It's January in Canada. Brrrr....

December is an active month. There’s lots of stuff going on, revolving around the holidays, people, parties… and winter is just beginning so you get your cold-weather stuff out in preparation and venture out to make sure everything works and keeps you warm. January is another story. It's a quiet time, and I have to work at getting motivated after the holidays.

Maybe it’s just the weather. As I write this, my thermometer says -17.6°C (that’s close to 0°F). It’s 8:30am and it’s dull out – f/8 at 1/15 sec, ISO 400. It’s snowing lightly, but you can see the wind swirling the snow off the ground, you know it’s cold out there. Every now and then, the snow drops off the heavily laden trees, making it look like a full-blown blizzard out there.

Last post, I showed you how the lake hasn’t yet frozen over, but now it has. The locals have put their ice fishing huts out and one guy I talked to said the ice was 9” (22cm) thick out there, and that was a couple of days ago when it was still hovering around the freezing mark. Last year I went out and took a few pictures of ice fishermen, I’ll probably do so again this year. I may even get a chance to go out and actually fish a little: it’s warm in the huts and it looks like a good excuse to relax and wet one’s whistle, so to speak.

OK, the huts are not really RGB (oh, you didn't notice?). Well the blue one is, but I coloured the others. The Red Umbrella Inn prepared the huts to be dragged out on the ice and took most of them out there on Saturday, January 2.

Inside one of their huts. Notice the heater and the mandatory "2-4".
This was taken last year.

This fellow was nice and cozy in his portable hut. Also from last winter.

Going to shoot some pictures out in the cold?

Just a few thoughts about what you should do if you’re taking your camera out to shoot pictures in the cold:

• Dress warmly. You can’t take good pictures if you’re shivering and you probably won’t have the patience to wait for that perfect shot if all you can think about is getting back indoors. Overdress, in layers so if you get too warm, you can open up things or take them off.
  
I have a very fine set of wool underwear. People think wool is itchy, but not this fine stuff. I’ve tried lots of other types but I’m always warm when I’m wearing this. And it actually wicks moisture away so it’s not too hot either. I wear them when I’m motorcycling or teaching the riding course on cool days. It’s called “Next to Skin” or something like that, and I bought it in a camping/outdoor store (Tent City on Steeles/Dufferin in Thornhill). I know the owner, and he told me to buy it, even though it was expensive. He was right: you can’t go wrong buying the best.
• Gloves are important. Yesterday I went out with a light pair of fleece gloves and within 5 minutes, my hands were cold. I actually have a set of layered gloves (inner glove liners, and over-mitts, which I admit I probably can’t press a shutter release with, but I can take them off to shoot and still not have bare hands. Anyway it’s winter in Canada, and if you don’t know how to dress for it, you should either stay indoors or live somewhere else.
  
• That camera body is cold. So is your tripod. Stop by the local hardware store and get that foam stuff they use for wrapping pipes, and put them around the legs of your tripod.
  

• Let’s talk about your camera. And your lens. They’re in a nice warm room, then suddenly you take them out in the cold. What happens? Not a lot. You would think that the air inside your camera, which contains a lot more moisture than the cold air can hold, would cause condensation to form. Maybe, but unless the camera is airtight, that moist air is going to get exchanged with outside air. So you might correct me if I’m wrong, but not much really happens, unless you do something silly like remove the lens and blow in the camera.
  
Do you wear glasses? Do they fog up when you go out in the cold? Not unless you breathe on them. But what happens when you come back inside? NOW THEY FOG UP. Why? Because the surface of the (glass or plastic) is colder than the air, and that moisture condenses on the cold surfaces. This can also happen inside your camera. So here’s a recent suggestion by Lance Gitter: seal your camera inside a big plastic bag when you come in from the cold (hmmm. I wonder if that would make a good book title? Nah, it might have been done before…). Now it’s surrounded by the cold outside air which contains very little moisture, so nothing will fog up. Let it slowly warm up to the inside temperature before opening the bag. Make sense?

Here’s a free suggestion. What’s it like inside your camera bag? I keep several packets of silica gel in the bag, which will absorb excess moisture. Where do you get silica gel? Try your local audio/video store – they often pack some in with electronic gear. Or motorcycle dealerships – Japanese bikes that come by seafreight from overseas have silica gel inside the crates, which the dealer throws away when they unpack the bikes. I found some at a shoe store: little packets inside every shoe box. A friendly store manager let me have a couple of dozen little packets.

