My old photography writings

Why I deliver digital files to my customers?

2014-10-19T22:00:00.000+02:00

Today I have found some of my very own writing that got lost for some reason... I just stumbled across this reasoning of my own from some 2 years ago... Well, not much has changed in my own attitude during this time, I would say. Was a little offline in terms of reading about these topics lately, so not sure if fellow photographers are just as scared of giving away digital copies of their photos or not so much any more.

Question to photographers: do you deliver digital files?
Question to clients: do you expect to receive digital photos from your photographer?

Here is the whole text from early 2013 or maybe late 2012:

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As time goes

2014-10-19T16:10:00.002+02:00

Today remembered one of the funnier moments captured back in 2011.

While looking at this photo, I realized that today it would look a bit different. I got less 'contrasty' over the years, I guess... Here is same photo today (coming from Lightroom).

Happy birthday, Maya ;)

Best autumn colors!

2013-10-10T22:00:00.003+02:00

I declare this year as delivering the best autumn colors ever since I moved to Sweden. Have not seen such intense fall palette for 8 years or so now! Appreciate that there was no storm to tear down all the colored leaves and we get to enjoy gorgeous colors of autumn for so long.

Look out the window of your car/bus while you can ;)

All shot on Nikon 70-300 lens and well... I still use my D70s body... I got a D600 in February this year (jep, 8 months ago) and still appreciate my D70s :) ahhh... For now I'll just say that I was one of the 'lucky' ones who got a D600 with poop on the sensor... More when the story is over!

Cheers for now!

Not all cancellations are bad!

2012-11-25T13:34:00.000+01:00

Today got a last-minute Christmas card session cancellation (here it is the season of ill children) which turned out into a ton of fun at home instead. So in the end some free time is really good as well. Always look on the bright side of life!

E has a new hideout! One of the 'top secret' type.

J is all laughter. She will never miss her chance to smile back at you.

And I played with Bibbles cross-processing preset while they were resting.

Julia - how it was made

2012-08-22T15:13:00.000+02:00

I proudly present the latest member of our family- Julia. She just turned one month! I don't have to say we are more than happy to have her. A note of sanity- this post is not about how Julia was made, it is more about the photo... ;)

Singaporean wedding in Gothenburg

2012-08-17T03:04:00.000+02:00

NO! They are not Singaporeans living in Gothenburg! They came all the way to Sweden to get their wedding photos done!

Yes, it was hard to believe for me as well, not just in the beginning, but all the way till I actually met them here in Gothenburg. I am still fascinated by the fact they traveled across the world... And also that I was the one who got to work with them!

We had two great days of fun and intensive shooting marathon. Thanks both Wendy and Winson for sticking it out and not leaving me during one of the night shoots...

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PixyLike online proofing is finally here!

2012-08-03T21:49:00.000+02:00

"Last time I made the selection, I thought that there has to be a way to simplify this..." In lines of these words were the client comments around proofing process of my photographic work. As you can imagine, going through a couple of hundred proof files, typing down the file names into a mail and sending that over back to me is not the most romantic bit of the photo session. Especially in the extreme cases, like the recent wedding when the choice was to be done from 1.5k photos. Therefore PixyLike Online proofing was born and now not just myself, but any photographer can ease up their own and their client life by automating and simplifying the proofing process!

Softer light with Elinchrom Rotalux 90x110

2012-03-11T17:46:00.000+01:00

Finally the time has come to soften the light from my Elinchrom 500BX Ri kit! For that I decided to go with the Rotalux 90x110cm softbox. Here is a picture of contents of the box as it arrived in the mail:

Not sure if the chocolate bars are included by Elinchrom or the web shop that I bought the Rotalux from, but it was a cool extra to find in the box!

Why I got this, other available options and initial thoughts are all listed down below, so read on!

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GED Dancers

2012-01-31T22:06:00.000+01:00

One of not-so-usual jobs from last year- photo shoot for GED, a dance studio in Göteborg. Talent was their top-rated couple Dawid and Frida- Swedish champions on multiple occasions etc etc. These two can seriously dance! I had a chance to observe them training and it was hard to keep up with all the moves, not to mention that inner feeling of being a tree stump or a rock or whatever heavy bulky and lifeless thing when it comes to dancing.

Definitely worth going to see some dance competition when one comes to your town! And if it is Göteborg, you might even see photos made by me on GED's posters. That was the main intended use for the photos, thus all was shot on white seamless background.

