Out of work and wanting to try photography?

Ah, so my friend just told me he’s been out of work for 7 months and he’s wondering about photography for money… but money is tight. (We’re just getting back in touch thanks to FaceBook).

If money is tight… start with the low end on cameras and make shooting earn the next steps… but you do have to start with something like the Rebel and lens and a flash, so still around $900-$1000. Too bad you weren’t around here, I could loan you some older stuff like I do with some of my young associate shooters.

No matter what you end up doing full time in the future, it’s great way to make money here and there…

For now, take any digital camera you have and shoot tons and learn lots online.

Here are a few good sites:

Strobist : Great lighting with inexpensive Flash

Tips From the Top Floor Podcast : Creative Photogaphy

Start to talk to people about wanting to get going and see what they say. If things are just right, maybe you can get the first couple hundred from a good shoot with someone that will prepay (like a family person needing some family portraits… or get creative and have like 2 or 3 families who have kids in little league pay for you to come to 2 or 3 games and you’ll give them all the photos… maybe rent a long lens.

There are lots of ways to start. BUT you have to have the eye and some talent. Also sign up for free online stuff so people can see your photos quick… like Flickr and a Wordpress blog.

Good luck man!

Buying a Camera to Make Money With

I have a friend from my hometown that asked me this:

I just found your blog and found that you are using a very expensive canon.Way out of my price for some studio and weddings.I am just starting toget back into this and I am starting my research.

I said:

Cool. You don’t have to worry about megapixels. They’ll all be fine. Any camera with the bigger body and interchangeable lenses will give you decent quality to start.

In the $800 area, you can get a decent Canon or Nikon and one OK lens… add a flash for maybe $150… or get a bit better one, since that’s so important if you want get pro looking shots.

If you can land a few good shoots and want to start right, the next step up cameras are built more solid, focus faster, etc… Like the Canon 5D Mark2, or the Nikon D300 I think it is… anyway… if it’s to make money often, that’s a nice entry camera and you’d never regret it.

Depending on what you want to shoot, you might need to save up for a decent long lens (Sports, etc) or a good light and umbrella (portraits).

But, you know… it’s not the equipment, it’s the shooter. I started in digital with a little Kodak camera, then a Nikon (and they were still about $1000 at the time!)… but I used really nice add-on flash, and that made all the difference to them not looking like snap shots.

And all you folks hurry up and get to be great shooters… I need the help!

Switching to Canon from Nikon

A client friend asked about this, and since it comes up so much, I’ll suggest you click on the ‘Canon Cameras’ in the Categories list and scroll down to the second page to read it all… but here’s my synopsis to get you started:

Now in 2009, it isn’t as critical for a choice between Nikon and Canon… the Nikon is much improved with high ISO, but at the time, I was getting uggo digital noise at 500 ISO with Nikons and Canon was beautiful at 1600-2500ISO in the dark tones, which is critical for me in theatre (I do Geva and Naz Theatre).
I also really felt that Nikon stopped caring about pros. They did a number of totally crappy repairs on my stuff, their rubber body molding would fall off of $5000 cameras and they couldn’t fix it, just stupid cheap stuff (the repair thing was really pointed out to me when an independent repair shop asked me ‘who fixed this last??!… it was so poorly done)
Little things like Canon just shipping me a little missing part as a favor to a pro, etc. made a big difference. Oh, and I don’t know about current cameras, but my Nikons never quite focused right, I was always babying them… and I just took it for granted until using my Canon and I was stunned at my fast, accurate focus.
So, who know’s today, but that was my reasoning 2 years ago before the Nikon D3 came out. And I’m still VERY happy with my cameras. Also now, I have had much fewer repair issues.

Got the PhotoVision Target

(my version is the medium sized one hanging on the gold reflector. It comes with the carry bag to it’s right, which is nice)

I just got my 14″ PhotoVision Target. I also use the Expodisk, but find that in a fast shooting situation, I don’t take the time to snap it on the camera, go to the subject area and do the correction. Wonder if I’ll use this? I find I fumble with keeping the Expo on my lens, or holding it there and getting shot (OK, I’m a klutz).

The thing I like best about the Expo is for getting rid of just totally weird color casts. See my earlier test shots with it.

The goal of any of these things is to shoot a neutral target and then use custom White Balance in camera.

I like that this new PhotoVision target has three peaks to match in my histogram to set exposure as well at those three light levels. The 14″ really folds much more compact than I was thinking and it’ll easily fit in my camera bag, so I’ll always have it. It folds like a light disk down to 6.5″. And the back is a nice silver reflector that I could see using on location shots in a pinch. I’m often trying to get a smidge of lights into eyes on shoots without lights and this will always be there, ready to use.

More as I use them….

Best way to make a web site… CSS!

