See the Information You Have
Color management is absolutely crucial for your workflow. If you do not color manage you might as well forget about making good images. Color management can be daunting to take on, but it really is not as difficult as you might believe. I’m going to try to use as little technical lingo as possible and keep it simple because it can be simple! It can be broken down into three segments: monitor calibration, color space, and color profiles.

First of all, monitor calibration. If you have ever walked down the aisle of Best Buy and seen all of the different tvs, you will quickly see that even though they have the same picture running into it they all look different. One looks dull, another looks bright, another looks a little warm, the other looks a little green, etc. and you no longer know which one is “right”. Computer monitors are no different. Every single one has its own quirks that make it “off”. A monitor calibrator knows what different colors should be through measurements and makes your computer screen display those same numbers by making a profile. A color profile is simply the computer telling the monitor how to read and display color. Its science and math that we do not need to know, but it is science and math that we desperately need.

If you are new to monitor calibration, I would recommend either the Spyder 3 by Datacolor or the Colormunki by X-Rite. Both do a good job, with the colormunki also being able to do printer profiles. The common suggested starting points for monitor calibration would be:

1. a white point of 6500K
2. gamma at 2.2
3. brightness no more than 120 candelas per inch squared.

You want your brightness that low for a couple of reasons (my monitor came at about 300 candelas per inch squared). First, any brighter will too bright compared to printing papers and thusly your prints will be dark. Secondly, that low of brightness allows you to see details in highlights well (essentially your monitor blows out highlights if too bright – you can no longer see detail that is actually there).

Also you need your room to be “tuned” in to accurate color:

1. a room with the light temperature of 5000K. At 5000K, you simulate daylight, which is the temperature by which we know any color (you know what red, green, and blue are from the outside world – however I would calibrate the monitor to 6500K because the way monitor technology works, 5000K will look too blue).

2. Your monitor should be the brightest thing in the room. Otherwise you have glare happening.

3. However dumb this sounds, I can tell you from experience have neutral colors surrounding you. I suggest painting your walls a neutral color. Also wear neutral dark clothing. Why? Color cast. Bright yellow walls will effect what you see on your monitor. The more neutral the color around you, the more accurate your calibration and day-to-day color will be.

Lastly, get a wide gamut monitor – Eizo or NEC are the two main brands for these. Wide gamut monitors can display colors as wide (and some wider) than AdobeRGB. I know your Apple Cinema monitor looks cool, but the color gamut is quite bad – roughly the size of sRGB.

This graph shows what color ranges ProPhoto, Adobe RGB, and sRGB color spaces have. It also shows a common paper type for printing. Look at all the greens, blues, and yellows a narrow-gamut monitor (sRGB), like the Apple cinema displays, cannot render. Most cameras capture the color space of around ProPhoto RGB. Look how much your monitor cannot show what your camera can take?

Here are the items I mentioned in the post:
Spyder
Colormunki
Eizo wide-gamut monitor
NEC wide-gamut monitor

I will pick up right where I left of with color spaces next.

Cheers!
PK

1. INTENTION – One of the worst conditions of a wedding photographer is the “spray-and-pray” mentality – shoot as much as you can hoping you get something worthwhile. I try to challenge myself to not release the shutter until I see an image I would want to display in my home. “Now hold on,” you may say, “you mean family pictures in front of the altar and cutting the wedding cake and all of the other boring moments of the day?” Yes. Now before you throw me aside as idealistic dreamer, think about this. Have you never captured a simple moment in an eye catching way? You know, that feeling when you see that one image out of the thousand you took and it just sticks out from the other twenty that look almost identical – it’s like it just speaks, “I’m the one you were trying to get.” This is what I’m talking about.

One of my goals as a wedding photographer is to share the story of the day. Cutting the cake most likely will go into a wedding album – so how can I put it into an album that will cohesively and uniquely add to the story? You then begin to search for ways you see the scene through your singular vision. The result, even though it is a simple, average moment can truly fit your style and vision. You do not have to change the rules of photography, you just have to keep yourself accountable to your artistic vision and not fall back on pure documentation. Those images will be boring, zap your creative energy, and most likely be passed by when you cull and when your clients look at them.

2. VISUALIZE – Intention leads straight to visualization 100% of the time. You know what you want and you immediately see it in your mind’s eye and it’s begging to cohere with reality. Many times what will dictate even what lens and exposure you want is this visualization of the final image. And I mean final image as in the image you will deliver clients at the end of your workflow.
This image is an image I saw as soon as I saw this scene. There were issues though. It was about 2 p.m. and there was no way I could have gotten the contrast of the sky and the foreground with one shot. So I got my place and had them walk. I knew I wanted them in that part of the frame because the tree right next to them stands out so I know the eye will go right to them. I had them walk back and forth twice “Like you were just taking a walk together after a date.” The beauty of it was the moment between them: holding hands shows connection, his glance shows love and care, and her posture shows vulnerability. After I got the moment I wanted, I took a snap of the sky knowing I can preserve detail and a low-noise final image if I do two well-exposed shots instead on medium one that would overexpose the sky and underexpose foreground.

3. KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN – This sounds dumb, but it needs to be said. I am always caught off guard once or twice during a wedding because I have let my guard down. At a wedding where emotions are high between a lot of people who know one another, there are moments to be captured at all times. My wife, Savannah (the other half of Ava Grace Photography), was taking the family pictures at the time I caught this image on the left. These two are the siblings of the bride and the emotions were high for the whole family. I could have taken this opportunity to breath, hold the lights for Savannah, but I was trying to keep my eyes open knowing the ceremony was soon and the family was all together. These type of images give a depth to the story that are needed to truly begin to capture the depths of emotion throughout the day.

To the right is another example taken by my wife, Savannah. The groom and his groomsmen were on the patio smoking cigars. We took some images of them, but Savannah saw much more potential. So we put a light out in the front lawn, had his groomsmen surround him, and let smoke fill up the frame. It was the groom’s favorite image of the entire wedding because it creatively reinvented the celebration with his groomsmen in way he will always remember.

And this is the ultimate goal for wedding photographers. Uncle Bob can document the day. We are paid to do something different with skills and vision we have cultivated as artists. We make moments memorable not just because we captured them, but because we captured them in a way never thought of by our clients – that is what the split second decisions of intent, visualization, and keeping your eyes open will do. The end result for you as the photographer, is high quality images that do not take nearly as much time to cull through.

-TECH TIPS FOR SHOOTING-
1. Shoot with highest bit-depth – the higher the bit depth the more information your camera can capture, which equals to higher quality images.
2. Take advantage of your custom menus – spend time on the front end to program certain shooting situations in your camera that you can recall in two button clicks (for Nikon at least).

My Custom menu:
a. Full Manual
b. Aperture Priority Outside (ISO limited to 1600, shutter speed limited to 250th)
c. Aperture Priority Inside (ISO limited to 6400, shutter speed limited to 60th)
d. 70-200mm Inside (Aperture priority, ISO limited to 6400, shutter speed limited to 160th)
3. Know Your Gear – spend time with your camera. Shoot often even if it’s pointless shots at a park, shoot with your screen taped up, shoot with only one lens each day for a week, and shoot for specific purposes such as light, color, and key moments between people. If you do not know how to use your gear to get what you visualize, you will lose the shot almost every time!

That’s all for now. Next post up will be on the first step to take to get quality final images – color management.

Cheers!
PK

“The runner who wins the race is not the fastest; the winner is the one who runs the fastest in the right direction.”

This saying hits the heart of a common tension we all feel when addressing workflow between quality and efficiency. I want to suggest that these two can work hand in hand and not in opposition. Efficiency is meaningless to strive for until you first have goal. If your goal is quality, uniquely-yours images then you achieve those efficiently by not wasting energy getting there. This whole string of posts have at their core this idea that high quality, unique images that reflects your singular intent as a photographer can be achieved in an extremely efficient manner.

Here are three guidelines for quality and for efficiency in your workflow that we will reexamine later (quality will be examined first since it’s qualities are represented in your final image):

Three guidelines of quality in workflow:
1. See the information you have (color management)
2. Access the information you have (bit-depth)
3. Keep the information you have (compression)

Three guidelines of efficiency in workflow:
1. Always choose the simplest, most effective option
2. Choose the option with the least amount of side effects
3. Know your stuff

But before we hit these, the efficient and quality-centric workflow absolutely won’t work unless one thing is there: solid shooting. We’ll hit some basic guidelines for shooting that will help you make quality images.

“Why is it kind of reddish?”
“Why is it lacking contrast?”
“Why is it darker?”

These question were why I switched to printing myself. Obviously these flaws can have many different roots, but I was meticulous to take care of my end and I was done trying to work with a lab to get what I wanted. I spent a lot of hard work on an image from capture to final edit, and I wanted to have the same attention to detail all the way through.

So I bought a printer. Started printing and I notice colors were slightly better, and dynamic range was a little better. It wasn’t night and day, but it was better. Well as I experimented with more papers, I found that the printer started to lag in some areas. Most notably in fine art papers. Things looked dull, no detail, and colors lost all vibrance. I tried multiple papers with the same results. Finally, I did a trial of Imageprint just to see if it was any better. The results below should speak for itself. Please note that a camera cannot fully capture the dynamic range and print quality, but it can show some of the obvious flaws.

Here is the original photo:

Manufacturer’s profile versus Imageprint:

Grass detail - Notice the clarity and contrast in the grass. Also the blacks of the trees in the background of the Imageprint match that of the print.

Shadow Detail - Shadows of the Imageprint match that of the original. The stock one has blotchy, lifted shadows. Also the water's ripples are all but gone in the stock.

Every printer and lab are not the same. These dynamically different results in prints are just from a change in the printer profile! Imagine having this issue on top of a badly calibrated monitor, or having to change color spaces and losing color detail for the sake of a lab. A truly great print is hard to come by, and a print is what your clients ultimately will have to live with.

Cheers!
PK

This morning had a sunrise that was quite unique. The sun was peeking in and out of clouds and I had to run around chasing the light, constantly scanning the scene looking for a glimpse of something special. You can be the judge as to whether or not I did find something worth photographing.

Cheers!
PK