Behind the Scenes Archives - Page 6 of 21

Boudoir Photography Basics

Boudoir photography can be rewarding but take time to learn the business first - By Kate Sharp

One of the first areas of photography that people outside the business tend to fantasize about is boudoir photography. I’ll admit there is a certain high five quality to the first time you get paid to take pictures of scantily clad women. The novelty wears off after the first few and you’ll be surprised how quickly it turns into just another location job. Although I still have to add the scenery is better than any cubicle job!

Boudoir photography is a trend that started 10 minutes after the first camera was invented. Once they figured out the photographic process worked, they started looking for some gal willing to take her clothes off. That’s pretty much the same feeling that’s evoked when a budding photographer gets a new camera. It’s a trend that ebbs and flows in popularity and lately it’s been making a come back.

Resist the temptation to run out and start advertising yourself as a boudoir photographer until you have a lot of experience shooting portraits and a good selection of lighting gear.

Lighting

Like with any other portrait, lighting will be key to getting quality results. The difficulty will be lighting the location, which will likely be outside the studio. If it’s possible, try to get photos of the room you’ll be working ahead of time, so you can adjust your lighting kit appropriately.

Also bring your own extension cords. Older homes may not have enough outlets for all your lighting gear. I use heavy duty cords, a power strip, and gaffer tape to make sure no one trips over them.

The key lighting features will be soft and warm. Soft boxes are a must and it’s good to have a selection of gels you can use to warm them up even more if necessary. I always carry half, quarter, and eighth straw gels because they’re particularly flattering for skin tones. You can also use the gold side of your reflector.

Nudity

I’ve found that some clothing or lingerie can actually be more alluring than being naked, but that will be dictated by your client’s comfort zone.

I encourage people to consider professional nudes when they’re at their youngest and hottest. You’ll be glad to have those shots in a few years after kids and life take a toll on your looks. But not everyone is comfortable with that thought, so let the client find their own comfort level. Sometimes I’ve had clients decide they were comfortable enough to try it after shooting started, so be adaptable.

Any time nudity is involved I have a nudity clause in the contract, get a copy of their photo identification, and give the client greater latitude over image rights. That doesn’t apply to commercial nudes, but boudoir clients are going to want to know their picture isn’t going to be hanging in a gallery somewhere.

Working Alone

I never work alone on boudoir shoots. I’ll almost always have my wife come along and prefer the client have a friend or relative on hand as well. I tend to err on the side of paranoia, but the last situation you ever want to get yourself into is a “he said, she said” about what happened on a boudoir shoot. On the flip side, if there are too many people running around it’s going to kill the mood and make the client nervous.

It’s sometimes requires a little tact and patience to balance the needs of a location shoot with a nervous client. I’ve found it’s actually better sometimes that I leave the room if the client is nervous and let my wife talk to them for a few minutes. When I hear them start laughing, I know it’s okay to get started again.

Just don’t jump into boudoir photography without learning the business first, at least start with some reading on the subject. You and your clients will have a much better experience.

Kodak Hunts For Gallery Buyer

Kodak is seeking a buyer for their online image storage business

Several news outlets are reporting on a story in the Wall Street Journal that Eastman Kodak is seeking a buyer for their Kodak Gallery, the photo sharing arm of their digital camera business.

While this sale will probably be a routine transition for most customers, it does point up that one of the dark sides of online photo sharing sites is that the hosting site controls your images and can use them and transfer them in ways you may not have imagined.

The ability of online image galleries to do that comes from the Terms of Service, or ToS. You should really read those instead of just clicking through. If you do, you may be amazed at how many rights you are actually granting the host company.

Back in July, Twitpic prompted user backlash when they modified their ToS to claim ownership of the images posted there. The old ToS:

“You may not grant permission to photographic agencies, photographic libraries, media organizations, news organizations, entertainment organizations, media libraries, or media agencies to retrieve from Twitpic for distribution, license, or any other use, content you have uploaded to Twitpic.”

In other words, Twitpic said you couldn’t sell your own images! After virulent and vocal push-back from users, Twitpic modified their ToS:

“You retain all ownership rights to Content uploaded to Twitpic. However, by submitting Content to Twitpic, you hereby grant Twitpic a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and Twitpic’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.”

Even though you retain ownership, Twitpic reserves the right to sell your images to news agencies. WENN signed a deal with Twitpics to buy celebrity photos uploaded to the site. Your pictures, their sale. Nice deal, huh? And that’s nothing compared to what can happen if the company ended up going out of business.

