Black eyes

Last post from this year. 2011 was interesting but turbulent year and it also meant resurrection for this blog with lots of new posts. Based on google statistics some people were also reading it so I try to keep posting here more stuff always when time for that. Happy New Year 2012!

Jar of fireflies

We had good outdoor location scouted but as the weather was really bad and raining whole day, all the photos from this shoot were done inside. Great that the Saara had access to this building which provided selection of indoor backgrounds to use in photos. More photos after the jump.

Gwendolyne

 Rainy & dark December, so time for another set of photos from autumn.

Jodie

This photo was taken at the early November when autumn was switching to winter but still some leaves left in the ground to give color. I have been recently trying to use just the ambient light for outdoor photos. It makes working faster as you can just focus on taking photos and not carrying or setting up lights. Colder the weather gets, less time you want to spend with tweaking the lights. For this photo ISO was pushed to 400 and VR from 70-200mm helped to keep the shot sharp.

Lens statistics

It was interesting to check Lightroom lens metadata statistics from the main catalog. By looking just the numbers, 24-70mm/f2.8 is my most used lens with over 11000 photos in the catalog. 50mm/f1.8 comes really close by having only 1000+ shots less taken with it. For me, surprising parts were the big amount of photos taken with super wide angle lens (Sigma 10-20mm) and that I have taken almost as many photos with 35mm/f2 than with 50mm/f1.8.

Photos in 0mm category are from MF lenses or corrupted images where camera lens info was lost from file. Yes, that can happen when memory card gets corrupted.

While I think lenses are not that critical for making the images, I like to test them. Especially when there is opportunity to test some special gear like MC ARAX 35mm/f2 or long telephoto lenses. I own only few of the lenses in the list and by looking statistics I could make most of my images just with 24-70mm zoom and one longer prime.

Profoto Umbrella XL

Profoto Umbrella XL, latest addition of light shaping tools from Profoto. First impressions and sample portrait photos taken in studio after the link.

Sugared

Fashion shoot with maniac girl in the land of sugar & trains. Best part of using candy as props is that you can eat them after the shoot. Models are so adamant about their diet that they can't eat them anyways :)

Pin-up

Teaching again

Yours truly, teaching portrait retouching basics about month ago. Non destructive image editing with layers was new to some listeners and I heard they updated image editing workflow after my presentation. When I teach Photoshop basics, I mention the layers, masks and blending modes to be the most fundamental tools with the software.

Problem with some Photoshop books are that they list everything you can do with software but don't focus on getting the workflow basics on the right track. But we all started from the zero, and first images were edited by running tens of silly filters to them. Oh those were the days.

It is amusing how much laughter you can generate in the audience by demonstrating liquify filter to create some photoshop disasters.

Photo: Lothar Mallon

Dr. Sketchy

Promo photo for Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School Suomi.
Models: Tin Ker Bell and Jackie O'Lantern. Small berets by Molla Mills. Drawings by Aiju Salminen.

Graffiti artist

Trama, graffiti artist


Making of N9 wallpaper graffiti


Setup for above time lapse

London & Bristol

It was good to see merry old England again. Last time was 11 years ago, time flies. English breakfast & lunch is still something that requires time to get used to. Or what would the life be without bacon?




And one from Bristol

Testing colors

Lightroom is awesome for quick testing of color adjustments (split tones, faux cross process etc.). Doing same things in Photoshop is much slower while it provides more ways for fine tuning the results with masks, opacity changes and so on. I spent some time to make this 3x2 photos .PSD file for testing different color toning combinations and collecting different tweaks under one file. Each color/contrast change effect is organized as own layer group and file can be always updated by dragging/creating more layer groups to it. This was good sandbox approach to test new color tonings as the result can be seen immediately for 6 different images.

Ahtolaiset

Ahti. From the editorial shoot for Nina Lahtinen's clothes in Espoo forest. This was done at the early autumn time. While scouting locations before starting the shoot, we were momentarily lost in woods. Never venture into woods without map & compass... :)

Travel photo editing

I wanted to play around with iPad image editing apps during summer vacation to test how they work with camera kit. Usual scenario when you travel without laptop and need to do some image editing. Some quick notes for couple of the well known image editing iPad apps.

Photoshop Express

This is quite far from real desktop Photoshop if compared by number of features, but can you really complain as it can be freely installed to your Ipad.

Photogene

Good number of tools and possible to undo multiple steps. App comes with presets for retro or other effects if you are in search for quick effects to spice your photos. What I liked in Photogene was the way to allow resizing image before sending it to mail/service and ability to view camera Exif & IPTC metada. Editing the IPTC metadata was also possible.

Photoforge 2

UI with rolling list of editing commands didn't felt as intuitive to use as UIs from other editing apps. But support for layers and blending modes gave this app more of real Photoshop feel. Seeing editing history as thumbnails was another bonus as was the possibility for real 1:1 zooming of photos.

Snapseeed

I liked the gesture based editing controls & tools selections but lack of zoom & limited undo options lowered little bit overall value. With latest updates, crop tool got the much needed aspect ratio selections but resize seems to be still missing.

With one or two of these apps you can do all the needed basic image edits and lot more while not having access to full Photoshop or similar software. Editing photos with iPad was fun & easy but works best when you only need to tweak just few images. Retouching tens or hundreds of images especially in detailed level is something where you still need desktop with bigger display & mouse/drawing pad for precise brush/mask control.

I was going to test few other apps but drifted away by playing Plants vs Zombies HD and other games with Ipad...

Steampunk

Visited yesterday Ofelia market. One guest from the event with steampunk styled hat.

 

Steampunk glamour fashion show.

Focus breathing

Handheld photos made from around 2 meter distance @ 200mm (AF-S 70-200VRII left & AF-D 80-200 right). Because of heavy focus breathing (change of focal lenght by focus distance) of new AF-S 70-200/f2.8 VRII you get lot less than 200mm FOV when focusing close to minimum focus distances (1.4-2m) :/  By reviews I wasn't sure how big drawback this would be in real use, but now after using the 70-200VRII some times at studio, it feels annoying. For headshots, you need to sometimes crop final image while older 80-200 would have delivered tightly framed shot. 70-200 with this trait is still fantastic lens and VRII makes it awesome for low light shooting. Would I have ever noticed this without internet reviews? Probably not :) Ignorance is bliss.

Studio session with flowers

From the first studio shoot with D700. Taken with AF-D 85mm/f1.4. 85mm with FX-body feels little bit too short for this kind of tighly framed headshots. So I need to start using more of my longer lenses (100mm macro & 70-200mm) for studio photography.

Ghostbusters

Fun shoot with Hell's Inc. Ghostbusters Finland. This was taken at studio using gridded SB-800 as key light and Pro-7b with gridded softbox as kicker. Smoke from smoke machine.


We had plan to take the photos on location but weather turned out really bad so we ended up taking most of the photos in studio.


One from outdoors. Group's costumes raised some interest with the locals :)