Today, I am going to shoot my first photo gig for 2008! I am excited! I hope I’ll get some of that luck from the newborn twins I am shooting…
I am going to try to replace most of my income this year with photography. Thanks to Brian for all his help with my portfolio site. Now if only I can find the time to fix the last few things on the site then I’d be all set to start printing those promo cards that Brian has graciously shared his ideas with me on.
2008, here I come!
This set took a little longer to complete due to my slowness in refining my own workflow and having to experiment with a few methods. But I like the results.
I finally broke down and gave Adobe Lightroom a try. The verdict? It’s better than “Bridge + ACR”, but it’s still got some UI issues it needs to address to compete with Apple’s Aperture. However, it does have a few more controls that I liked to really fine tune each image and tweak it until I like it. And the RAW conversion seems to be much smoother and of better quality than Aperture as did Aperture.
So I guess I am ditching Aperture for now and going for Lightroom as much as I despise its badly copied Aperture UI. Finally, I’ve found my workflow! Hurray!
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Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again
–by Xu Zhimo
Very quietly I take my leave
As quietly as I came here;
Quietly I wave good-bye
To the rosy clouds in the western sky.
The golden willows by the riverside
Are young brides in the setting sun;
Their reflections on the shimmering waves
Always linger in the depth of my heart.
The floating heart growing in the sludge
Sways leisurely under the water;
In the gentle waves of Cambridge
I would be a water plant!
That pool under the shade of elm trees
Holds not water but the rainbow from the sky;
Shattered to pieces among the duckweeds
Is the sediment of a rainbow-like dream?
To seek a dream? Just to pole a boat upstream
To where the green grass is more verdant;
Or to have the boat fully loaded with starlight
And sing aloud in the splendor of starlight.
But I cannot sing aloud
Quietness is my farewell music;
Even summer insects heap silence for me
Silent is Cambridge tonight!
Very quietly I take my leave
As quietly as I came here;
Gently I flick my sleeves
Not even a wisp of cloud will I bring away
Brian and I spent some time brainstorming and experimenting with logos for my upcoming pro photo site. We finally almost nailed it with this symbolic seal as a logo. It’s a highly stylized character for the word “Chu”. Incidentally, the color red is also the perfect choice since the alternate meaning for “Chu” also means red.
This is going to be a perfect watermark… I don’t want to reveal the final look and feel of the site yet. But this will fit in perfectly to the design of the site as well. I am excited that all the pieces are finally coming together. Good times.
I’ve been doing some pretty intense reading and research in children’s portrait and photography in general for the past few weeks. And I came to the realization that the industry (at as far as U.S. is concerned) is almost exclusively dominated by woman (I have yet to come across a GOOD male children’s photographer portfolio site)! I guess no one should be surprised since women, generally and stereotypically speaking, are thought to have closer and more nurturing ties to children. On top of that, since most family photo decisions are made by the females in a family (and I am just assuming here), it’s natural that one would prefer to choose a photographer whom she deems would understand her and her child(ren) on a deeper level. Plus I also think children may warm up to women more quickly (well, until they find out what fun rides grown up males can be!).
I am not sure if this means I won’t get as many calls and referrals because I am a “guy”. This is the first time I feel that my being a “man” could actually hinder my survival in doing this specific type of photography and that it could be viewed as a disadvantage… (and I am saying this cynically and sarcastically with my own style of humor here).
In trying to come up with a name for a portfolio site, Grace and I brainstormed for a few days but failed to agree on a “gender neutral” name that would be catchy, memorable and be attractive to decision-making moms and, at the same time, showing the “gentler” side of me… Brian jokingly suggested “photosterone.com” to counter that, which made me giggle pretty hard.
In any case, I hope my style of photography and my creativity will be able to convince enough moms that I am actually not half bad! 😉 And maybe that’d put some of the men in families at ease when they find out the photographer is a guy! Hah!!
I had my first pro session today. Still lots to learn from today’s shoot. It’s always “after the fact” that valuable lessons are learned — trials and errors.
Lessons learned today (note to self):
1. Always move to a variety of locations.
2. Fast prime lenses (f1.8 or faster) work better than fast zooms (can’t get any faster than 2.8 on most zooms).
3. Natural light is the king.
4. Indoors is good. Outdoors is better.
5. Having extra memory cards with me is a good thing.
6. Overexposures are easier (and prettier) to fix than under exposured shots (especially on my Fuji S5).
7. Children want to show off… Let them.
8. Don’t over plan or over think on journalistic style of shooting — just show up and shoot. Everything will fall into place. Instincts will take over.
9. If a client insists his/her house is messy and requires a lot of cleaning up, suggest (and, in fact, insist) on taking the session elsewhere, such as a nice public garden or somewhere outdoors. Cropping and editing will be easier. Invariably, you will also be forced to select scenes more creatively with such open space. DO NOT SETTLE FOR messy indoor sessions. The result will make nobody happy.
PBS’s Curious George has been our favorite pass time both as storybooks and half-hour TV shows. Grace found the clip below on Youtube. And I think it’s possibly one of the best commercially animated clips that is fun for both the parents and young kids in terms of entertainment value and education!