• Cold temperatures affect your batteries. But you knew that. Just like a car battery, they deliver much less power in the cold, so keep it charged up and a spare in an inside pocket.

If the weather outside is frightening (tune stuck in your head?), you want to protect your camera against the elements. Pretty well all cameras are reasonably resistant to moisture, but not completely. So you can get them a little wet with no damage. WARNING: that is NOT true if you’re in a marine environment where there’s salt water. Salt will EAT your camera

I worry about water and stuff like windblown sand getting into the camera or in between moving parts. So I bought a “Storm Jacket” which I use when it’s nasty out. There are lots of different ones, but the one I bought has elastics at both ends so you can seal it at your lens hood, and you can leave the back open to access your controls and viewfinder.

This is mine. You can buy it here 

There are lots of different brands, ranging in cost from $15 up. Look here

Of course a simple solution is a plastic garbage bag with a hole torn in the bottom to stick the end of your lens through. You obviously can’t shoot through the plastic. You could also use a garbage bag as a raincoat, but doesn’t a real one make more sense?

I did go out to shoot a few pictures in the last few days. I think it was worth the effort. The snowmobile is the ubiquitous transportation mechanism to mid-lake, although people actually walk out on occasion.

I told you it was worth going out in the snowstorm to shoot pictures! This one's going in my favourites folder and is being submitted for competition as well.

Sunsets are different in the winter, too:

Some indoor photos!
Instead of going out in the cold, I decided to set up my light tent on the dining room table. I was curious if there would be enough light just relying on whatever came in through the windows. There was, because being on the tripod, I could simply increase the exposure time.

I was also curious whether I needed more than one light source. Turns out, I didn’t. I set the camera in ‘commander’ mode and remotely triggered the Nikon SB-600 , holding it in different places – inside and outside the light tent, from various angles. The differences were subtle. All of the following pictures used different setups, and they all look very similar.

This is a 60 Gb Creative Zen Vision M. It's for sale. Send me an email if you're interested in a steal!

I also played with direct lighting from a little flashlight.

So the message is, you don’t have to go out in the cold to take some neat pictures.

Light tents are not expensive, and easy to use. They fold down like a reflector disk, but damned if I can figure out how to fold it back into its original shape!

You can get one here.

A quick word about Lightroom.
I love it. I find myself editing things much faster and especially, when I output images. The pictures for this Blog took me about 5 minutes to prepare: I saved them in a collection called “Blog Topics”, then selected the ones that I wanted, clicked “Export” and chose a preset to fit them in a 1280x1024 container. Done. All I had to do after that was drag them across the network to the other computer (which I probably could have done directly, but I wanted to keep them in one place for archiving).

I still get confused a bit – for instance I’ll select a whole new collection and find the image I was looking at before still on the other monitor. I dunno why! Next time I’ll talk about the workflow, and flagging, rating and labeling images. I want to work on my routine a bit more before I share it.

Have a great day!

Long time No write!

What have I been doing for 2 weeks? Not writing in the Blog, that’s for sure.

The photo tip I have for you today is how to buy outstanding full colour business cards with your own artwork.

Lots of photographic stuff that I’ll talk about a bit; not all of it taking pictures that I can show you, though. . I’ve only been shooting pictures sporadically except for a couple of assignments (there's a lot of that going around. I just read Shannon's Blog and I think we're in the same place!), I’m up North and actually enjoying the onset of winter,

What happens during a power failure? With not much to do, I played with taking spooky pictures and I put my crockpot on top of the fireplace to hopefully keep cooking my dinner! This was a longish exposure, moving the camera, with a flash at the end.

I’ve been working on some workshops and seminars. Let’s start there.

I did a workshop on non-destructive Photoshop techniques for the Club that I wasn’t satisfied with. I got off-track and didn’t prepare well enough. You ever go brain-dead? How about in front of 24 people? How many times have I hit alt-shift and clicked on a layer mask to superimpose it on a layer so I could see both; I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to do it at the workshop. Lesson learned, I’ll do better next time. Best part of it was the “head swapping” exercise from the group shots that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

I’m working on developing some workshops which I’ll teach or work with experts teaching. We’re not there yet, but watch for it at http://www.photography.to/ (you have to admit that we got a cool web address!). Stay tuned.

On to some hardware stuff. I’ve tried to live a philosophy that I’d like to share with you. “Always buy the best”. It doesn’t always work — money jumps up and rears its ugly head — sometimes I buy lesser quality stuff just to try it, intending fully to upgrade later. Such was the case when I found a “cheap” graphics tablet at Tiger Direct. It was made by “Genius” and was only $70. How could I NOT buy it. I knew that I really should buy a Wacom tablet but this one leapt off the shelf into my hands.

