CLICK TO ENLARGE --- Bliss Dance, sculpture by Lloyd Taylor

Some people think of photographic post-production (especially if the word “Photoshop” is used) as synonymous with trickery—as an underhanded way of creating something fake, of “doctoring” a photo, like some supermarket tabloid cover featuring Gary Coleman partying in a hot tub with an extra-terrestrial. Sure, you can do that with Photoshop.

But for most of us photographers, post-production is not some diabolical plot to create something fake, but a useful tool to help us re-create what we saw in reality but were unable to capture in the camera.  Or sometimes what we saw in our mind’s eye as the potential shot, if not for the unfortunate accidents of poor weather, bad lighting, or fat tourists.

It’s a tool to help re-create the shot that should have been.

The photo on this page is a good example.

CLICK TO ENLARGE - Before Editing

This was an awe-inspiring metal sculpture standing alone in the vast, beautiful openness of the desert. At various times, I saw it in glorious sunset or sunrise light, sometimes with stunning clouds, sometimes in a dust storm, sometimes with people at its feet, sometimes standing all alone.

In the best of those moments it was breathtakingly beautiful. Unfortunately none of my photos managed to combine all of the best elements.  In some shots the light was good. In others the sky was good. In others, there were no people cluttering the shot. And so on.

But I want my final photo to express the way it really felt to be there, caressed by a warm desert breeze, gazing up at this marvelous work of art against the beautiful backdrop of nature.

The only way I can recreate that experience is by editing one of my unsatisfactory photos into something that looks more like the real thing and which conveys that feeling.

In this case, I chose a photo where I liked the position of the camera and the angle of the light, because those are fundamentals that can’t be altered.

From that foundation, I did the following:

1. Create a Curves Adjustment Layer to increase the contrast and saturation in the entire image.  This makes the scene look more like what I saw with my eye, which is so much more sensitive than my camera.

2. Remove the leaning ladder and the open access hatch (where the sculptor had climbed inside to work), because these were temporary obstructions in this shot, not indicative of the way the piece usually looked.

3. Remove distracting people and clutter on the ground by using the clone stamp tool to copy bits of the photo from one place to another. (Of course, I kept one human figure for scale.) This helped show the sculpture the way I often saw it, standing alone on a vast desert plain. By doing this I hoped to stir in the viewer the strange and beautiful sense of lonely drama the real scene stirred in me.

4. Finally, after selecting and masking the sculpture with a Layer Mask, I did another Curves Adjustment Layer, this time affecting only the sky, revealing color and detail that my eyes could see, but my camera could not.

The result is the “After” photo shown here.

While some may consider this kind of work to be fakery, trickery, cheating—a good argument could be made that it’s exactly the opposite, because the final result here is a much more accurate representation of the way this sculpture looked and felt to me in person.

Which is more real? The literal truth of a fleeting moment captured by a relatively insensitive and limited recording device—or my best attempt at enhancing that unsatisfactory snapshot to reveal the deeper truth of what it was like to actually be there?

Feel free to leave your opinion in the comments.

By the way, this photo is one of the case studies in my Photoshop Basics course, where over the span of a 20-minute video lesson, you can follow along as I go through the entire editing process described above, if you’re interested in seeing how that sort of thing is done.

Persian Power Trip - Click to enlarge

I’ve had over 1 million page views this month on my Burning Man Festival photo gallery, largely thanks to viral interest in a single photo (shown at left).  Don’t get me wrong, this is a popular site, and I typically get hundreds of visitors per day.  But occasionally a photo will take off like a rocket in popularity and I’ll be deluged with traffic.  As I write this I’m getting 8,000 visitors per day, largely because of one photo.  This has happened before, to a lesser extent, with other photos, but this one seems to have captured the world’s imagination.

Can you do this, too?  Maybe.  And that’s what I’d like to write about today.

First of all, nothing can ensure that a photo or video will go viral on the web.  If there was a surefire formula, every marketing department on earth would already be exploiting it.  The Internet zeitgeist and the quirky collective whims of humanity are simply too unpredictable.

Analytics for the month - The surge is just getting started! - click to enlarge

However, you can take certain steps to at least make it possible.

You can lay the groundwork so that, should lightning strike, that spark can start a brush fire which can rage out of control.  Alternately, if you do things wrong, you can prevent lightning from ever striking at all.

