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Greenroom: Photo Critique and Edit

Now we could get into the backstage stuff. We'll start with the d thirty two hundred. When we sat down, anybody at home, we sat down in the green room, had nice conversations and actually did some of this stuff what I start with the eighteen to fifty five again, compositionally what's wrong? Yes, she's in the center, it would look better the other way, but then I then I started to move her for the next shot still would like it to go a little further, but I also wanted to cut out this bright area here because that's where that one little light that we had so I wanted to mover over, I would like to have moved over a little more, but actually it's not bad you have all these band names on the wall. I didn't even realize this when I was shooting, because I wasn't paying attention to that, but it would be cool to put the whole band against this, maybe move one of the benches in the future if you're comfortable with the band and try to do a band shot against the wall because it's cool that yo...

u have other names like I saw group love right here and carmen and that's pretty cool that they're there, it is a pretty good that that that's part of a scene that that adds dimension what are we at here sixty four hundred eyes so again I mean this works as well I put her where the lightning bolt was one of the lightning bolt to come out of her head and I like the contrast and I like the tones that are created here again this is what the d thirty three hundred and now you're eighteen the fifty five with the forty two millimeters I was doomed out to forty two which means that my f stop went to f five this is where the image started so I don't think the color would have worked too well I like the tones of brick when they go black and white so we went to this and then off to the side more this time I threw her off to the side even more just to play with my different compositions back tio twenty four millimeters eighteen fifty five tighter head shot I situated her there I like the arrow to the right and then the lightning bolt to the left I just thought it was just something different I thought it fit with her personality anybody agree really really bad lighting by the way I did a bad job there but brought it back in the raw file to make it work let's look at the settings one fortieth of a second of five point six what happened there is when I zoomed out the five point six the aperture it's a variable aperture lens, so it went from maybe being in a four where one fortieth of a second would have been fine to five point six to being totally, I'm actually two stops off on two stops off, because that's, what I corrected for and this is showing you that even with the raw file of a d thirty three hundred and being two stops off, which is further than I like being off, it still works so that that is that, I guess. Russ that's, the fear part, the fear part is that I sit there and have to sometimes practice what I preach, but I totally botched it with the with the exposure, I'm that far off on two stops off, but it saved because it wasn't in j peg, and it works got larry, we threw on the twenty four to seventy for this, I don't know. The funny thing here is, I don't know that I particularly put him right in this position to see that there was the green, the door, the brown door, and then the green. To get this, I put the twenty four to seven on this camera just because you can obviously do that, you could put any piece of glass on it, that I'm a big fan of the quality glass, so the lighting in the hallway wasn't wasn't too good, pretty flat, pretty plain. We just did this pulled a bunch of the color out on, but this one, I actually left color because of the separation from this and this we had those exit signs in the background, we've got these wires laying along the ground, which actually aren't that bad because it is backstage that could be wires laying around, threw him off to the wall said, look up, put your phone on the wall, look across it's okay to direct, sometimes for some of these things are pretty set up shot, but it still looks candid, but, you know, it's set up, but it's, not that big of a deal. What are we at? We're at three, five, so being that we're at forty eight millimeters it's not really going to blow out the background too much if I would have gone into the next hallway and used a seventeen to two hundred if we didn't have cameras, people behind me, I could have blown out the background, mohr and separated him from the background, but this is still going to work, and then one shot like this he's holding up the walls like he was in the death star and the and the what it was with walls work for the compact or walls were closing in and actually the lights look pretty cool here. One thing I didn't notice and stephen pointed this out to me was the diabolical metal coming out of his head I was focused on remember what I said unlike look, the exit sign has these things that look like bolts coming out of his neck and I didn't even see those things up top just didn't see it when I was looking through the viewfinder uh doesn't kill the image no, it could, but it doesn't a way to correct this is I could get maybe at a lower angle or I could have him move forward or move backwards so that those polls aren't where they are, but in this case it may just fit his personality so that's what that with the d thirty three hundred I could get to the d for s ones from post show this is where we were having fun, we just let them do their thing I cleared the table one fiftieth of a second to eighty five thousand s, so they're not moving that's why I dropped one fiftieth of a second I'm at fourteen millimeters, so I'm not breaking that rule that you don't shoot uh slower than your focal length, which we ended up breaking most of the time anyway because there's ways to cheat that system with the v r way you hold the cameron stabilize yourself so this is a cool hanging out backstage group shot I for for stuff like this over set up band shots they've been there could too contrived I don't like them as much the expressions they're cool they're all right but I like the angles we've got the difference of the wall here going on this angle we've got the dimension being created here as that's going like that so I like the tones and colors that we're getting there also the angle they talked about point of view russ was asking a question yesterday from their chat room about point of view and there are times where I went higher and I went lower in this case you can see that I went higher for this because they stood up and I had a back up and good a little wider because they went from this so this I had to be prepared for that focused in on the center I believe right about here and we I liked it in color I just like the feel of it in color and this is a cool shot it's a cool band shot so it's not it's not set up at all and they chose to sit here and start talking they just started to have a conversation and I just