Mistake. Not only did it cause my computer to crash (with no available restore points – another sad tale), but also I discovered that (a) it doesn’t work with dual monitors and (b) the drivers for CS4 aren’t written yet. Fortunately, I was able to get my money back. Now I’m looking for a REAL Wacom tablet. That said, although there’s a learning curve for working with a tablet, it’s very cool. I’ll get one soon.

Read my lips. “Always buy the best”. Don’t put yourself in the position of saying, “Gee, I wish I had bought the [fill in the blank here]”.

I mentioned above that I shot some assignments this week. I did. One was my usual ID card thing, I’ve got that down to a science. I shoot about 40 people, bring a small printer with me and by 10am, I’ve printed and delivered all their pictures.

Yesterday, however, I had an interesting project: I got to shoot some live models. As opposed to dead ones, like rocks and trees. Unfortunately, the client won’t let me post any of the photos I shot, but it was really fun. Let’s just say the goal was to create a holiday greeting card for a retailer and the idea was to have the store owner with a couple of beautiful women draped all over him, a glass of champagne, “Happy Holidays”. The women were spectacularly beautiful and so easy to shoot. We did do some really sexy shots as well that the client can’t really use publicly and I learned that posing them – especially the one girl who was experienced as a model – was not that difficult.

What was tough was the venue – a small store. Good backgrounds were hard to find (the client wanted to show the store, so I couldn’t bring a backdrop). They also didn’t want me setting up a bunch of lights, so… Gary Fong to the rescue! I love using this damned simple piece of Tupperware plastic and if you don’t have one, get one. Now. Go. (I’m a Loblaw’s commercial for Cheesecake). I wish I could show you the pictures. At one point, I set the D300 to commander mode and the remote trigger on the flash on. I put the flash over on a counter about 10 feet away from the camera. I added a little fill light from the on-camera flash (almost 2 stops under). Excellent!

Another neat trick was to use the radio remote shutter release. I set the camera up on a tripod, and I was able to walk over and talk with and position the models, get them looking in the right direction, and shoot by pushing the button in my hand. Or use Live View and stand back and compose the picture on the viewscreen.

It occurs to me that if you don’t have a D300 or at least aren’t familiar with some of the Nikon features, you won’t know what I’m talking about. “Commander Mode” is setting up the camera to control a remote flash, not attached to the camera. “Live View” is being able to compose your picture looking at the big LCD on the back of the camera instead of through the viewfinder.

I spent a few days up North last week, and the weather caused a few challenges. It snowed. In Toronto, they got a couple of centimeters, here: almost a foot. Heavy, wet snow. So heavy that the branches of my evergreen trees, which normally the oil delivery truck can drive under, were actually touching the ground!



The stuff also stuck to my satellite dishes — TV was OK but the internet dish (Xplornet) couldn’t connect. I hate being off-line. I also hate ladders, but I did climb up and clean it off so I could get back on.



While I was up there, I plowed snow off the roof, then I cleared the driveway, breaking the shear pin in the snowblower.



Long day…

I was exhausted and although I shot a few pictures, I wasn’t inspired. However I did shoot this scene on the way home on Thursday.

There was no light in the cabin when I shot this. It was daytime. Can you say, "Photoshop"? By the way, this was a 1/20 sec exposure with the 200mm VR lens, resting on a fence gate.

So on to our photo tip of the day. Of the week. OK, of the semi-month!

FacZen Photography Tips Business cards from your own pictures! Due to my former life as a desktop publisher and print broker, I still have some wholesale contacts with people who don’t deal directly with the public. One of them is really great trade printer. Although they do other stuff too, they focus on Business Cards. And they’re really good at it. They do runs of 1000 cards or more at a time. Their claim to fame is a full-colour card, printed on both sides of thick, rich stock, coated with a high gloss or now with a matte lamination. I tested the latter last week and I LOVE the rich results. Now that said, you need to have the right picture to benefit from the matte finish. It should have plenty of “pop” and not too much detail and complexity. If it does, glossy works better. If you go to http://www.photography.to/, you can see what I put on the back of the card, although I punched up the saturation when I did. Those crop marks and stuff are part of my graphic design. If you want some cards with your own images on them, I can get them for you. Here’s what you need to do: For each side (of course you could leave the back blank) you need a 3.75” x 2.25” image at 300dpi. They’ll trim 1/8” all around so you end up with a 3½” x 2” card. There’s a template you can use to show you where it will be trimmed and the area you should keep your type in. Ask me for it. You have to finish it completely. Lay all the type down, do all the stuff to complete it, flatten it, crop it to size, and sharpen it appropriately, You need to convert it to CMYK from RGB. Now save it as a .tif file, lossless if any compression. How much is it going to cost you? $95 plus taxes and shipping. If you’re in Ontario, that works out to about $120, all in. Call any printer and ask them to quote on 1000 cards printed 4/4 full colour full bleed on 14 point C2S card stock with writeable aqueous coating on both sides. Delivered to your door in a week or so by UPS. Subtract $15 if you only want it printed on one side. Add $35 if you want it on 16.5 point stock with matte lamination. Remember: you’re doing ALL the artwork. We’re just printing what you give us, so we’re not responsible for any typos, errors, etc. Yes, I’m making a (small) markup on this, but someone has to pay for my Blog! Contact me directly at photography@faczen.com for more information.