So what can you do? First of all, of course, you need to capture a noteworthy image.  ‘nuf said.

Second, you must display your work in a place where people can find it.  This would seem obvious, but I know countless photographers doing good work but letting their precious gems go to waste on a compact flash card, or a hard disk, somewhere, never spending the time to process the photos and put them online.

Third, you must make it easy for others to link to your work. For example, my current photo du jour rests at a fixed internet location on a basic HTML web page.  Anyone can link to it, or share that URL. If my website were built entirely in Flash, as so many photographer’s sites are, it would be impossible to link to a single photo inside the site.  Game Over.

Finally, you can encourage virality by intentionally courting the social sharing sites.  In the case of my current photo, the fire stared at StumbleUpon, and while I didn’t start the fire, I do occasionally “stumble” my own content when I release something new.  Can’t hurt to try.  Likewise, I maintain some galleries at Flickr (even though I dislike the site) just to keep a toe in that viral pond.   Likewise with Facebook, Twitter,  Delicious, Blinklist, Google Bookmarks, and countless other social bookmarking sites.

Create an account at each of these sites.  When you have something new, mention it there.  Most of the time, it will immediately sink into inglorious obscurity.   That’s what happens to 99% of my stuff, too.  But once in while, something will catch on.  An influential member may like your item and share it with thousands of followers, and if one or two of those followers are also linchpins (to use Seth Godin’s delightful term), then magic can happen.

Just some of the gear I'm packing

Preparing for Burning Man is only slightly less daunting than packing for a polar expedition — or perhaps a mission to Mars is a better analogy.

Each year my packing list grows longer and more complex (it now spans 8 pages of closely-spaced typing), and each year I nevertheless forget several important items and end up cursing myself out there in the Nevada desert when I discover that I forgot to bring, say, the superglue that I need to re-attach the sole of my shoe so that I don’t have to walk 3 miles back to camp barefoot on the blistering, 120-degree surface of the alkaline lakebed.  Or the charger for my camera battery. Or my can opener. Or, even worse, the beer. Or any one of the hundreds of other things that make life bearable in the extreme environment of Burning Man.

Most important of all is the camera gear, of course.  Forgetting a key item there can basically wipe out the main purpose of a two-week, 1500-mile trip.  These days I try to build in some redundancy, carrying multiple copies of important items, so that certain things can break or get destroyed by dust, and I can still go on shooting.

I now bring two complete cameras, plus spare lenses in case one of the two main lenses goes kaput.  Lots of memory cards, of course.  Here’s a photo of the main camera gear as I’m organizing it for packing.

Key items include (not all are shown in photo):

Canon 40D camera
Canon 350D camera
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens
Canon 70-200mm f/4 L IS lens
Canon 28-135 IS lens (backup in case of main lens failure)
Canon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens for night shooting
Big camera bag (holds both cameras with lens hoods)
Camera backpack (holds one camera plus assorted gear)
6 Memory cards ranging 1 1GB to 4 GB in size
Card Reader
Compact Manfrotto light stand with umbrella bracket
Canon 430EX Speedlite
Canon 580EX II Speedlite
Lots of rechargeable AA batteries for speedlites
2 Spare rechargeable batteries for each camera body
Battery chargers for each camera and for the AA’s
Gels for flashes
Flash radio triggers (this year Yongnuo RF-602, expendable)
Westcott 5-in-1 Reflector
Improvised car sun-shade reflectors
White shoot-through umbrella
Black/silver umbrella
Gorillapod
Lightweight tripod
Kodak Zi8 Video camera
Alcohol lens wipes, air blowers, and compressed air for cleaning cameras.
Macbook computer (for downloading images from cards each night)

And that’s just the main stuff.

Of course, I certainly won’t use all of it.  I never seem to get ambitious enough to haul out the flashes and do some radio-triggered off-camera lighting under the difficult conditions of Burning Man.  I’ve never yet used an umbrella (too much wind), and I rarely bother to recruit a volunteer to hold a reflector.  But you never know, I might want it, so I bring it all.  Better to have it and not use it than leave it home and wish I had it.  I think.

By the way, if you’re a photographer going to Burning Man you might want to check out my “How to Take Better Photos at Burning Man” tutorial on my training site.

