There’s a relatively well-known quote attributed to Woody Allen; “If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough.” In photography, failure is the norm, embrace it. I made a tutorial video that I hope helps you be OK with failure:
It’s been a while since I made a video about Photoshop techniques. I did a shoot recently using a white vinyl seamless background, and it had lots of folds, creases, and even dirt. I easily fixed all of it using Photoshop, as well as some other little fixes that my client requested. The cool thing is, even though I used Photoshop CC for this video, virtually everything here can be done in Photoshop Elements 9 or above!
This post is aimed at those of us who are tasked with getting a family photo in crappy light, while being asked to “hurry up we want to eat”, while trying to get a large group to semi-cooperate! In this scenario I had my camera, a Fuji X100S, and one speedlight triggered via wireless transmitter…..and the most important factor…..a white ceiling. It was the ceiling that allowed me to pull this off.
Not to long ago all of my photo gear was stolen. All of it. Out of my car. In my driveway. $6000+ worth of gear that took me years to accumulate. Having been through that experience, and having found out the hard way that my homeowner’s policy only covered 1/3 of the replacement cost, I can make a few suggestions as to how you can protect yourself against theft.
I made this video to demonstrate the stopping power of speedlights. I used 3 speedlights so I wouldn’t need to use any one at full power. The flash duration is slowest at full power. I used speedlights by 3 different companies; Canon, LumoPro, and Yongnuo. There fall-off times varied slightly, but at 1/4 power on each, the duration for all 3 was slightly faster than 1/2000th. That’s fast enough to stop most movement, but the tiny birds visiting my bird feeder were unbelievably quick. I can’t say I got super-sharp freeze-frame, but I did get pretty darn close. Watch the video to see how I did it.