In a bankruptcy sale the situation becomes even more difficult. Then the images in an online image sharing site become just another company asset and the bankruptcy trustee has the ability to modify the terms on which company assets are sold and distributed. So the ToS you clicked through might not offer much protection if the company goes bankrupt. The court and trustee could theoretically grant full ownership to the new buyers as part of the sale.

As far as I know there haven’t been any court cases involving the use of images obtained in a bankruptcy trial, but it’s only a matter of time. That’s why it’s a good idea to read those terms of service and think carefully about the images you store online.

If Kodak doesn’t find a buyer for Gallery and goes out of business, we may get our first test case sooner than most of us realize.

Triage For A Dirty Camera Sensor

digital camera sensor — Your camera's sensor is the heart of your camera, treat it gently - By John Carney

The heart of any camera is the sensor. The computer is the brain but there isn’t a lot you can do as far as maintenance goes. Keep the firmware up to date and that’s about the extent of it.

But the sensor is another story. That’s where the images are being recorded and there’s a lot going on in the sensor bay. In most cameras there’s a mirror mechanism flipping up and down and those moving parts are lubricated at the factory. After that mirror flips up and down a couple thousands times, it sometimes happens that some of that sophisticated lubricant on the mirror mechanism ends up on your camera sensor.

Another way dust and dirt find their way on to your image sensor is changing lenses. No matter how careful you are changing lenses, short of a dust-free clean room protocol, sooner or later you’re going to get dust on your sensor. For some reason the most powerful attractive force in the universe for attracting dust is located in the sensor bay of your DSLR.

The day will dawn you start noticing spots in your photos. Little smudges that appear in the same spot photo to photo. The quickest way to check for grease and dirt is to go outside and shoot a patch of open sky at f/22. Then take the photo and jam the levels, you’ll see the smudges right away and clearly.

Sensor Triage

Okay, don’t panic. This happens to everyone sooner or later. You have several options for dealing with the problem, so just follow the protocol and you’ll be fine.

If you’re really worried, you can send your camera back to the manufacturer for cleaning. That will mean bouncing it across the country in a FedEx or UPS box and then the lab bounces it back to you. I’ve had cameras come back dirtier than they left, not because the factory guys did a poor job, but because of all the handling.

One gadget that’s indispensable is a lighted magnifier so you can see what you’re doing.

The other indispensable thing to have is a fully charged battery. If your battery dies in the middle of this operation, the mirror will drop back down, possibly on your cleaning tools. That will not make an improvement to the mirror mechanism. You will be sad.

Step 1 – Blower

The idea here is to see if you can dislodge the dust particle with a gentle puff of air. Do NOT get the tip of the blower too close to the sensor surface. Air at high enough pressure will mar the sensor cover. So just gently blow on the dust, it’s either going to come off or it isn’t.

Step 2 – Static brush

The next step is trying a specially made anti-static sensor brush. Do not use a lens brush! Sensor brushes are specially made.

Be really gentle. Anything that won’t come off with a gentle flick of the brush is probably lubricant.

Step 3 – Cleaning Kit

Lubricant is going to require a cleaning kit with methanol. Don’t mess around and try to cobble it together yourself. Spend the money and get a professional cleaning kit. There are detailed, step-by-step tutorials and instructions on their site. Follow them.

Take your time, don’t panic, and don’t try to cut corners and you’ll be fine.

Understanding Exposure

exposure photo — Correct exposure in this instance is in the mind of the creator, not the firmware of the computer

At the most basic level exposure is the relationship between the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. When you push the button on your camera in automatic mode, there are a fantastic number of calculations going on inside your camera’s computer. Besides autofocus, your camera is analyzing the lighting, scene type, the light reflecting off the subject, the dynamic range, the contrast, and boiling all that down to a single set of numbers by balancing a fantastic number of variables.

In the old days you did all those calculations with a light meter in one hand an exposure guide in the other and, even then, you bracketed just in case. When you nailed the exposure it was part art, part science and part pure, dumb luck.

Now all that’s over. The sensor and computer inside your Canon 5D MKII or Nikon D300 camera combine to create an imaging device that is, by historical standards, absolutely mind blowing. But, even today, exposure is part art. While your camera is incredibly good at the science, the art still has to come from you. Part of what makes photographers worth the money is knowing when to trust the computer and when to take over.