(Aside: Since I was a writer long before I was a photographer, I still think of them as “author’s copies,” but I guess that doesn’t really fit when it’s a photo. “Photographer’s copies” would be more accurate, but for some reason “tear sheets” is the industry jargon, even when it’s a whole book.)

ANYWAY, the joy of tear sheets for me is that they always come as a surprise. Not that I wasn’t expecting them, but they are usually so slow in coming that I’ve completely forgotten about the project by the time they arrive. Then one day out of the blue a package shows up in my mailbox containing books or magazines.

Today, for example, I got a big, mysterious-looking box from Japan. I couldn’t recall ordering anything from Japan, so this seemed weird, and I started to fear I’d been drunk-shopping on Amazon again.   But I opened it to find three copies of a Japanese travel guide that had purchased some of my Burning Man photos (I wrote about that previously in a blog entry called How to Sell Photos to a Book Publisher).

We get so used to seeing our images on computer screens, that it’s always exciting, almost shocking, to see them in print and hold them in our hot little hands. Well, it’s exciting for me anyway. Maybe if you’re Chase Jarvis or Annie Leibovitz the novelty wears off. Or maybe not.

P.S. If you can tell me which 4 photos on that page are mine, I’ll give you a free copy of my portrait photography course.

Today I turned a publisher’s request for a single photo—with no offer of payment—into a 5-photo sale for hundreds of dollars.  It’s a lesson for me, and maybe for you, in what to do right.

I was contacted by a Japanese travel book publisher, who wanted to use the image at left from my Burning Man Festival photos (caution, some nudity) in their “Dream Trips” guidebook, which will include a chapter on Burning Man as a tourist destination.  (Of course, the notion of busloads of Japanese tourists arriving at Burning Man is pretty damn funny. If you’re not familiar with Burning Man, it’s the annual festival of “radical self-expression” held in the Nevada desert — a photographer’s dreamland of fantastic characters, art, and spectacle — but definitely not for the faint of heart.)

Anyway, this publisher offered no payment, only credit.

First thing I did right: I asked for payment.  Too often we photographers will turn cheap tricks just to see our photos published, but I wasn’t in the mood to get down on my knees today.

Second thing I did right:  I didn’t get greedy. I asked for a reasonable amount, considering that the photo was going to be used small, as part of a collage (they had sent a mockup).  I mentally extrapolated what I thought a publisher could reasonably afford if they had to pay for every photo in the collage, in every chapter of the book, and politely asked for that amount.  Plus some copies of the book.

They agreed!

Japanese "Dream Trip" Guide — Caution, some nudity

Third thing I did right: I immediately sent off the high-res image to them, showing that I was on the ball and ready to deliver fast. Publishers are always on deadlines.

Fourth thing I did right: Knowing that publishers are always on deadlines and that lots of people (including photographers) are flaky and slow to respond, I told them: “If you have trouble getting images from any of the other photographers you’ve selected, feel free to browse my website for photos to fill the gaps.  I’ll offer additional images at the same price.”

They came back with a list of images they were having hard time acquiring, and asked if I had anything similar.

Fifth thing I did right: I immediately did the research and sent them links to similar photos of mine.  I even sent links to specific photos by another photographer, my friend Scott London, when I knew he had images to fit some of their needs that I couldn’t fill.

They came back offering to buy 5 photos of mine, instead of the original one.

Sixth thing I did right: I doubled the price on two of the five images, because they had selected some nudes that had required model releases (and in one case a payment to the model.)

Again they agreed!

Bottom line:  A request for a single free photo turned into a multi-hundred-dollar sale of five images.

It’s a good reminder that we do well in life when we step up and help other people solve their problems.  I made it clear to this publisher that if they were prepared to pay a reasonable fee, then I would help locate the photos they needed, respond quickly, and deliver the goods fast, all of which reduces their workload and keeps them on deadline.

It was a great way to start the day.

Now I can’t wait to meet these Japanese tourists at Burning Man.

The Hoop Unit performs in the lobby

In a previous post I wrote about shooting an indoor event in a dark warehouse with the Lumiquest 80/20 with on-camera flash.  Today we’re going to look at another option for event photography: using the Canon OC-E3 Off Camera Shoe Cord (or a generic equivalent) to get the flash off the camera.