Read more for the tech details and findings...

Seasons greetings

2011-12-23T23:48:00.001+01:00

Frosty xmas greetings to all friends! Hope you have a lovely coming year!

Not sure if I can take all credit for the picture... Lets call it a reproduction of natures artwork :)

Take care!
M.

Last wedding this year...

2011-10-09T21:49:00.000+02:00

And so, with my last congratulations to the newlyweds, I declare my wedding season over for this year. Nothing else planned, at least. However, you are more than welcome to come up with an unexpected winter wedding!

Meanwhile, a couple of moments from last session at a wedding in Germany.

Summertime fun!

2011-09-09T01:00:00.000+02:00

A lovely day spent with family Veitch! The kids were having a blast and were really hard to keep up with! Or is it just me getting old now... :)

So, here is a whole bunch of sunny summertime portraits of kids having fun.

Right before I left Mum suggested that Maya should go and take a nap... That idea was actively refused by crawling under the table and playing with a network cable... If that is not cute, I don't know what is :)

A bit of summer romance

2011-07-22T13:12:00.009+02:00

What is a summer without a wedding?! Here are a couple of candid shots from a recent wedding in Sweden. Congrats to the newly weds one more time!

A few more weddings left this year. Hope I will be able to post those here!

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Emmet

2011-06-18T10:37:00.001+02:00

Meet Emmet- the drooling, chewing happy five-month-old. A great kid and such an ease to work with! Was smiling for the whole hour while I was there.

As usual in the full post you will find some more details on the techie side of the pictures.

New members of the family- Emilia and A Nikon 50mm 1.4

2011-02-11T20:42:00.000+01:00

So it finally happened and maternity that I took pictures of materialized into a lovely daughter Emilia :) Now you know why I was gone for a month... So without further delays- here she is.

As this is a photo blog I will not go into details how cool this is- too hard to explain anyway. Let me just summarize briefly:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Highlight recovery / portrait processing with Bibble 5

2011-01-07T06:08:00.083+01:00

Welcome to 2011 ;) First post of the year is made from half year old picture of Desiree Hermann. During Christmas vacation I was playing with one of the (technically) messed up pictures from that photo shoot. The picture is slightly overexposed. Not completely blown out, but not usable straight out of the camera. So I decided to have some practice with highlight recovery and play more with Bibbles layers and new feature of 5.2- layer opacity to try and add more depth to the portrait.

Here is a screenshot of the final image and how it all came together from the original RAW file (straight out of the camera, without even my default RAW settings for Bibble applied to it):

Click on the image to see it bigger!

Jump inside the post to read more details how I got to the final version of this photo. All in all I am seriously happy with what Bibble 5.2 delivered!

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Happy holidays!

2010-12-24T07:00:00.004+01:00

This year was 3 times more productive than the previous ones (hooray for statistics, sounds cool but this is post number 30 this year:) ). That is if we measure by amount of posts I have written (the only directly measurable thing, I guess :) ). As for myself - it has been the most educational year EVER in all available senses.

Looking forward to next year and hoping to have more time for sharing what I've learned with you all!

Thanks for sticking around another year! Hope you have a ton of fun and great pictures and a very educational 2011 ;)

Cheers!
//M.

P.S. just to stick to it- one 60x60 softbox (from Elinchrom BX 500 Ri kit) straight in front of the teddies. 4 sec exposure to catch the candle light. Complete darkness besides that.

Now it is time for xmas :)

Acid morning rising over Göteborg (or my batch output settings for Bibble 5)

2010-12-17T09:36:00.099+01:00

Some shots from an early freezing morning walk. These were actually aimed to the west- the sun was rising behind my back. It was amazing to watch the purple glowing haze come down all over the city and then just disappear over the horizon... Not always the best action is with the sun :)

Jump into full post if you care about batch processing settings I have for Bibble 5. Some thoughts about Bibbles sharpening in there too. Otherwise, enjoy the view. I had great two hours on that hill with -10° C and Terra to keep me company (some running around with a dog is a good way to warm up :)).

New Bibble 5.2 released just now!

2010-12-16T21:37:00.003+01:00

Great news today- Bibble labs have just released a '5.2 Release Candidate' version of their RAW photo editor. It is not the final version (not gone through full testing procedure as I understand), but I am already downloading it for a test ride on my laptop (paranoid to touch my workhorse PC just yet :) )!

