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.  :-)

Photos from PIASC

Here are some photos of the Riverside Entrants and I from the PIASC dinner a couple weeks ago.  They're not mine (I was too deep in food coma to take anything good), I think they give a good overall impression of the night.

See the whole album HERE 

Thanks for reading! :-)

What You Say Matters…

A lot of times when I have to design a poster or graphic or something, I tend to get too caught up in the visuals and not so much on the message.  Especially early on in my visual education, I'd mostly look to create something that looked good, and then try to find or make up text that would fit it.  And to tell the truth, that worked some of the time.  I'd just stumble onto an appropriate look, and then find words that seemed to work.  But, that is/was no way to be consistent.  And if you're talking about being a designer, and having some sense of control over your work, "hit and miss" strategies like that definitely wouldn't be the way to go.

And that's where research comes in.  It's important when you're starting something, to not just stumble over your thousands of bookmarked Photoshop tutorials, find the coolest looking effect, and design around it.  Think about what you're going to say and why you're going to say it, then start trying to think of ways to visually communicate that idea. 

And sometimes, what you say can be more important than what you see.  Which I think was the case with the PAiSC Truck Graphic competition that I entered last month.  The project was to design a truck "wrap" to market printing as a viable, green industry.

Here's what I came up with.


After looking over what the other applicants submitted, there were a lot of pretty good looking ones, and some that I think were much better looking than my submission.  But the thing that I think set mine apart was the thought I put into what I wanted to say. A lot of the applicants, although visually appealing, didn't have a strong message, or in one case didn't even come up with an original message, just taking the headline off the PIASC website.

You can judge the other submissions for yourself on the PIASC website: HERE

My personal favorite was one submitted by Natasha Granell, a student from Fullerton College.

It's way better looking than mine, but I think the text get's lost in the graphic, and it's probably a little too abstract/artsy for this very commercial competition.

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

Weekend Photoshop Fun

Just a little fun with a not so great photo I took the other week.

original

 Hopefully the end result doesn't look too fake :-).

I've dubbed it, "The Night of Decievery!"

Any comments, suggestions or critiques?  Feel free to leave them below ;-).

I'm not Stealing! I'm paying homage!

Don't steal!  Stealing within design or elsewhere is wrong…. However… it's perfectly ok to pay homage to someone else's work.  So don't steal.  Just pay homage to a design you like within your own ;-). 

But, all kidding aside, sometimes when you don't have any concrete ideas of where to to take a design, mimicking someone else's can get you started.  And getting started is always the hardest part.  Not only that, but once you get started and have things on screen to work with, you can mix and match the different elements that you've "homaged"  in order to make the design your own.  And this was the case with the Print and Graphics Scholarship Foundation poster I created for their design competition.

At first I wasn't sure what direction I wanted to take my design.  So after a quick Google search, I looked at a couple of posters of previous applicants.  Including. last years winner. 

The previous year's winner. It's a bit too intense for me.  Really bright colors are splashed everywhere and the layout is a bit all over the place.
 

I like the simple color scheme and layout of this poster.

So after deciding to "pay homage" to the design above, I looked back at some of my previous work and found something I made earlier that I could also "homage" from.

Something I made when trying to create a logo.

After I had these elements and ideas on screen, it didn't take too much time to put them together into something new.

My Final Design.  PGSF Scholarship Poster

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to see more of my graphic work or photography be sure to check out my Flickr and Facebook.  And if you have any comments, suggestions or critiques feel free to leave them below ;-).