If you want to view the photos before reading about them, see the gallery here.

Last night I attended the San Diego Burning Man Film Festival at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park.  You can always count on the Burning Man community to turn out in fanciful costumes that make great photos.

Since I knew I’d be holding the camera in one hand and the flash in the other hand all night, I chose my gear based on weight: the super-light Rebel 350D and the 430EX flash (each considerably lighter than carrying my 40D and 580EXII).  Unfortunately, my workhorse lens for indoor photography, the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, is a monster, so the camera is still quite a brick to hand-hold all night.  Not to mention front-heavy as hell on the tiny Rebel body.  But these are the trade-offs we make.

Rebel, 430EX, and Canon OC-E3 Off Camera Shoe Cord

I wanted to get the flash off the camera for reasons explained in my previous post.  Direct on-camera flash is flat and harsh, bouncing straight back along the lens axis to create glaring hot spots and boring light.   Last time I used the 80/20 to lift the flash about 15 inches above the lens and soften it, but it’s still on the vertical lens axis.  This time I attached the OC-E3 shoe cord so that I could hold the flash outstretched in my left hand, taking it a few feet off the lens axis both horizontally and vertically. The light is now typically hitting my subject from an angle that varies between 20 and 45 degrees, depending on how far away I am.

This is a big improvement over on-axis light, but it still suffers from one terrible defect: It’s basically a point source, so it’s hard as hell and casts hard shadows.  The only solution is to put some kind of big diffuser on the flash. I considered putting the 80/20 on the flash head,  but I didn’t feel like carrying something that bulky around in a crowd in my left hand, like some high-tech fiddler crab with one monstrous claw.

The other solution to the hard shadows is to use two flashes: Put the 580EXII on the camera’s hot shoe, dialed down to a low power to fill in the shadows, and use it to wirelessly trigger the 430EX which I’m holding in my left hand as the main light.  I’ve done that in the past, and this is a great setup when you have an assistant to hold the off-camera flash (this is how I shot this fashion show), but pretty damn exhausting when you’re holding everything yourself.  It’s bad enough one-handing the camera all night, but clamp a 580EX on top and a photo shoot becomes a grueling athletic event.

Normal flash sync in P mode

Slow-sync in Aperture Priority mode

The other consideration (the eternal question for indoor flash photography) is what camera settings will get the best results.  I generally like to shoot in Aperture priority, and when you do that with a flash attached, the Canon cameras automatically go into slow-sync mode and drag the shutter to expose the background until it matches the flash-lit foreground subject.  This usually makes for nice light, and it produces nifty motion blur on dancers and performers in low light.  It also warms up the whole scene when you’re shooting in a room where the ambient light is tungsten, as it was in the museum last night.  For a comparison look at the two photos of the violinist here.  The one on the top was shot in Program mode which does NOT slow-sync.  The bottom one was shot Aperture priority, which drags the shutter using slow-sync.  Notice how much warmer the light is in the second shot, resulting from the longer shutter picking up ambient room light.

Slow-sync works best with lots of background light, to keep the exposure short

I do almost all my flash photography in slow-sync mode because the light is so much prettier than the stark, blasted look of basic flash with its hot foreground subject and black void background.  The downside (there is always a trade-off, right?) is that you get a hell of a lot of unusable photos because of motion blur during the shutter drag after the flash fires.   I came home with 250 photos, of which I kept 36.  That tells you something about the perils of slow-sync.   If I were hired to document an event by a lifestyle magazine that expects clear photos of every single face in attendance that night, I’d have to resort to boring flash, because I couldn’t afford to toss out the motion-blurred shots.  But since I’m doing this for my own amusement, and not answering to anyone, I feel free to create the light I want, even if it means a lot of the photos don’t come out usable.

By the way if you’re interested in off-camera flash, I recently published a 9-video training course called “How to Shoot Headshots and Portraits on a Budget with Small Flashes” at my photo tutorials site. Feel free to check it out!

Links to equipment discussed in this post, at Amazon:
Canon OC-E3 Off Camera Shoe Cord
Or, the half-priced Chinese knock-off version that I use:
Opteka E-TTL / E-TTL II Off-Camera Flash Sync Cord
Canon Speedlite 430EX II Flash for Canon Digital SLR Cameras