July 2016 – Lightroom, Composition, Sports Photography, Histogram
I’ve said it before, I’m a Lightroom user. My favorite all time Lightroom quote is “There are two types of photographers, those who use Lightroom and those who should”. This month we have a link on Light Stalking titled 5 Free Lightroom Resources all Photographers Should Know About. You can find it here.
http://www.lightstalking.com/5-free-lightroom-resources-all-photographers-should-know-about/
One of the more effective techniques in photography is to use elements of your scene to frame the subject of your picture. How you frame it can add to the interest and understanding of your subject immensely. Here’s a good article on Picture Correct titled of all things, Framing in Photography.
http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/framing-in-photography/
Ok, I’m back on my Lightroom thing here. This is a full length Master Class by Tim Grey titled How to Approach Photo Editing in Adobe Lightroom. Allocate yourself a big block of time and grab your coffee/wine/scotch and settle in because this video runs about an hour and 45 minutes.
http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/how-to-approach-photo-editing-in-adobe-lightroom-masterclass/
I’ve mentioned the fact that I don’t usually take pictures of anything that can talk. My granddaughters are the exception. I also don’t take pictures of sports. Well guess what? My 6 year old granddaughter plays soccer and she asked me to drive up to Asheville to photograph her game. It’s like talking to your wife; all you can say is “Yes dear”. So I went off to shoot soccer in Asheville. I don’t even understand the game. Just lots of guys running around, they don’t score very often and there are no time-outs so when the players get tired, one of them lies down on the field until they bring out a stretcher to take him off. That apparently gives him enough time to rest because as soon as he’s off the field he jumps up and goes back in the game. Weird. Anyway, I wish I had found this article before I went on that shoot. It’s on Picture Correct and titled Capturing the Motion of Sports Photography.
http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/capturing-the-motion-of-sports-photography/
When I first started shooting, I learned quickly that you looked at the LCD on the back of the camera to check your focus and composition, but that was totally useless for checking exposure. For exposure you had to check your histogram. It gave you an accurate representation of whether you blew out your highlights or blocked up your shadows. If you were shooting RAW you had a better chance of fixing this in post processing than if you were shooting JPEG, but it’s really easy to fix it in camera just by looking at your histogram. Here’s video tutorial by a guy named Aaron Nace who operates a site called Phlearn (Photoshop Learn). Arron’s a great educator and his site is filled with great tutorials. This lesson is titled How to Use the Histogram in Photoshop and he takes the histogram and shows you how to use it along a levels adjustment layer to fine tune your image in Photoshop to get the most out of it. He goes from basic explanations to some pretty good tricks at the end of the lesson. It takes about 20 minutes. Here’s the link.
https://phlearn.com/how-to-use-the-histogram-in-photoshop
Here’s an interesting video just for fun. It uses Canon cameras but the subject matter can apply to any brand. Back in 2003 canon brought the 300D with a frame rate of 2.5 fps. This year we have the new 1DX with a rate of 14 fps. This video highlights the difference by playing the sounds of those shutters. Pretty cool.