That George is just so nicely drawn and animated… Stuff like that makes me miss doing animation… (but not modeling, lighting, texture mapping skeleton setups, character rigs or any of that technical stuff)
The character design was done by the moderately famed Shane Prigmore and Shannon Tindle. And I feel that the fine 2D lead animator Jeff Johnson also deserves credit… We are gonna have to watch the movie.
We went to a birthday party last weekend and snapped some good shots. It seems like the only things we ever do nowadays are centered around the kids (as the way we like it). But some of our childless friends are having a “kid picture overdose”… I think the sheer idea of having children makes their heads spin. And then there are those who plan their activities purely around the adults and try to fit the kids in as inconveniences they try to solve (poor kids).
We went to a pumpkin patch with Bryan’s usual play dates over the weekend. It was unusually warm considering how crazy the weather had been in the days prior to that. The kids had fun, except Bryan still felt pretty sick and didn’t feel like jumping in for the fun.
The biggest lesson I got out of these past two photo sessions has been figuring out a comfortable work flow I can live with for dealing with 300+ images from each session. The colors are also becoming more consistent after monitor calibration, finalized output work flow using Apple’s Aperture, Photoshop and a decent conversion setting from Adobe RGB to sRGB color spaces. I’ve been getting some very constructive and positive feedbacks on the shots. Have a visit to my Flickr page and tell me what you like, dislike or any other thoughts on your mind!
Generally speaking I think having invested in a MacBook Pro was one of the best investments in hardware equipment I’ve made for computing. But in terms of arts and photography, it’s looking a bit weak on the color front. My Eye-One monitor calibrator finally arrived today. So I ran a few tests trying to calibrate my monitor based on a few conditions. But at the end of the test, I was surprised to find that MacBook Pro’s gamut is actually pretty damn small compared to even sRGB!
Luckily Rob Galbraith found a fix for the 2nd gen MacBook Pro I have. Interestingly, he also noted that the latest LED-based MacBook Pros are the best of all laptops he’s tested as far as color accuracy is concerned. I look forward to the day when I can justify getting a decent display to edit photos with. Clean my mac x will help to monitor the system and optimize the storage.
I guess Ken Rockwell ain’t lying when he said color management is a silly thing to do unless you have super high end equipment that can both display and print those beautiful wide gamuts that digital cameras capture. Maybe I should dump Adobe RGB and go sRGB all the way instead since it seems no consumer grade monitor can even display anywhere close to the Adobe RGB gamut range… And most consumer grade print shops only print in sRGB, I could save myself a lot of grief having to manage and convert Adobe RGB to sRGB all the time! Hmmm…
It’s pretty rare to have both “arts” and “geek stuff” categorized for an entry. But I guess this is the beginning of things to come for me — back to the roots.
After not having touched photography in any serious capacity for 11 years, I recently started investing in the craft again. Brian agreed that I should diversify and do what I enjoy the most and try to make money with it. Instead of going back to film, I retired my faithful Nikon N8008s and picked up the most “film-like” DSLR I knew (Fujifilm S5 Pro, which is based on Nikon D200 body) and some new gears to go along with it.
I was pretty fluent and advanced with film and darkroom techniques having experimented heavily with black and white film and silver prints in college*. But the age of digital media ushered me into a whole new game in terms of photographic techniques with digital darkroom (or so to speak). Not surprisingly Photoshop rules in this area… So now I am scrambling to catch up having to learn more advanced techniques in post production processing. It will be a glorious day when the earnings from my photography breaks even with all the investments in equipment and time I have made.
Fortunately some parents that Grace hangs out with really like my shots of their kids and are thinking about paying me to photograph them for special events. My jaw dropped when one of the moms told Grace that an event held by her parents cost them nine G for a photographer. Then I went back to dig out the website of one of my wedding photographers whom agreed to be a backup photographer for almost nothing because she’d just started out doing wedding shoots — she now charges between $2,200 to $4,500 depending on the package; things must have been good for Connie.
I am excited but at the same time feeling a bit late to the digital photography game and doing it seriously. That scares me a little. It’s like asking me to go back to doing CG, special effects and all that crazy 3D stuff again — I know the basics and used to know quite a bit, but the industry has left me behind to rot while everything else has been advancing in leaps and bounds.
Nonetheless, let the good times roll. Hopefully my deteriorating back pain can take the abuse of toddler/children photography**. 😉
* I have Tom Fischer to thank for his Zone System class. There’s no better person to learn Zone System from as far as I am concerned since Tom was one of the top disciples of Ansel Adams having been Adams’ assistant/student for a number of years. And I also have Craig Stevens to thank for all the expensive flim/paper/chemical combo experiments — that was possibly the single most expensive class I’ve ever had in college other than color photography.
** Try squatting a hundred times within a few hours trying to take pictures at the same eye level as those toddlers while trying to chase them and capture the best shots…. Hanging out with kids is fun (the gentle ones are), but taking good shots of them is hard. I think my S5 Pro already feels a bit slow for them.