Gone2themoon
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Gone2themoonParticipantHi,
its good enough but consider that you’d get 2 brand new Yongnuo YN560 for much the same. I’ve used them lots and personally, have never had trouble. Some people have had trouble mind you. I’ve got the 430ex and paid top dollar for it, i’d have 3 flashes for the price I over-paid for it.
Just my 2 cents.
IanGone2themoonParticipantOther than eBay, I wouldn’t know where to source bags.
May I suggest, wrapping them in brown paper, tied up with butcher string.
It has an old style to it and looks classy.Gone2themoonParticipantHi Martin, Yes!.
Ok I should have mentioned, I drive, so its all audio. and yes listening to all these has improved my skills ‘cos I’ve come across new ideas, new techniques, marketing tips, photographic ideas, new photogs to research and much more. Tips from the top floor has expalined a lot that I probably would have never have learned in practice. I fully agree with you about “practice by doing” but I cant “Do” when I’m driving. Its about 10 hours a week spent learing/exploring rather than listening to the same music every day. I’ve just run out of resources to stem the boredom in transit.Murchu
Cheers, I’ll have a look for the Brooks Jensen stuff and the 7 questions.
I’ve been through the History of Photography stuff, very interesting. Loved the one about Manipulating Photos, and Women in Photography.
I think the Art of Photography is Video too? Must CheckOthers i’ve been through are,
The Digital Story ( good )
Digital Photography Life ( ok )
Martin Bailey Photograpy. ( very very slow paced )
Internet Marketing. ( Non photo )Thanks for the Replys Folks.
Any other Suggestions?
Gone2themoonParticipantCutting against the grain here but, a monthly photo-mag subscription will see you inspired each month for at least a year, will give you resources to follow up on and will give you something to read as you improve your knowledge and skill. As for which one to choose? go with the free CD!
Gone2themoonParticipantThanks for the reply guys. I will try as suggested.
I really do suspect the shutter, but just dont want to admit it.
Its a second hand camera I only bought a month ago.
Will be hard to get money back at this stage.Gone2themoonParticipantHere’s some tips found on line, can’t remember where I got it but I emailed it to myself cos I thought it was good.
Especially the file managment stuff. In my opinion lightroom will save you hours! (50% off on adobe.com)
Happy reading.
g2tm~~~~~~~~~~~
Software:
– Fast Picture Viewer (incredibly fast culling)
– Photoshop
– Photographers shopping cart
– FileZilla ftp client – http://filezilla.sourceforge.net” onclick=”window.open(this.href);return false;Shooting/setup stuff:
– Synchronize the times of each camera
– Shoot RAW
– manual exposure
– I still use Av mode and partial metering for situations where the lighting changes more rapidly than I can meter manually.
-Sometimes I just use the histogram instead of the light meter.
-I never focus manually.Steps:
I do a first pass to do the initial cull, then I do a second pass to cull some more and do the color correction.1) Copy each card to a subfolder of the customers event folder on my hard drive. Manually check image counts and that file sizes aren’t 0.
Once verified copy all images to root of customers folder.3) Check to see all images are present. You can check using image numbers or visually, preferably both ways.
4) Change the sort order to by date modified and visually check the images are in the correct order. If they’re not change the sort order to by date.
5) Use the batch rename function to rename your images to something meaningful to you. I use a combination of the customer initials and initially a 4 digit number.
6 Fast Picture Viewer and cull the images.
– Hit the keys 1-5 to indicate how good the image is.
1=unusable for a technical reason,
2=duplicate image or not worth showing,
3=good image,
4=image that will probably go into an album,
5=image that will go into my portfolio.7) Open brige and use the filter panel to select images as follows.
Images I rated 1* are deleted immediately,
images I rated 2* are kept in case I need to do a head transplant or eye transplant (ie swap eyes/heads between pics). I rate duplicate images 2* and I rate quickly so I keep the dupes just in case I choose a blurry one or something. Customers aren’t told I do this, one saw them once and they want copies of every image, usually I explain why they don’t need them but on occasion i’ve given them out.8) Now I do color correction. This means I can make albums, prints, and a high res CD from the JPGs, I generate now without having to go back to the RAW image. Color temp presets can be helpful, but I usually adjust from the preset. I often use the highlight recovery and fill light sliders to reduce the extreme bright and dark patches of the image, as it’s to much dynamic range for print (to my eye). Using too much of the highlight reduction tool turns white to grey, I find the shadow highlight tool with highlights set to 10/10 more effective, but I only do this for images going in an album.
– By experience i’ve found that I don’t want the histogram to quite touch the right hand side, else my prints come back brighter than I prefer. Exception is when the main subject isn’t the brightest part of the image. I’ve done a whole bunch of 6×4″ test prints with my lab with different brightnesses and color temps, and have discovered that what I see on my calibrated screen isn’t quite what I get back, so I recommend doing similar tests. Take 2-3 images, bracket the white balance by -2000, -1000, 1000, and 2000, and for brightness by -1.5, -1, -.5, .5, 1, 1.5, and anything else you want to try.
– I have presets defined for B&W images & sepia. To make a B&W preset for this open any RAW image, drag saturation to -100, then tweak the sliders in the calibration tab to make the image look bettter. Hit the right arrow thingy, hit save settings subset, and tick the boxes you want to tick. I have a half dozen different presets, including one that resets all settings except the main tab ones. For prints I take the color photo into photoshop and use the channel mixer. In CS4 use the B&W checkbox, and split toning, both highlights and shadows set to orange with saturation of 10-15%
– Image is straightened if it needs it (shortcut key is A)
– I do a bit of clone tool type work in the ACR tool too (shortcut key is B). I think it’s called blemish removal or something.
