Recent Work- Hilite Recovery

Photographic technology is nothing short of amazing. But with great power comes great responsibility. Or something like that. Wait, did I really just quote a superhero movie?

My point is that you can achieve some incredible results not only with your camera but in post production as well. But it doesn’t always mean you should. Case in point for me has to do with the “latitude” of digital photography. That is to say, how bright your camera can see vs how dark. There are a lot of people who see blown hilites as completely unnecessary and downright sacrilege. I am not one of those people. I have no issue with underexposing some parts of the image and if some hilites go off the scale, hey, that’s life.

Now, that being said, I did a little work on a recent image I made. It started out of curiosity after I was speaking with Chris Marquardt the other day and I showed him this shot. I went into a little rant about how I did not care about the overexposed bits and while I could probably pull some back because I shot it in RAW I didn’t feel I needed to and BLAH BLAH BLAH. Chris agreed wholeheartedly but I got the feeling he was just being nice as anyone who has met him knows he is a good guy. So I got to work.

I went back into Aperture and brought back the overexposed bits. However, I made the decision that I did not want to bring it all back. For instance, the sky should stay where it is. But what if I recovered the reflection in the pavement? There are probably better ways to do this but here’s what I did- brought the new image into photoshop and laid it over top of the original and then just erased the parts I didn’t want from the new layer. The end effect is that most of the picture is untouched except for the reflection.

Here are the two images together in an “After and Before”. Which image do you prefer? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Recent Work- Shadows

I haven’t posted recent work in quite some time so I’m going to make a conscious effort to do so from now on. Furthermore, I will try and spread the themes around a little because once the summer hits there is likely to be a flood of baby photos. Great, just what people need to see. More baby photos. I promise to keep that to a minimum. So…..

I was walking around town the other day, shooting photos for the weekly challenge that Adam and I engage in on The Two Hosers Photo Show, and decided to experiment a little with shadows in broad daylight. The sun was getting lower in the sky creating really intense light on the cobblestones streets. Rather than look for shaded areas or keep my back to the sun, I decided to shoot into it and see what I produce.

These shots were made with a Canon 5D mkII and a 50mm f1.4 lens. In order to get these exposures I dialed in ISO 100 and as fast a shutter speed as I could manage- sometimes up to 1/8000 sec in order to maintain a wide aperture and get some DOF.

The Invisible Camera

Today is April 1st and that means part two of the Invisible Camera video got released. You can check it out here.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check this out first.

Now for a little backstory…..

Late last year I was a guest on the popular photography podcast Tips From The Top Floor. (Turns out Chris Marquardt’s studio is just down the street from me.) Then, last month, I was working on a promo video for his iPhone App called Pocket Chris when he showed me his latest project- a handcrafted pinhole camera.

I was immediately struck with the idea of making a glass version and promoting it with a spoof video on Youtube. At first I couldn’t tell if Chris liked the idea until I got an e-mail the next day saying that he had ordered a prototype. Suddenly the game was afoot.

I wrote a script, the camera arrived and we started production- a few evenings in the studio and one on location in the woods.

Once the video was ready we had to decide on a strategy. The internet has made April 1 very difficult so we opted to release it a little early and let the momentum build for the big reveal. Chris has a pretty loyal following on Twitter so he started the ball rolling there. I think it’s fair to say that we were both surprised with speed that this picked up out of the gate.

It started to get picked up by a few prominent blogs (that we suspect were playing along with the ruse) and then it spread all over the world in many different languages.

You can get the full story on the Blame Canada episode of TFTTF here.

My homepage is here.

The original Youtube video is here.

And part 2 can be found here.