very different feeling than a dance and so I didn't want to try the same approach as the other two nights. Instead of using flash and a wide lens I switched to a fast normal lens (my 50mm f/1.4). The light coming through the windows was bright enough that I was able to shoot at around 1/60 at f/2 or f/2.8 and ISO 800 or 1600.

Once again the noise isn't much of a problem because the photos are exposed well as this picture shows. The shutter speed is just slow enough to get some blur at the ends of the limbs but not enough to lose all detail.

Bellydancing Class

Since I was using a normal lens instead of a wide angle I had to mostly abandon the idea of getting big group photos and instead try to capture individual people as they learned. Using a wide aperture let me isolate the people from the sea of arms and legs in the backgrounds and gave the images a soft quality that helps reflect the feeling of the afternoon.

I really like the soft-yet-directional light that came from the big stained glass windows combined with the overhead lights. Lately I've been using flash a lot in my photography and it was fun to get back to using natural light. I'm going to try to practice with it more in the near future.

Overall

Northeast Girl Jam was awesome. I had a great time dancing and photographing and got to see a lot of old friends (and meet new ones). If you're sad you missed it there's another event in Rochester next month: Stompology. It's a weekend of solo jazz and Charleston workshops and awesome swing dances.

If you'd like to see the rest of the photos I took this weekend I posted them on Flickr. Feel free to comment here or there; advice/questions/comments are always appreciated!

Lately I haven't had time to spend hours manipulating one image at a time so I've started looking at Lightroom's presets. Some of them are pretty unexciting but there are a few that actually give fairly interesting effects, especially if you tweak their settings after applying them. None of them will look perfect on an image on their own but if you adjust the settings to suit the photo you're applying them to they can look quite nice.

I tried out a few different presets on a photo I took a few days ago. The photo itself made explore on Flickr, but one of the manipulations also made explore and ranked even higher. All I did was apply a preset and tweak a few of the values to better fit the image.

Which of these do you prefer?

Last Saturday I went to the second official Lindy Compound Blues Party (the first one I've been to). It was a ton of fun; I got to see and dance with people I haven't in a long time. The more I blues dance the more I like it, but I'll save that topic for another post. This one is going to be about the photos I took. I knew I wanted to take some decent pictures while I was there but I didn't want to set up any lighting because there isn't really room. I ended up taking my camera and one flash with a trigger.

Early

Early on in the night I wanted to try playing around with flash and slow shutter speeds and I think it turned out well. I didn't want to worry about technical stuff so I used a 24mm prime lens and set it to ISO 400, f/11, and the hyperfocal distance. I set the white balance to daylight so my flashes would create accurate color then the tungsten lights in the rooms warmed everything up during the rest of the exposure.

The shutter speed was either 1/3" (for the better-lit living room) or around 1" to 1.5" (for the terribly lit dance floor). Other than that I didn't change anything while I was shooting; I didn't even bother looking through the viewfinder since 24mm captures quite a bit.

Post processing mostly involved contrast and clarity adjustments; the photos didn't need very much work.

Late

Later in the night I didn't want to use flash; everyone was tired and the flash gets annoying. I knew I couldn't get sharp, technically perfect photos so I threw that out the window and tried to capture the feeling of the night instead.

I ended up shooting at ISO 3200 at f/2.8 in aperture priority mode (shutter speeds were usually around 1/6"). I think the post processing helps the images a lot here. A little bit of contrast here and there, but the main change was using Lightroom's vibrance control to desaturate the photos. Vibrance affects colors that are already saturated more than the others (unlike saturation which affects everything equally). It also affects skin tones less than other tones (coincidentally the dance floor is roughly the same tone as skin). Using vibrance to desaturate was quick, easy, and gave the pictures a muted look that I really like.

Results

I'm happy with how everything came out. If you want to see the rest of the photos I've put them on Flickr. I'd love comments and/or advice (either here or on Flickr)!