– A few images are taken into photoshop and played with, the result saved as a PSD in the same directoy as the RAW images. The RAW I worked from is moved to a subdirectory called “RAW Processed” (or something like that). This is so when I batch the directory I don’t get two copies of the same file.9) New The order of using the sliders is important. Exposure comes first, in conjunction with blacks – they control the left and right hand edges of the histogram, and stretch the histogram as necessary. Highlight recovery comes in there somewhere too. The brightness comes next, it shifts the center of the histogram. Only then can color temperature be accurately set – of course you need a calibrated monitor. Once this is done you can start playing with contrast, and vibrance/saturation, or do your B&W/Sepia conversions.
10) Renumber all the keepers for the customer so they’re sequential. This is important, if you don’t do it the customer wants to see the “missing” images.
11) Any required photoshop work is done at this point. Mostly I do eye swaps, head swaps, basic things like that. I save the edited files as PSD files, in the Adobe RGB color space, mostly because my album company wants Adobe RGB. Most people should use sRgb. Once the edits are done I keep the psd files in the image directory, and I move the RAW files to a “Processed” subdirectory so I keep the RAWs in case I need them in future.
12) Once all images are rated I filter for 3 star or better images, select them all, right click and choose “open in bridge”. I then hit select all, set sRgb, hit save, choose the proofs folder, set quality to ten, and hit go. This can take 10-30 minutes depending on the number of images (down from 1-2 hours with my old PC). The PSD files need to be done using image processor.
14) Use image processor to batch the images to 600pixels on the longest side for proofing. I put them into about ten folders to correspond to parts of the day (ceremony, portraits, reception, etc).
15) The generated jpg images are uploaded to my website, after creating the gallery in the shopping cart. 500 proofs are about 30MB. I use FileZilla since it can upload a number of files at the same time, which speeds things up hugely because of latency and how ftp works.
16) The images created in step 7 are used to create a DVD slide show of proofs, using Proshow Gold. Very simple show, bit of royalty free music, default transition, “f” as the caption to put the filename onto each image.
17) Backups: until I have my images stored offsite on another hard drive I keep the cards with me at all times. I mirror my hard drive onto an external hard drive, which I keep in a secure location OUTSIDE of the building I work in. If it’s in the same place a fire can destroy everything. I only delete the images from your cards once the offsite backups have been done. I’ve never lost an image, and I doubt I ever will.
18) The album is predesigned using PhotoJunction remix, the customer see this when they come to see their images (a slide show of about 100 images set to music, on my 40″ LCD TV with a nice surround sound system). This is a sales tool. The basic steps of working with PJ are:
– Export my 4* and 5* images into an “album” subdirectory
– Create the PJ project, import the images, categorise into parts of the day
– Design album
– Export as PSD files
– Sharpen and retouch
– Send to album supplierGone2themoonParticipantIf I had to pick from your list, the 24-70mm would be my choice. You seem upset about the 28-70 as you’ve sought a repair before. 24-70 would fill that gap in your heart. It’s also my “lust after” lens. You’ve got a better line up there than most people who start in wedding/portrait stuff. Also, I must highly reccomend the yongnuo YN565EX, it’s the equivalent power of a canon 580 with most of the features for 1/3 the price. And then there’s the portability factor of small strobes over flash heads.
Gone2themoonParticipantMost DSLR will fit your needs. Just a matter of budget. I would suggest looking into some backgrounds or possibly a light tent, and some lighting. google and youtube are your friends. There are some fantastic Poduct lighting tutorials on youtube. have fun!
Gone2themoonParticipantSome really nice poses. I bet this couple were well pleased. Red ribbon looks a bit worn out. She looks uncomfortable in 8. Head dropped in 2 giving her a double chin. Maybe a tighter crop on 6, guys t-shirt pulling my eye. 5 is excellent idea. Hope the kid ain’t as hairy as dad!
Gone2themoonParticipantIf your asking “what camera setting should I use”, you probably should have said no to the Job. Doing a School shoot, is a quick way to piss a lot of people off in one day.
In terms of advice, get there early and set up your equipment, use manual mode to maintain a standard between photos.
Use your histogram, expose to the right, shoot RAW, and above all else watch the posing, uniforms, ties, hair and smiles or no matter how technically excellent your shot is, parents won’t be happy.
Good luck.Gone2themoonParticipantRead a bit about the different exposure metering systems offered in the camera and how to take advantage of them.
Gone2themoonParticipantBecause they can.
If they put a €250 price tag on it, people would think something has been cut out or reduced in quality.
Even the review refers to the canon lens as being a “professional lens”, it then even shows the CA’s and the Field Curvature to be worse on the Canon but still gives a higher Optical Rating than the Sigma. Whats that about like?Gone2themoonParticipantI like the locations and variance in the shots, nice backgrounds and little to distract from the couple.
in the first the couple are in shadow though, could there have been a better position for you to be in, where they were facing into the sun? Perhaps not?
Second, I like but I’m never sure if these shots should have both looking at the camera or both looking away?
third is my favourite, but she looks uncomfortable, and the dress (that she’s paid enough for) could be positioned better. wind might have been a factor?
Excellent Job on your Maiden Voyage, wish mine was as good.
IanGone2themoonParticipantI thought Amazon wont ship electronics to Ireland? Anytime I’ve tried, I get a message during the checkout?
Gone2themoonParticipantSupposedly one of two major announcments from Canon before the End of the Year. A place holder for canon users, against nikons announcments Nov3. D900? D3xII?
Also mentioned online is the coincidence that new cameras get revealed in a pre-olympic year.
If only I had a few grand spare…..