locked in and started to shoot focusing in on the ladies here they were doing whatever they were doing then I sat down on the chair and started to talk to larry I'm like hey larry look over here we have the girls and out of focus in the background that's pretty cool this is a cool shot and then this one like a pointed may interaction is fun then back in the hallway same thing one one twenty fifth of a second three to sixty four hundred s o using the seventy, two hundred this way we blew the back ground out a little more about out at one twenty two seventy millimeters on this the colors seem to be pretty cool it's a pretty interesting color it's just off the wall and it's pretty good it's a little dark underneath but but here my focus is on his face actually like the contrast I like the way that the there's light on his hands here on his arms here there's not so much underneath his neck I had him lift his head and I just like the lights that are coming from from the top I just think it works pretty cool you find this in a lot of hallways there's interesting shots is interesting colors that can happen and it's not a studio shot so it's not going to the most perfect perfect thing in the world but I think it works is pretty grungy hi same thing that is crossing the arms and when in doubt cross the arms that's a low point of view same thing here we got larry there didn't cut off his arms let's see if I did a cut off his arms by accident in another one you see how the centering how he's not centered in this the composition wise I probably saw that when I was shooting and knew that I wanted to get him more centered now that I say that I don't know that either one is centered at all but that's the point is to try to get him actually this one is better he is more in the center you can see based on where his head is and his arms pretty even left to right and things like that russell I'm going to throw to you for questions am I supposed to be critiquing this their stuff now we like what you're doing uh yeah, I think I think what the plan was to do it as kind of the end of this segment. Okay, so it kind of depends on what you still want to do with the rest of these. Yeah, one request we did get which was tio going to see you go through this step by step process on a color image we did through the black and white but we love to see a step by step on a color image already should we do a band? Do they want to ban shine? I shouldn't ask you that, but would you guys rather see the behind the scenes? Want what you want to see a live shot this one way to put me on the spot so I can show you again that I would be completely wrong and how I edit it this time that's where it started flat when you said you want people to call you out. Melvin is wondering whether you screwed up yesterday and are just doing black and white to cover your mistakes. Did he watch? No, I don't know now if you didn't watch no, they're they're going black and white isn't covering up for making mistakes going going black and white is is going black and white because there's no color there or it just feels right for me. It's a feel black and white, is in a cover up for mistakes. If it was out of focus, it wouldn't matter if it was color or black and white it's out of focus don't make me curse because then I have to give something away, but no, don't that za legitimate question, but absolutely not there is no such thing is trying to cover it up by going black and white. Ah mess up is a mess up is a mess up there's nothing you can do to do it so an out of focus picture is not something that you can hide in the fact that I upped my clarity to eight million and I upped my contrast and I try to make try to hide the fact that it's out of focus right? You can't do it lytro sucks all right lights or doesn't give you the ability to anyway is there a camera on me lytro all right never mind let's reset this and see what we can do I mean the color is pretty weird here yes I'm going to get nowhere near what I did yesterday because we're here doing it like this let's see how is the color right here yeah see there was a little too much magenta I'm just pulling that back a little bit because the wall to get in get that green of the wall looks better pulling out a little bit of that yellow I'm boom defying a little more this time I'm pumping up the shadows a little bit because it holds up huh let's say and we do and I don't want to go too far with the yellow and so magenta on their faces though I think you're getting this this green of this green hue off the wall so sometimes you're not able to correct things perfectly but that's what you're getting this this reflection off this wall which is causing this we have a different reflection off of this wall which is causing larry to be a little more on the magenta side because he's not sitting by that green wall we really this is my process of going through images I literally sit here and try to get the feeling that I'm going for when I'm looking at it where did I start? So it wasn't that far off actually this one is less yellow so not that bad maybe I want to like twenty four and we pulled out and it's something like that I mean that that is literally what I personally do that makes sense that seem like it's difficult hard easy personal preference yeah can you talk a little about how you stay organizing palladium I am okay what part vancouver bank over on it stay organized in what way how do you ah how do you bring your images in the later? How do you keep them organized? How do you start them? How do you color them? Yeah god bless you. So what I do? I renamed my folders here in this case it's two thousand fourteen oh seven ten underscore concert before us another underscore ivory name everything like that when I'm importing, you can put tags and key words in there in case you ever need to search anything like uh bands the location where it was shot. But when I when I import them, I import everything. So we have everything in here that I shot. I would rename everything to match the two thousand fourteen oh seven to match my file naming like that. And then having go from zero all the way up to however many, if it's nine hundred ninety nine then we go zero to nine hundred ninety nine that's how I go up and I organized those I also when I do other the next stuff you see there's another folder under it because that was a that was a different camera. I probably would have combined them because they were taking a different times, but I'm not generally doing those two different cameras there. But if I did have two cameras and shooting the same show, I would make sure that the times on the cameras were sink so that I can match them up after so that they come in chronological order when they come into my system here, when I go through and star, I go through and I and I went wrong way on the mouse. I start somewhere like this, and I go through, and if I like it, I'll sit there and be like, you know what? This is the five and I'll make it a five the reason I do read nowadays and that's just