I'm Blind! : My Follies with Flash Photography

I'm one of those photo guys who thinks that nothing beats the rich glow of a summer sunset.  If I had it my way, I'd probably shoot in nothing but that kind of light.  The problems with that are pretty obvious. Firstly, sunset light only lasts about a couple hours a day.  The whole thing about the sun only being outdoors all the time doesn't help matters either :-).  

So in comes flash.  I don't use it very much.  I should probably practice with it more. And my lack of experience with it is probably glaringly apparent in my photos :-D. (See what I did there? Flash. Glaring.........  If you were cool, you would of laughed at that :-P)    You can probably tell in these photos that I took for my recently concluded photo journalism class, too.

The assignment was for an environmental portrait using flash. 

My subject: cousin, Teso, who is an ex-death metal guitarist.  (Thanks again, homie!).

So back to flash, after you get a decent exposure, you really have to look out.  It's easy to adjust for blown out foreheads and eyeballs and large harsh shadows.  But you have to be careful.  Because sometimes it's easy to miss little things. Like over-exposed reflections off objects away from the subject or small-uber harsh shadows, like the one on Teso's face from his hair.

On top of that, it can be hard to notice those things off the tiny LCD monitor on the back of your camera.  

Don't get me wrong.  I don't hate flash, and I'll probably like it more practice I get with it.  It's uber-cool when it comes to adding motion blurs, por ejemplo.

THE ROOF! THE ROOF! THE ROOF IS ON FIRE!!!!!

But, to conclude.

Moral of the story:  Nikon needs to invent an affordable and portable minnie sunset sun for photographers.

Thanks for those who read this thing (Hi Mom!) and feel free to leave any comments, questions or critiques below.

A Passion for Dance...

Thanks again to Ms. Habibi for letting me shoot her and her class.

 

Performance in Hemet

The Full Set can be seen on my flickr: HERE

Thanks for reading!

Jpeg vs Raw: An Epic Battle to Determine the Fate of the Universe!!!!!

When i first started shooting in Raw a little while ago, it was a major revelation.  There is so much more you can manipulate with raw, versus jpeg.  All the Photoshop sliders and micro adjustments at your disposal.  You can make a photo look completely different from the way that it was originally shot.  You can turn bursting early morning yellows into the warm embrace of late afternoon reds and oranges.

With Raw nothing is beyond my grasp! Reality is mine to bend and control!  With Raw at my disposal I shall control the continent!

NAY! THE WORLD!!!

Meglomaniacal Laughter!

 Or so I thought...

The thing about Raw, though, is that with all that power comes a butt-load of work.  There is a lot to process with Raw.  Like oodles.  Sure, you can just choose all of your images and make the same adjustments at the same time, but, boy howdy, a lot of them don't look good with the same adjustments.  So you'll have to go over and tweak them anyways.  And that's all well in good in some cases.  Like when I'm taking portraits, or stuff that I may later use for graphic work, I want that kind of control.  

But what my feeble mind is slowly starting to grasp is, when I'm photographing an event (thousands of photos are taken as oppose to hundreds) and you won't be needing to manipulate your photos all that much, Raw becomes more of a hassle than it's worth.

Case in point.  For my final project for my Photo Journalism class, I shot a wonderful class of belly dancers.  I was shooting in Raw to begin with, but halfway through the class, I found out that I didn't bring enough memory cards.  So I ended up switching to jpeg to save space. 
 

Roughly half of these images were shot in Raw and the other half in Jpeg. 

When I began photo-editing, with half my shots in raw and jpeg, I really saw no difference after the minimalist editing that needed to be done.  With the black and white and "don't touch it" style that is photo journalism, you really don't need to manipulate things all that much.  In the end, Raw was just a hassle and took up way more memory space than it was worth.

So… Moral of the Story:

When shooting events that you don't intend to go all photoshop crazy on, I recommend shooting in jpeg.

If you want to go all artsy fartsy, however, go with Raw.

Shout Outs to Ms. Hadia Habibi and her class!
You can visit her website HERE

Thanks for reading!  If anyone has any comments, questions or critiques, feel free to say so below.  :-)