Turn off the auto pilot

I shoot photos for a university. Professors teaching in classrooms with blackboards, or whiteboards, behind them.  Those large areas of black or white can wreak havoc on a camera's automatic exposure. The camera sees a lot of black and overexposes. The camera sees a lot of white and underexposes. Sure, you can use exposure compensation. Sure, camera manufacturers' automatic exposure is getting better all the time.

But here's a suggestions: Just ditch the automatic and switch to manual mode.

Arrive a few minutes early. Fire some test frames in whatever mode you typically work in. Adjust to get the subject exposure you want. Then lock that exposure down in manual mode. This works in many situations outside of classrooms ... particularly indoor shoots. Gymnasiums and stages come to mind.

Outdoor lighting can change more quickly ... I find the automatic exposure modes, aperture priority (typically my choice), shutter priority etc., paired with quick exposure compensation (add about a stop and a half of postive exposure compensation for backlighting), more helpful here.

The photo shown above is of the Dance Ensemble at the university. Auto exposure would have vastly overexposed the image. Exposure compensation would have yielded wildly inconsistent shots. It was shot with a Canon 7D in manual mode with the 50 mm 1.4 at 2.8. ISO was 3200 and the shutter speed 1/160.

The significance of small differences

A case of bad news, good news.

Bad news: We've had a few challenges this semester. A number of projects didn't come off as smoothly as I'd like. Of course, I'm never completely happy.

Good news: Nothing catastrophic. And there were a lot of lessons learned that will make me a better designer.

It brings to mind a book I read several years ago, Why Buildings Fall Down, by structural engineers Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori. While the subject of the book is architecture, engineering and disaster ... the lessons really can be applied to almost anything. The authors touch on the fatal collapse of a hotel catwalk in Kansas City (illustrated very clearly at the blog After Corbu) ... a reminder that seemingly small differences can be essential. Written pre-911, the concept of redundancy is brought home in the example of an aircraft that hits a skyscraper without toppling it. The book is accessible without being condescending, and the lessons can an easily extend from engineering structures to editing and design work flows.

Inspiration: Color and character

If you have children, chances are you've seen cartoons, lots of cartoons, and less face it, to an adult, many of them are really unbearably stupid. In fact, there's one on the tube as I write this.
Funny thing: one of the first things my wife and I watched together was a cartoon and it was great. We watched on DVD and couldn't wait to see what happened next. The cartoon was Tenchi and it featured a great heroine, space pirate Ryoko.
Tenchi is classic adolescent fantasy ... firing on all the Jungian cylinders. (I'm old enough to recognize one, but young enough to appreciate it). A boy steals some keys from his grandfather and sneaks into a cave where he awakens a female space pirate/demon ... Ryoko (right). A classic bad girl gone good ... a sort of pre-Xena who can shoot energy beams from her hands, teleport, regenerate lost limbs, and drink like a sailor. In short, a perfect Anima.
And she's also got really cool outfits ... this one in particular struck me even at the time as having a sophisticated thing going on with color.
Color complement pairs are red-green, blue-orange, and purple-yellow.

Normally with red-green it's hard not to think of Christmas. You've got to shift something. Here, it looks like they've paired red-green, with a weakened and matched set, orange and the light green in the hair. I'd love to find an excuse to use a scheme like this sometime.

Update: 

Thinking about this overnight. I tend to use color complements in the traditional painterly sense, but scientifically, perhaps the pairings should be red-cyan, green-orange.

About the show: What made the cartoon so good ... the character design and voice acting were all top notch ... the script was funny. You can watch it with the kids (we did) and there's still plenty for adults to appreciate. Lots of sly fun and innuendo, but without the cool irony of a show that doesn't really want to commit to it's own story ... there's an endearing earnestness to it.

File under the best camera is the one you have with you.
This isn't a perfect image. I'm not even sure it's a good image, but in this case, I'm biased. One of nice things about living in a small town is that it's big enough to have a "there" there, but small enough to feel like it's your town. You can park and walk to a variety of places ... pick up a sub at an old-fashioned lunch counter ... walk to an art reception. And along the way a little girl is mesmerized by the dresses (and shoes) in the shop window.  Grabbed it quick with an Olympus XZ-1, which is a very nice tool to be elaborated on in the future. I'll cross post this at bloomsburgarts.blogspot.com because I think it says something good about the nature of the community.

Image: How to lose the fluorescent light blues

Quick tip:

I almost never shoot photos in raw, unless it's a critical shot that can never be repeated, or if there are particular challenges in the lighting and I need every scrap of dynamic range and resolution I can get.

Here's a way to lose the yellow cast you sometimes get in skin tones when shooting digitally in mixed light.

In Photoshop, select Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation. Select "Yellows" from the drop down menu. You can use the eyedropper to fine-tune the selection. Shift the first slider "Hue" to the left to about -5. That will move the yellow cast a little toward a healthy red/pink glow. Adjust saturation and lightness to suit the image. Now, unless you specifically select the skin area to adjust, you may shift the color of yellow objects in the frame. Often, I don't care.

This is the ink painting that hangs in my office, and to a certain extent, still informs what I like to do in my work. The painting, done with a medium size watercolor brush and traditional chinese ink is large, about two feet by three feet. There were probably just half a dozen pencil lines sketched before I put brush to paper. I did several takes, working very fast, looking for a sense of spontaneity and grace, and chose the best. Ink, with a brush or a fountain pen, attracts me as a medium because there's no hiding. The line is there, or not. It demands commitment. But it also demands a level of constant practice, which is hard to maintain. Or else you find yourself working in a familiar way. So recent works have been done in pencil, using the lighter shades of grey to find my way, break out of drawing habits and look for alternate lines of expression.
A larger version of the painting can be seen on my DeviantArt account.

Project: Have I seen this face?

I work at a university (it won't be tough to figure out which). Here's the drill: You get an email about a speaker with a long speech title, and some art, which just isn't as high-rez as you'd like. You set aside an hour and work something up.

So imagine my surprise when this lands in my inbox. The title has just six words. The speaker is fairly well known. And his photograph is good. He looks, in fact, a bit like Jean Reno, which is only so bad.
So, I make the photo very large. Boost the blues a little. Cut the type into the picture and the picture into the type. The client wants a little more verbiage than I'd prefer, but nothing too outrageous.
Overall, satisfying.

Some technical details:
1) What background color to use? I chose a pale blue to match the eyes. Another logical choice could have been a sandy tan ... playing up the blue/orange complement pair and perhaps suggesting the Middle East. But I stuck with the blue background, which I think has the effect of magnifying the warmth of the skin tone.
2) How to get the photo inserted into the text. In InDesign, select the text block, create outsides. Then (re)import the photo into the text block and size and position it to match. InDesign wouldn't let me do more than one line at a time, so I had to import the photo a couple of times.