There comes a time in every amateur photographer’s learning curve when they come across an image that requires them to pause and ask, ‘am I ever going to be that good?’ All the nice little macro images of blossoming sunflowers and the ever-active cockroaches under the bed that they just uploaded on Flickr somehow seem a little off-target compared to the image in question. As they twiddle their thumbs, alternately glancing at their new 55 – 2000mm AF YU FG KK BC !! lens crafted from ores harvested from Proxima Centauri and the stack of unpaid bills that were themselves beginning to look threateningly like a meteor shower, the sense of urgency seems to heighten. At this juncture, the usually reassuring comments like ‘You’re a Photographic Genius, Comment 5, Post 1′ somehow seem unable to overshadow the burgeoning question, ‘Am I talented?’

Err…no. The plain and simple truth is that everyone cannot be as gifted as I am. But let’s just put that handicap aside for the time-being (since there’s very little you can do about the fact that you’re not me). How can you make progress? How can you get *almost* as good as I am? Huh? Heh? Hmm? Quite frankly, the easy way is to kill yourself instantly and pray that you are reborn with a little more talent (on second thought, you might want to do it the other way round). A roundabout way of achieving the same thing is to use the following resources:

Light, Science and Magic: If Photography were to turn into a religion in the future, there’s a very distinct possibility that this book would go on to become the Bhagavad Gita/ Bible/ Quran/ Zend Avesta/ <fill here>. First published in 1997 (I don’t really know that, and I don’t care – just needed something to start the sentence with…), this book takes you through the basics of lighting in the context of still photography. That, it does through some easily replicable photographic exercises, illustrated through very detailed lighting diagrams. In fact, what you read in my previous post was a rather shameless reconstruction of one of the exercises from this book. The text is lucid, and instead of just ordering you around to ‘place gelled light at 45 degrees to left of camera’, it in fact explains why you should place gelled light at 45 degrees to left of camera’ and how it would impact the final photograph. What this does is give you the necessary dope and the confidence (funny how both of these always seem to come together) to think through your own shots and try variations. And in fact it is these variations that contribute the most to your learning. Get it here! You will not regret it. If you do, I promise to get rid of your copy for free.

Strobist.com: Mercilessly stretching the religious motif further, David Hobby is perhaps the Johannes Gutenberg of Photography. Prior to the craze that is Strobist.com, photography was an elitist pursuit, reserved for a very niche kind of people who were either already well known professionals or were not bogged down by the mundane details of life like responsibility and having to earn a living. Credit goes to David Hobby for peeling off, layer by layer, the mystique that surrounded photography and make it more accessible. Through his blog, he suddenly made people realize that one need not necessarily have lights the size of airplanes and equipment that merited visits from UN inspectors every other week, to take decent photography – just a tiny little strobe is enough. In fact, the Strobist website attacks this idea with a vengeance – an often reinforced theme here is to make-do with whatever is around, rather than investing in expensive equipment and writhing in guilt every time the folks at home made a fuss about the disconnected phone line, the erratic electricity supply or the irregular milk supply.(Alternately, he could also be blamed for the deluge of blogs on photography by talentless idiots, who insist on dishing out crap in the name of photographic knowledge – a specimen here). Through a series of articles imaginatively called Lighting 101 and 102, the Strobist website takes one through the basics of off-camera flash, and how it can be used effectively to create professional looking photographs without having to file for bankruptcy. There is an ‘On Assignment‘ section that’s dedicated to the dissection of photo shoots that helps one recreate the same. Also, there are Boot Camps (currently, Boot Camp 2 is on) that offer assignments that the readers can participate in. (I rocked assignment One of Boot Camp 2 – see here!). And in case one is at a loss as to where to start, there are the Strobist DVDs that pretty much encapsulate everything one needs to know to catch up – find them here. Lastly, there is a very large following of the website present on the dedicated Flickr group – this is a very active and helpful community that one can learn a lot from (barring the occasional Off-topic post on burning issues like ‘A Bride threatened me with a shotgun…‘).

To be continued…

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

‘Look,’ I said, proudly waving around the bundle at the missus. Inspired by strobist.com, I’d ordered myself a sample book of Lee’s color correction filters on the net, and completely forgotten about it. So, after a couple of weeks, when it was delivered to me, it was an awesomely pleasant experience and I felt like sharing my delight.

The missus immediately snatched the bundle from my hands, and gave it a thorough inspection, mentally scanning the repository of sarcastic comments she reserved for ‘look what my husband dragged in‘ kind of situations. But there couldn’t possibly have been much she could have said on this occasion. First, she had no idea what it was. Second, I’d not destroyed any of her ornaments or other stuff to make it (the incident involving my now defunct DIY soft-box using translucent cloth, held together with earrings still comes up every once in a while). I hadn’t been so proud of myself since quite sometime.

