tutorial | The Blue Brick | Photography and Handcrafts by Shireen Nadir

Posts Tagged 'tutorial'

Photography – My work flow

Published March 20, 2013 Photography 1 Comment
Tags: HDR, lightroom, photography, photoshop, tutorial

2 weeks ago I flew to Calgary to shoot a sales centre my agency had helped design. It was a great shoot; a challenging space with lots of monitors and lots of glass. The white balances were all over the place, and the monitors, windows and pot lights meant lots of light sources to contend with.

This post is about my mental work flow when I’m doing this type of shoot. I won’t get into the photoshop details too much – this is more to show how I analyze a shot so I can get the best results.

Here is the original:

And after processing:

Step 1

I used the free transform tool to straighten out the walls. I used guides to make sure everything looked right.

Step 2

I had shot 3 exposures. I used the lighter one on top with a layer mask and selectively painted in with a semi-opaque brush to lighten up the darker areas.

Step 3

A levels adjustment layer was used to get the detail under the chairs to come out.

Step 4

I had to darken the view outside because it was blown out. This is where the darkest of my exposures came into play. Again I applied a layer mask and used a semi-opaque brush to paint in the darker exposure where I needed it.

Step 5

Using the vanishing point filter I established a perspective grid for the areas that were left blank by my wall straightening. Then I rubber stamped within that grid to fill in the corners without losing the perspective.

Step 6

I duplicated my layer, set it to multiply and applied a layer mask. Then I used a semi-opaque brush to paint in the highlights on the floor and table, to dim them a bit.

You can already tell I use layer masks and adjustment laters A LOT. I believe in non-destructive editing, this is very handy if the client has comments, and allows you to go back to any stage in your process to make adjustments (or create blog posts ;) ) I also rely heavily on my graphics tablet for detail work.

Step 7

The tungsten lighting in the room was making the floors and carpet come out orange. I created a new layer, set its blending mode to colour and painted the floor and carpet a neutral grey.

Step 8

I did the same for the back wall and ceiling area, to lessen the effect of the tungsten lights. I was, however, careful to paint around the art piece on the ceiling, so it’s gold colour wouldn’t be affected. Removing the orange tone from the white wall helped this piece pop out more.

Step 9

The overall tone was just a touch too bright for me. I used apply image, multiply at 10% to bring it down a touch.

Step 10

The monitor at the end was off so I put an image in.

Step 11

The screen didn’t look realistic yet, so I added an adjustment layer of levels to just the screen and increased the brightness and contrast. Then I added a slight outer glow using layer styles.

Step 12

Finally, I duplicated the monitor, turned it upside down, applied a layer mask and painted in just a little detail onto the table as a reflection. I added a gaussian blur to the reflection to make it more subtle and realistic.

Here are the before and after again :)

A lot of this is my personal taste, but knowing my work flow helps me determine how to shoot. I ask myself questions like

Do I need multiple exposures?
Do I need multiple white balances?
Do I need a polarizer filter for the reflections?
Are the walls bending with my wide angle lens? If so, should I do it in one shot or stitch it?
Would this shot benefit from a graduated filter?
Do I have any ‘hot spots’ that I’ll need to take out later?
Do I need to add anything (Like that monitor)?

This helps me create a shot that, though heavily processed, looks realistic, maintains the subtle details and allows me to deal with complex compositions.

HDR – The easy way

Published January 21, 2013 Photography 1 Comment
Tags: HDR, Long BEach, photography, photoshop, tutorial

Most photographers have heard about HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography. There are lots of great sites that get into the technical nitty-gritty, but in a nutshell HDR photography is a way to even out the light in an image so you get something closer to what your eye perceived. Googling HDR photography will show you the range – from beautifully captured, realistic pieces to over-processed, over saturated, mind-numbingly terrible pieces.

I’ve used Photomatix for a lot of my work, but increasingly I feel that even this delivers a result that looks too processed for me. So I present the Dummy Method of HDR – if you’ve got a copy of Photoshop (or even Photoshop Elements) you’re good to go.

Here’s what you do: bracket your exposure, but rather than bracket them by the traditional 2-stops under, 2-stops over and 1 mid-range, examine your image and break it into different areas based on light. You can see an example below:

Take your photos, as many as you need, based on your analysis of the shot. My shot analysis looked like this:

1 shot for the great sky colour
1 shot for the detail in the foreground sand and the rock
1 shot for the reflection in the water by the rock

Then (here is the dummy part) load them all up into Photoshop as separate layers in one document, grab yourself a big, soft eraser tool, set it to 30%-40% opacity and erase away the bits of every shot that you don’t need, building up the effect as you go (If you’re familiar with Photoshop you can use layer masks to non-destructively accomplish this bit instead). Here’s my result:

And here are a few more:

You can even do this in Photoshop Elements, it’s got layers and an eraser and that’s really all you need :) I’ve been shooting HDR for about 7 years, and I honestly believe that, simple as it is, this gives me the best, most consistent results and the greatest control over the final product.

