Donostia-SanSebastian, the view from our hostel, 29 Dec 2012, the day of the match between the Basque National team vs Bolivia. Party in the streets all day before, then after when they won 6-1.
Every street in the Parte Vieja was like this.
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A funeral ceremony in Tanah Toraja, Indonesia. The more water buffalo that are slaughtered the higher chance the deceased has of riding one up to the afterlife. Pretty disturbing to watch honestly, I didn’t make it long.
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What’s your guys’ policies on pictures with people in them (not in a large crowd or far away)? Do you ask permission first? I try to avoid it, but noticed that a lot of people don’t and was wondering etiquette about it
Kinda depends on a few variables, country, gender, touristy area or not, but in general if I’m close to a person and I think it would be rude, then I ask. But I also will take some quick shots from farther away with my telephoto lens, and those I don’t usually ask.
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Yeah I’m terrible about asking. Unless I’m buying something from them, then I might ask. But if they look uncomfortable at all I don’t pursue it.
This Mongolian family selling pine nuts were very happy to have their picture taken (back in my point and shoot days).
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And then there’s also places where people see a camera and request to have their photos taken!
This was just walking around the market in Cebu, Philippines
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Your exposures seem like they are perfect every time. Do you adjust your setting much when taking the photos, or do you get things about right and make adjustments in post? The lighting situations in a lot of your photos look tricky yet the exposures are solid.
Yea, it’s mostly all done in post, as long as it’s close when I’m out shooting it’s fine. The important thing in tricky lighting is making sure none of the highlights or shadows are clipped, so that way they can be brought back in post. Gotta shoot in RAW though. On the computer I’ll adjust the white balance, the highlights and shadow detail, the exposure, etc. That’s the foundation. Then there’s quite a few other nitty editing stuff I like to do to get it exactly how I want it…
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When do you find you need to adjust the white balance? That’s one setting I don’t mess with much. Can you briefly describe your process, including the nifty editing stuff?
Here’s my basic flow:
- Load up image in camera raw
- Crop
- Fiddle with the sliders - exposure, shadows, saturation, vibrance, etc
- Fiddle with dehaze (powerful but can really tweak the image if overused)
- Open in photoshop
- If one part needs to be adjusted, like dark foreground and light sky I adjust for the bulk of it in camera raw, and then do the rest using clone-painting:
- Clone the base layer to a new image, this is your palette
- Line up the clone stamp tool by clicking on the palette image, then hit
ctrl-tab and option-click again on the target (base) image - this lines up the tool - Then do whatever you want to the palette and “paint” it on to the base image, usually with big soft brushes and low opacity. I find this kind of painting on a lot more fun than dealing with layer masks for some reason. And if it’s fun I’ll do it more.
- And finally sharpening if it’s going to be printed
I know a few other tricks like high-pass filter (but it has to be one layer on top of the other, and I think multiply). And stuff like channel-select to replace or tweak specific colors, or only edit over specific colors. But I know there are a million more tricks I don’t know.
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I find that my Canon always seems to have a colder, bluer tint than I’d like so I’m usually just using the color balance to warm up the colors a touch. Anything in the snow comes out wayyy too blue.
I said nitty editing stuff! Because a lot of times it’s just small stuff I’m anal about. My PS skills are kinda rudimentary, but they get the job done. And I’ve never even used dehaze in ACR :0
I don’t have a strict formula, but I like playing around with soft light and multiply, usually using a shadow mask so the shadows don’t get too dark. If I’m only doing the sky I usually do a channel mask to isolate it, some sort of multiply layer, and then refine edge to make sure it blends properly. I’m a big fan of dodging and burning, possibly too much so, but there’s always some parts of the photo that I want to highlight! Sometimes certain colors look off to me and I’ll selectively edit them. If my bright colors get too bright I’ll select them and tone them down. I’ll usually finish with a light vignette and maybe a touch of sharpening. So I can usually get my photos pretty much how I want them, but probably much less efficiently than a PS pro.
I guess I also forgot about getting the horizon straight, and I’m also a nit about wide angle distortion, so to fix non-parallel lines on buildings or light poles etc I’ll do transform → skew and drag it out to the sides, which straightens the lines but mashes everything down a bit, and then free transform to drag it up and get the proportions back to correct.
I’ll have to look into the clone painting! I do remember looking into stuff like high pass and luminance masking at some point, but then just kinda forgot about it. They seem more important in landscapes, which I don’t do as much of anymore.
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Is that your photo?! Very very nice.
No I just grabbed it as an example of over-vignetting.