Tips & Tricks 3
My friends Carl and Rachael got hitched last year and I really wanted to do something special for them, but since you can’t rush creativity, I didn’t think of something quick enough. But while we were at their reception, the light bulb went on and I had my idea. Carl is a huge nerd (and I mean that in the most loving and cool way possible). We’ve been friends for years, dating back to when we used to stock shelves at the grocery store. He loves comic books, so I thought what better way to capture their “moment,” then to immortalize them in a comic book cover. And while I was halfway through making it, I thought why not document the process as well. Read Post
Months ago I shared my iBook version of The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. With the recent updates of the iBooks Author software, Apple has removed the option to have an iBook be both portrait and landscape orientated. Even loading my previous file which had both versions is now only in landscape (the original template selected). It seems now you can only have one or the other, not both. And let me tell you, landscape looks horrible in portrait mode. Needless to say I’m not too happy about this. I hope in future releases they will bring that option back. Looks like I’ll have to go and make a portrait mode version now. The good thing is that iBooks Author-created books can now be viewable on iPhones with the latest iBooks app.
Mr. & Mrs. Claus spread their magical cheer at a recent mini photo session at Balzano’s.
This past weekend Dodge + Burn Photography did a tag team-up for Small Business Saturday. We teamed up with Balzano’s restaurant in downtown Bloomsburg to do a breakfast buffet + mini photo sessions with Mr. + Mrs. Claus. Overall it went really well and the feedback was excellent. We only had a few kiddos not into it.
From a technical perspective, my wife and I were pre-planning on how best to handle the shoot; she would be shooting and I would be handling the payments, quick-editing, and delivering the photos all before the families would leave the restaurant.
One of the ways we thought we’d be efficient was to do tethered shooting. Tethered shooting is basically having a USB cable connected to your camera and to your laptop. Once she’d shoot, it’s show up in Lightroom almost immediately. This worked out awesome for this occasion. That is until I had to review our client’s photos with them while Lisa was still shooting. This proved to be very frustrating since I would be showing a photo and then once Lisa would shoot a new image, LR would then jump to that new image. So, in theory it would have been awesome if we didn’t need to review photos with anyone during the shooting.
The other step to cut down our processing time was to apply a preset during the importing process. The night before the shoot when we were doing our setup, we did some test shots for the lighting and angles and such. When we came home, I loaded those pics into Lightroom and made a custom user preset. Since the lighting and environment wasn’t going to change, we would apply this preset to each image as it was being imported into Lightroom. This was a huge time-saver for this type of shoot and I only then had to adjust the angle and cropping of some.
All in all, this was a great learning experience for the above mentioned, as well as doing speed-shoots with the big guy in the red suit.