New FO and How To Fix Curly Shawls

Published September 6, 2012 Crochet , Knitting 3 Comments
Tags: Crochet, edging, knitting, Mystic Fire, Northbound Knitting, shawl, tutorial

So I finished this lace shawl, and it’s so gorgeous I can’t believe I knit it.

It’s the first thing I’ve done entirely from charts, and I have to say I’m pretty pleased with m’bad self. The pattern is Mystic Fire by Anna Dalvi, and the yarn is Northbound knitting Superwash Merino in the gorgeous colour way ‘Artemisia’.

The pattern is great – some of the charts look intimidating at first but one row at a time I managed just fine. I have an iPad, and an app called ‘Good Reader‘ that opens and lets me mark up pdf files. I can’t recommend it enough – it let me outline the row I was on for easy reading, insert other lines to break up the chart into digestible chunks and leave notes for myself on the side, such as which repeat I was on, and directions another knitter used to make it bigger if I felt so inclined.

Still, when it was all done, there was a problem. I may have needed a few extra rows of garter stitch in there, but the thing curls up faster then my cat in the sunny spot on the couch. I didn’t discover this until after it was bound off and blocked.

I needed a solution, because the curl really bothered me, and damned if I wasn’t going to get to enjoy the best bit of lace knitting I’d ever done. I bat around different ideas like sewing on edging, blocking it even more aggressively, threatening it, and finally hit on a solution that I’m sure many knitters before me have discovered but was brand new and shiny to me and had a good amount of it’s-so-simple-it-just-might-work going for it. I was going to crochet on a simple trim.

Here’s how I did it:

I used the leftover yarn from the project, luckily there was some. You only need a small amount.
I used a smaller hook size then the needles I’d used. 1.25mm smaller to be exact.

I tied the working yarn to the bottom corner of the shawl and single-crocheted my way across, using the small holes left by the stretchy k2tog bind off (highlighted in yellow). At the corner I did 3 SC in the same stitch to turn.

Even after only 1 row of SC you can see it’s looking better:

I did 2 rows of SC before tying off the yarn and blocking it again.

It worked like a charm. I know some folks might not be fond of having a thick border below their lace, but in this case I feel it works. It’s certainly way better than the curled edge I was getting before, even after removing the pins and wearing it the edge stays flat, allowing me to take this creepy instagram pic:

Best of all, it cost me nothing extra and I was able to work directly into a cast off piece. The beauty of crochet was that if it didn’t work I could have just pulled it out without damage to the shawl. I’m pretty happy with the results :)

Ravelry Project Page here.

The Drop Zone Caterpillar

Published August 30, 2012 Photography , Uncategorized 4 Comments
Tags: CNE, long exposure, multiple exposures, photography, Rides, tutorial

Tito and I have had a romantic tradition of going to the CNE every year, on a work night, and just walking around, shooting the rides, eating bad food and losing spectacularly at games.

This year I tried something a little different, just for fun:

Here’s how you get the effect – take multiple shots of each ride, like so:

Then you bring them all in to Photoshop. You want all the pictures to be different layers in the same file. You change the blend mode of each later to ‘darken’, and voila! I like how the drop ride now looks like a crazy caterpillar.

The results are very cool, I can’t wait to try it with more complex movements, like the erratic flight path of a bee, or one of those games where everyone is tossing rings at a row of bottles. I plan to have a lot of fun with this one! Of course, that’s not to say that I didn’t also do my favourite – long exposure shots.

I love the CNE, can’t wait for the airshow!

Photo-Take-Outter Friday #14 – The Silky Water effect

Published June 8, 2012 Photo-Take-Outter Friday! , Photography 2 Comments
Tags: photography, tutorial, water

Have you ever seen a photo of water and wondered how they get the water to look so silky and smooth? The answer is a trick, all you need is a tripod and a DSLR or digital that lets you shoot in full manual.

Set your camera on the tripod and set it to manual mode. If you have the ability, shoot in RAW.

Here’s the trick; squeeze your aperture as far up as it will go. Remember, aperture numbers are like fractions; bigger numbers mean a smaller opening and you want the smallest you can get.

Make sure your ISO is 100 or as low as it goes, so the camera doesn’t try to compensate for the tiny aperture.