me I do five here's my process start to finish imported rename it go through it take the ones that are fives I go through and I pick the fives and those are the ones that I edit people wonder well you took so many raw files you edit every single file not everyone's a keeper if it's not a keeper I don't edit it they forced me to edit the non keepers this time because they have to pop him up on the screen but that's just there's no reason to edit it if it's not something that is a shot that you're going to keep so then after I started I go through and I do that and then maybe the ones that I make red maybe the top six the best of the best of the best makes sense seems like is that what you do pretty similar I mean there's I don't know what else we would do yeah I just I know people sometimes use different stars for different things you know three, four five stars I mean yeah again it's it's it's all personal preference this is just what I've done since I have been in light room on dh my method of doing it pick the ones I like edit the ones I like and then I can come back to them at any time and go back but also here's the thing when you import them after a shoot and you go through it the night of a shoot maybe when you get home don't throw anything out star the ones you like and then go back tomorrow and we look at everything again there's times where I've missed images that should have been there there there there really really good because I was either tired or I just saw my mind was different in the next day and then I saw something that I like that I was like oh snap I missed that yesterday I should have done this makes sense absolutely alright lets you want do the critique part before we move on now we're going to doom or editing and stuff later on today as we go through a couple of other shoots that we appreciate that we did a my favorite editing stuff that's eleven so claire I'm next artist a couple others wanted to know why y light room why not go into photo shop? Can you just talk a little bit about your kind of high level editing philosophy? Uh, light room is more of a way to organize and get to your photos quicker photo shop for me it's I don't like the bridge component I don't like the raw editor there I think it's too it's just not as pretty is not laid out in a photo program for you to edit one hundred shots in a row you feel the same way on that stephen for bulk editing yeah spoke ending for exactly and that and that's why I use this I thought you're gonna ask me why don't you use aperture? Because nobody should use aperture when they're shutting it down I don't go into photo I personally do not go into photo shopped at all that's just that's just me I don't do it, I say in light room and do my edits here and so just something that somebody noticed that I think is worth pointing out if you look in that list you've got about what two hundred fifty six photos you happening yesterday from yesterday from the d's arrest on that case and we took more than three songs, you know, they sang more than three songs. Yeah, so that is this pretty representative of what you'll do from an actual concert. Absolutely yeah, I mean, I there's no saying that I'm not going to limit myself to the amount of good ones and that I keep or or bad ones for that case, but it looks like I started eighty five of the two hundred fifty six so if if there are that many that are pretty good then that's not bad there especially when you're shooting a band like this when somebody's running around so much you have to shoot a little more to try to get those shots sharp or in focus about two hundred fifty six is not that many of those people that will shoot eight hundred pictures in three songs, so yeah, that was a little more than three songs, but I'm pretty happy with what I got. I'm not over the moon happy with everything because I'm rarely happy with everything I shoot, but I think out of this we could pick ten solid images to deliver to the client. Ideally, I would have sat here and showed you the ten best of the best and then and called it a day, but we have to show you everything because that's the way to learn to know that not every image is perfect and it's not going to be perfect that's a that's a misconception. I think a lot of people have is that you see people's work and you go and that's the best. Well, if you put out the best work ofyours and people have nothing to compare to the worst stuff, why put out something if you're not happy with it? So you see the best of what you have to know that not every picture that I take in a concert is going to be a keeper but at the end, when I deliver those files, you're going to see the best of the best and there's show there's been shows where I've only been able to get three or four really good shots for whatever reason, and that is what it is, but the client has been extremely happy with those two or three shots or four shots it's just like, wow, that's cool and that and that just is what it is, maybe one more before we get into the critique, which is ready to go. Ah, few different people large e, particularly right here was wondering about, uh, calibrating your monitor. Do you do that at home? What do you use itself? I have an imac twenty seven and I'm back and I don't calibrate it. Um, I never have steven, on the other hand, uses a pc and had a older monitor that was a little further off. I think a lot of the lower end monitors are going to be further off than apple cinnamon displays are pretty darn good. What what I buy you, uh, can't viewsonic no, not a viewsonic, a can't member of thought my head, the actual amount, but bought stephen a great monitor for editing for doing the videos that we have at home, and he basically what happened when you saw that ah well I compared the two I have been out side by side and the one I used just for like a spotify playlist or some music for editing on it's completely off compared to the brand new pre calibrated pre factory calvert ones pre factory calibrate right there are there are calibration tools out there if you use I suggest using them on on most monitors if you have it I just never done it and even making my prints wherever I get them printed they've been pretty darn close I don't know and that's even going back into my pc days what I what I used to do even if you have ah a lower end monitor you have to know that what you see may not be what the printer seas have some test prints done at the printer and a lot of them have the the what what they call the you can download their their profiles you can download their color profile so that what you see is what they're going to print you also have to know that ninety nine percent of the world doesn't have their monitors calibrated so when they're looking at your file and they go oh it's too yellow well maybe yellow on their screen where on your calibrated moderate looks perfectly fine so you're not going to really find that everybody's monitors air going ever match yours because nobody's nobody's really going to ever be totally calibrated