I got a message from John at the Wayne County Arts group and he’s been tasked with updating their web site. It had been created a while back in Adobe GoLive. He commented on liking my site (above) and so here’s what I said. This mostly applies to small organizations and self-employed folks like me. It also requires some interest in graphic design, or you can make a crazy-ugly site… and we really don’t need more of those, do we

Here’s a good site about what’s possible with CSS, CSS Zen Garden. Both examples above have the exact same content, but use CSS to style them radically different. On the Zen Garden site, you can click to see for yourself all of the submitted CSS designs. It’s amazing. An example of CSS on this site is the design squares at the top left. Clicking on those change the background design, and could change the entire site if it was coded to do that.

I had used GoLive before I switched over to a CSS workflow. GoLive is gone and Dreamweaver is the current product from Adobe.

Now, those pages can be as beautiful or as ugly as the person’s skill. The two aspects are using a good graphic artist in the design and then someone who can make stuff happen via the options and coding (sorry if you already know that, just trying to be thorough). So to do it with Dreamweaver, you can work visually, not just hardcoding… drag images in and use the options/code to create links with images, etc. I’d guess that’s what was done with the county site.

The easier way is with CSS templating. I’m on Mac and use RapidWeaver.
You can create some really elegant pages, simply using template they have and that you can buy and add on.

It’s still possible to make a dull page, but you folks should have access to graphic designers that have worked enough on the web to steer you right. It’s more likely to create a site that looks like it’s from a template, so you have to fight that as well. BUT it’s easy to create a pretty powerful site quickly.
I suggest that young photographers look at lots of really great photos to learn what world-class work looks like. The same is true on the web. Search for sites that are in your industry and find the ones that are truly functional, useful and elegant. Then figure out how to steal (ah, I mean implement) those aspects of great sites into your site. Not making your site a rip off copy, but learning from what works and what is beautiful about the design and finding how that can work for you… just like in photography or your personal art!

I’d suggest that people use Dreamweaver because they are pros and want total control and all of the options. They should use CSS based solutions if they don’t want the hassle, or like me enjoy mixing tweaking the code with the ease of design.
Another CSS setup on the Mac is iWeb from Apple (free on every new Mac and wonderful).

There are other options… modifying a blog setup to be your web site (might not be as practical for an Arts site, but it could work, and could allow artists to write in now and then blog-style). Also there are just plain online templates you can buy and fill. One thing not to do is use Microsoft Frontpage if it still exists… it’s know to create nasty sites in many ways.

Oh, one final consideration. One that we bump into with our church web site… the way I create my site is great, but it’s hard to be modified by a group of people. Really it’s just meant for all changes to be made from the computer that created it (there are ways around this, but that’s for another show…). So if the goal is just to create a site that others will change on an ongoing basis, a CSS site sitting on your home computer might not be the best solution. If you are willing to make changes, (or willing to learn and implement the plug-in that allows changes to RapidWeaver sites via the web)… then you’d be OK.

Hopefully that’s a helpful walk through the web maze for anyone interested in creating their own site, or who wonders what tools I’m using to do my site and my blog.

High Quality Big Prints

I have a friend that attended one of my classes and was working on making enlargements of his digital photos for an art show. He asked how to ensure the prints had good quality up large… what numbers in Photoshop would ensure a good large print??

Here’s what KodakGallery Recommends:

In Photoshop, I would suggest 225 PPI/DPI is very safe at the size in inches you’ll be printing… so is Photoshop shows you can be at 16×20″ @ 225 PPI, then you are good.
From practice I know you can go much lower, but I try to not drop below 200 PPI @ the final print size just to be safe. The Kodak info above is quite a bit lower than that, and they are a lap that will make the prints with that minimum. What they say for 16×20″, in Photoshop works out to be 6×9″ @ 200 PPI… once again, these are their ‘minimums’.
If I want to go really big on a photo, I use Genuine Fractals.

But that’s $150 investment.

And you can upsample the image in Photoshop, but using GF is a somewhat higher quality. If you start with a very nice file, with very little artifacts (like film grain), you can go huge in GF. That’s with a low-compression JPeg or RAW file. If you took a tiny JPeg, that was highly compressed in the camera, and maybe wasn’t the sharpest file to begin with, any upsampling to give it more pixel resolution won’t really help.

‘Resampling’ is a checkbox in the Photoshop menus, Image Menu/Image Size. I tell everyone when they are changing a photo for most uses going bigger to have the ‘Resampling’ box unchecked, so that the image quality won’t suffer. You would leave it checked to have Photoshop add some fake pixels to try to make the image have a bit more resolution to print better at a large size. Genuine Fractals is a Photoshop add on that is designed to do the same thing, just a bit better.


As a side note, if you are making an image smaller, you leave the ‘Resampling’ box checked, as you are throwing away pixels and if you don’t have it checked, you are not really making the file size smaller (like for the web, or an e-mail photo).
Your best bet is to just do a test print early at the size you want to use and see how it looks. Maybe one with the normal file, and one with a resampled file to get to 200PPI@ the print size… and see how they compare. Let me know how a test like that goes.

The last point is what sort of camera you use. A file from a digital SLR of any price is much more likely to handle upsampling better than a file from a little snap camera. I discuss that in my class, but the image sensor is soooo much bigger and better in the SLRs (the bigger cameras where you can change lenses), and they invest a lot in how they compress the Jpeg files.