‘Wow, you must be very proud,’ she said, tossing the bundle back to me. ‘I don’t know of many people who have a collection of 1"x4" colored, semi-transparent paper.’ I felt like pointing out to her that the sample book had come completely free of charge, and all that I had to pay was INR 800 for the delivery, but I wasn’t certain that this too wouldn’t be twisted and turned into something that made me look bad. If ever I ended up murdering cute puppies, I would hire my wife as my lawyer. Am sure she’d have a way of making me look like the victim.

Here’s the thing. Apparently light has a temperature. ‘Hah!,’ you say. ‘Why on earth should I be bothered!’ Well yes, you shouldn’t. You see, this temperature bit is just a con, not unlike all the technical jargon that photographers keep blabbering about to make themselves feel important and purposeful. Everyone knows light has color, right? You switch on a tube-light – WHITE color. A bulb gives us YELLOW color. That concept is just too simple. Any idiot would understand that. So, instead of calling it color, why not just go around talking about temperature instead. And just to confuse the shit out of newbies like me, call it color temperature! Anyways, mercifully, we can get along pretty well without the jargon, thank you. All we need to know is this: Light has color. And, if there is a semi-transparent medium between the light source and the subject, the light would take on the color of the medium. Neat. But what is this medium? Well, it could really be anything that’s semi-transparent. A transparent plastic bottle of water, for example (as was the case with Charsi’s image on the left. Or a piece of colored glass. Or if you are friends with anyone from the United National Progressive Alliance of India, you could try placing his head in between (Caution: Vacuum is colorless). But there will come a time when you’ll run out of colored-semi-transparent stuff. That’s when you go here and order yourself a sample-book. What you get is a bundle of 1"x4" colored, translucent paper. They are called samples because that’s what they are supposed to be. They are like a shade card from a paint shop that you use to decide what shade of pink would go on the walls of your bedroom to go with the hot-pink curtains that your missus brought home. Only, in this case, you can actually use them. The size of the samples are just about enough for you to be able to cover the head of your flash. From thereon, you are only bound by your imagination. You can use them for some really nice effects. Coloring backgrounds, for example. Or adding a nice warm glow to your images.

But the primary use for gels is color correction. There are gels called CTO (which is a secret code for Color temperature Orange, but it’s much more intuitive to just pretend it stands for Change to Orange) and CTB (Change to Blue) that apparently every photographer should have inserted in tiny little capsules inside their mouth lest they get captured by the enemy. These gels help manipulate the light emitted by your flash to better match the ambient light, giving a more natural looking output. In most situations, you would want all your light sources (including ambient) to be of the same color, unless of course you are assisting Anurag Kashyap and going for the psychedelic-doped-out-of-body experience kind of mood lighting. If, for instance, you are shooting indoors, and your primary light is daylight through a window, while you are using a flash for filling the shadows, you would want your flash to have a CTB gel. Why? Because daylight is primarily blue, while the light being emitted by your flash is not. So, Change to Blue! If you are shooting with tungsten ambient light, you need to change the flash color to tungsten, or orange. So, you CTO. You get my drift.

As you can see, not only is this gel thingy pretty handy, it also comes pretty cheap. And having invested in all those fancy lighting equipment, you really need to ease your conscience, don’t you? So, go ahead and treat yourself to some cheap fun instead. The Canon EF 50-200mm lens can wait another couple of months.

Enjoy!

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

Kuler is the new collaborative color theme generator from Adobe. While it’s meant specifically for designers, it’s equally helpful for photography as well. It’s online, free and community-based. And, it’s free. From Adobe. You got that, right? Adobe? Free?

The interface has a simple color wheel that has 4-5 nodes that can be moved around; the positions of the nodes control the colors of the swatches of color at the the bottom of the screen. While the ‘custom’ mode gives one full control of the nodes, there are other modes set according to predefined rules. For example, the ‘Shades’ rule will help you navigate five shades of the same color. Or the ‘triad’ will help you play around with 3 color schemes. Once you are satisfied with the color scheme that you’ve generated, you have the option of naming it and sharing it with helpful tags. You can also browse through schemes made by other nerds and bask in the warm cozy feeling of nerdy brotherhood.

Once saved, you can also export the swatch values (color info) to other Adobe products. Having a set color scheme in mind while post-processing images leads to interesting results. You could also try and integrate the color choices while taking the actual image with color gels. It’s also possible to work the other way around: to generate a color scheme from an image. You have the option of either uploading an image or linking to your Flickr account for this.

For offline work, if you have Adobe Air installed, there is a tiny little applet that you can use to admire your creations right from your desktop. With connectivity, you can also browse through sorted lists (in order of popularity or recommendation) of others’ creations. Enjoy!

Mental Note: Remember to crop deskbar before posting images.

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.