And now lower your shutter speed as far as you can without overexposing the shot – even in daylight you can often get up to a shutter speed as long as one second – especially if you’re working with a lens that lets you drop to, say, f32.

And that’s it! You only need a second for the water to blur beautifully. If you can get more than a second then you can into some truly beautiful effects. Enjoy!

Photo-Take-Outter Friday #8 – Macro Photography 101

Published March 30, 2012 Photo-Take-Outter Friday! , Photography , Uncategorized 2 Comments
Tags: Canon, macro, photography, tutorial

Macro photography is a great love of mine, and a very fun hobby. The best part is that whether it’s spring buds, yarn fibres, glaze details or critters – there is always something to shoot. Bored? Go on out and do some macro. There’s a great shot waiting right in your backyard.

Some of my favourite shots are up there because they capture something that you don’t normally get to see; the tilt of the stars, a birds wings frozen in motion etc. The cool thing about macro is that you’ll always get something that people normally wouldn’t get to see. So, at the least, it’s a fascinating shot every time.

For macro, I use Canon’s 100mm prime f2.8 macro lens. It’s also a fantastic long-range lens and I’ve done a lot of wildlife work with it. It’s not a cheap lens; but it’s worth every penny. It is, without question, the sharpest lens in my kit.

On top of that I use Kenko extension tubes. I bought mine at Henrys, used, for $100. Extension tubes have no glass, but lengthen the distance between your lens and your camera. This enables a lens to focus closer than it’s normal set minimum focusing distance. Kenko tubes come in sets of 3, which you can use together, or individually, depending on the effect you’re going for.

Here is an example of my 100mm lens, with just one Kenko tube on:

Here it is with 2 Kenkos:

And finally, with all 3:

Quite a dramatic change, right? Here it is again:

My tiger lilies with only one extension tube.

With 2 extension tubes

... and with the whole kit n kaboodle.

I’ve done some great critter photography with this set up:

Tips for the actual shooting part:

This lens set up weighs a lot, so a tripod is a good option.
The extension tubes compromise your exposure and you’ll need a longer shutter speed than normal – so bright light is essential if your subject is a moving one.
It can also be difficult to focus when you’re trying to get as close as possible, so what I do is lock my focus as tight as I can get it and then physically move the camera toward and away from my subject until I find that sweet spot for the shot.
Be ready to be patient – shooting outdoors means wind and that means your subject may not stay where you want them, even in a gentle breeze – but when you do get that perfect shot it’s that much more rewarding :)

Photo-Take-Outter Friday #3 – The Magic of the Lightbox

Published February 24, 2012 Photo-Take-Outter Friday! , Photography , Pottery 12 Comments
Tags: lightbox, photography, pottery, product photography tutorial, tutorial

Today I wanted to talk a little about product photography and how I get even lighting on my shots. For an example I’ll use a piece of pottery.

Here is a photo of one of my pitchers. Pottery is very hard to shoot because it’s shiny & colourful. Any picture of my pottery doesn’t do it justice if there are sharp, bright highlights and the colours can’t shine. So first I fix the lighting issue by aiming 2 stand lamps at it.

Starting to look better but there are 3 huge problems with it.

The background is distracting
The shadow of the handle is harsh
The highlights are too sharp and bright

Now I add the lightbox, to soften up the light and neutralize the background. My set up now looks like this.

The result is a shot that looks like this:

Definitely looking better! Now, the background is still not neutral enough for me so I’m going to insert a sheet of neutral grey fabric that will drape over the top of my lightbox and over the edge of the table. Then I place my pottery on the fabric, and my set up now looks like this:

Taking a shot gives me this:

Perfect! And that’s how you use a lightbox to improve your product photography. Here is a before and after.

You can get really creative from here and start adding different fabrics and papers into the background:

I’ve used this technique on the cheap too – you don’t need expensive equipment to start with. Here is my first ever set up:

I’m using a cardboard box with the sides and top cut out. Over the cut outs I’ve taped on some of that stuff that your electronics come packaged in, but you can use tracing paper or crepe paper. The sides are reinforced with packing tape. To light it, I’m using my livingroom window on one side, and an ikea stand lamp on the other side, the results were still lovely:

And that’s it! If you’re new to lightboxes and you decide to try them out I’d love to see a shot, and remember – you can get started without having to buy anything up front!

The Blue Brick | Photography and Handcrafts by Shireen Nadir

Posts Tagged 'tutorial'

Photography – My work flow

HDR – The easy way

New FO and How To Fix Curly Shawls

The Drop Zone Caterpillar

Photo-Take-Outter Friday #14 – The Silky Water effect

Photo-Take-Outter Friday #8 – Macro Photography 101

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