Here it comes again!

Yep, winter. I drove up North today, fighting sloppy slush most of the way. When I got to Kirkfield, I had to stop for this picture. Hope you like it (the picture, not winter. Well I hope you like winter too...).



So how did I create this image, you may ask? If you didn't ask, that's OK, I'm going to tell you anyway. I'm putting on my "instructor" hat.

First thing I did was to recognize what (I think) is a good photo opportunity. I drove past it, thought about it, turned around and grabbed the camera. Braving the snow and sleet, and the trucks going by threatening to inundate me with wet slush, I chose my viewpoint and took the exposure. Before I did, I made sure that I selected 200 ISO, and I spot-metered on the building because I didn't really want an average exposure. Snow is NOT 18% grey... of course I took several exposures, mostly to find the best viewpoint because I was pretty sure of the exposure values themselves.

I opened the images in Bridge and selected the one I wanted to work on. Double-clicking opened it in Camera Raw where I did some minor adjustments. I didn't touch the colour balance -- I didn't know then what I was going to do with it, but it looked pretty good to me. I brought the exposure down, added some black, and a bit of sharpening. Then I opened the image in CS3.

So here's the original image I started with:



First thing I did was to hit ctrl-J. That opens a new layer with the whole image (it actually creates a new layer with whatever is selected, but the whole image was selected...). Next I looked for problems (OK, "challenges"). There was an icecream ad on the right side of the front of the building. There was a power line. I didn't like the concrete pillar on the left. There was a telephone pole. I decided I could crop the pole out, but the rest would have to be cloned. So I got to work with the clone stamp. Oh, and there was a fuzzy water spot on the side of the building (it was snowing, you know. I did get some on the lens).

That took about 15 minutes. A little touch up with "Levels" to increase contrast, and I saved my work as a .psd file. Now I got the "black and white" feeling, and opened a "black and white adjustment layer". I went through the default filters, the one I liked best was the yellow one; but it wasn't quite what I wanted so I moved some sliders around. I wanted the GATEHOUSE sign more contrasty, so I decreased the red and magenta sliders, and increased the yellow.

I started cropping it. I used a preset ratio of 3:2 (4200px x 2800 px) but that didn't give me enough foreground with the telephone pole cropped out, so I turned on "perspective" and dragged the vertical corners until I included what I wanted to see, while maintaining my aspect ratio. I slightly adjusted the angles to straighten both sides of the building.

Saving the image again, I wondered what it would look like with some selective colour, especially on the sign, so I clicked the layer mask on the adjustment layer and started painting with black to mask the sign. Cool! I flipped the layer eyeball off for a second and thought the window frames would look good in colour too, so I started painting again on the mask.

This all took another 10 minutes or so. I blew it up, ran 'round the edges and looked for problems, fixed a couple of things. I saved it again, then thought I'd put it on a matte; so I increased the canvas size by 400 px then selected the image part, copied it onto another layer and added a drop shadow. Almost done! I wanted to name the picture, so I did and matched the ink colour of the name to the red in the picture.

Another save, then we're done. Well almost -- I wondered if it would look better as a vignette, so I reloaded the image just after the canvas size increase but before the drop shadow, and ran a vignette action. I didn't like it. Back to the other version.

I flattened the image, sharpened it a bit, then saved it as a .jpg. Finally, I ran an action I call "resize 1000" which changes the horizontal dimension to 1000 px, to downsize it for the blog. I saved that one separately.

So all-in-all, about 30 minutes in PhotoShop. I kind of like it, do you? Comments are welcome, good or bad!