Take the scene above for instance, a father and son sweeping out the engine bay at our old fire station. That is a classic “meter cheater”, meaning the proper exposure does not yield the most artistic expression of the scene. The first thing the camera tried to do was activate the pop-up flash so it could light the foreground subjects. I had to override the computer and tell it to expose for the outside light and ignore the foreground.

My opinion is that full manual shooters are kind of an anachronism these days. Manual shooting is slow, even when you really know what you’re doing. Do it long enough and you can get amazingly good at dialing in the settings, but you’re missing out on a host of functionality the sophisticated programming in modern cameras affords you. In controlled conditions, like a studio, you’ll be doing more manual shooting because the environment stays consistent.

More often these days, you’ll be telling the camera what you want to do either through soft menu settings or selectively managing certain components of the exposure. If you’re out shooting fast moving objects, you might tell the computer you need at least 1/500th of a second on the shutter speed and then let the computer manage the other settings.

You can tell the computer to make the exposure darker or lighter, to expose for a particular part of the picture while ignoring everything else, or to selectively change the contrast, color saturation, or sharpness. Knowing when to override the computer is one of the factors that go into becoming a great photographer.

In the old days that relationship was one way and dictatorial. You told the camera what to do all the time. Today it’s more of a cooperative relationship, more subtle. You and your camera work together. You do some things, the camera does some things. When you’re in a hurry, like chasing a story subject down the street outside the courthouse, or your camera is on the end of your monopod trying to get over the heads of the other reporters at a press conference, you trust the computer to do more because it can read a scene at the speed of light.

So, get out there and experiment with exposure and your camera menu settings. Use the AEB function (Automatic Exposure Bracketing) and compare the results. Experiment with aperture priority, shutter priority, and changing your camera’s presets. Do it until you can look at a scene and guess within an f-stop what settings your camera will choose.

Just because you don’t need to use all the manual settings all the time, doesn’t mean you don’t need to understand them.

Passing Down Photos In The Digital Age

wwII photo — My dad (far right) with his flight crew on Christmas Eve, 1944 - No digital image would have survived that long

A while ago my mom found a box that had a stack of pictures that dated back to World War II. There were my mom and dad as teenagers involved in a war.

It got me wondering about how that same scene would play out 50 years from now in the digital age?

When I used to work as a research scientist at a government lab out in the desert there were rooms full of data reels containing data from nuclear bomb tests and reactor tests going back years and years. But there were no longer any players that could read the data on the tapes and instead I had to go around to all the old timers collecting printouts that were stuffed in old filing cabinets and, in one case, were being used to line the bottom of a storage cabinet in an attempt to recover and digitize that old data. Even with that recovery effort, reams of data were lost, some of it forever.

I’m concerned the same thing will happen in the digital age. For some of you, JPG images have been around as long as you’ve been alive, but on the grand scale of photography, it’s a short time. The standard has only been around since 1991 and while it may be hard to picture a world where there’s no device around that could display a JPEG, technical history is full of examples of just that type of thing happening.

Future-Proofing Your Images

There are few good ways to insure your images are going to be around 100 years from now. Even film has a tough time making it that long in storage, unless it is temperature and humidity controlled. But prints are still the best way to have photos around long after you’re gone.

Metal Prints

Metal prints come in two flavors: Paper with metallic inks embedded in the paper and prints on actual metal plates with photographic coatings. Both of those boast lifespans of nearly 100 years, but since the processes that create them have only been around for 10, it’s hard to put a lot of faith in that claim. Still, metallic prints seem to be the best method of preserving your personal photographic history on a time scale that long.

Photobooks

Photobooks are another good choice for long term storage, provided they remain in some reasonable range of temperature and humidity. The advantage is they can be put in storage and discovered, and still viewed, by family decades later. Provided it doesn’t get wet or moldy, there’s a good chance your kids could find a photobook in 40 years and still view it.

Digital Storage

There are few digital options that will provide generational continuity unless they are upgraded regularly. File formats change, operating systems come and go. You can’t dump digital images on any kind of storage media and expect it to be accessible in 40 years. If someone handed you a pancake platter from the 70s would you be able to read it? With a lot of searching, you might find a data archive company that could read the data, but it’s a long shot. That’s likely the same situation your kids would face with hard drives of today.

It may seem bizarre to suggest that the best way to preserve your photographic memories is to get prints made, but that, unfortunately, is still the technical reality.