A whole bunch of new features added. I have a hunch that I will especially enjoy enhanced selective editing - layer opacity and ability to copy/paste layers - to name a few. Read full details about this release on bibblelabs forum here or just download Bibble 5.2 from here.

Updates and more hands on comments inside the post!

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Before and after of the Swamp Raider picture

2010-12-10T07:05:00.084+01:00

Thought I would outline the workflow of post processing the photo of my dog Terra, the one from the swamp weekend. Here are the four steps that I took to get to the final image starting with original file with only my default RAW settings applied:

Jump inside for details!

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On-Line photo printing in Sweden

2010-12-03T06:08:00.001+01:00

Note: this one mostly applies to Sweden-based photographers... And is a nice find for myself.

A few days ago Frida and Pikki (I photographed them this summer) came over to order their wedding prints. And this really embarrasing thing happened- I could not upload the pictures to the printing companies web page... Then the lightning struck me- I have never done this since moving to Linux!

Some kind of Java plugin error... IcedTea it's called... This was all I was getting in my Chrome window...

Darned, the whole situation was just so ugly... I tried some other photo printing companies. Seemed like everyone was using Java for the photo upload interface...

Blah. After F&P left, I dived into the web for more detailed research. Came across Crimson lab in Stockholm. And what a lovely find that was!

More details inside the post.
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Maternity shoot

2010-11-26T07:41:00.001+01:00

A bit different maternity photo session - for the first time it is of my girlfriend Dalia! We are expecting a very unusual Christmas present this year!

After all the talks about photography at home (nagging out new gear) I could not afford not taking pictures of her, so here are some shots from the latest session we had.

The idea was to have 'white and light' maternity pictures and I think it worked out pretty well!

We could not miss the 'belly holding' shot too, with yours trully in there as well :)

Realy excited about our first addition to the family! I don't think I fully understand what's coming my way, but I am definitely getting a lot of practice with baby photography quite soon!

If you are interested in details on lighting setup and diagram, click the Read More link.

How to crop in Bibble?

2010-11-19T08:04:00.002+01:00

It might sound like a funny question, but in all brutal honesty- it took a while to figure out the trick behind crop tool in Bibble 5. And so how do you crop in Bibble?

All you need to do is just press 'c' (or click the crop button ), select the area you want to keep in the photo and ... that's it. I had to take a break and come back to the crop issue before it struck me that there is no need to double-click or 'apply' or 'ok' my crop. The cropping was finalized right after the selection... And as soon as you switch to another tool (i.e. click the 'Pan & Zoom' button), Bibble will display the properly coropped photo. And even if you don't switch, your crop settings are already saved and active.

Today I've been working with Bibble for 4 months or so now and sometimes I still catch myself double-clicking in the crop area to apply my settings... Bibblelabs have surely eliminated a completely needless step, but it seems to be stuck in my head for good :D

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Simple lighting setup with Elinchrom Bx 500 Ri

2010-11-12T07:55:00.000+01:00

Some weeks ago a good friend came visiting and one of the evenings we spent making a couple of portraits of her. She is a happy camper as you might notice :)

Half way into the photo session Terra felt she needed to investigate things

Terra is one curious dog. Nothing goes unnoticed at home...

For those curious how the pictures were taken- a chart of lighting setup and some more details on how the pictures happened inside the post.

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My default RAW settings for Bibble 5

2010-11-05T14:12:00.000+01:00

You can create a custom defined set of 'Default RAW settings' in Bibble 5. These default RAW settings are the ones that are automatically applied to every RAW file you open in Bibble for the first time.

If you are using Nikons software (similar goes for Canons, I guess...), your in-camera settings for sharpening, color saturation and the like will be reflected on screen immediately. Now what Bibble does is completely different. Seems that all you get from camera by default here is the pixel values and white balance, which in many cases looks nothing like the picture on your cameras LCD. It just turns out quite dull and boring actually.

The good thing is that a much better looking photo is just around the corner! Two things that I have been doing 99% of times after opening a new picture for editing was to first adjust curves to a slight 'S' and then increase saturation. So both of these adjustments were added to the Default RAW settings. The S curve as you see it down in the screenshot below, and saturation set to 15. When you adjust these settings, right-click on the picture thumbnail, choose Settings and then 'Save as RAW Default Settings...'.

Here are two versions of a photo of crayfish - original straight out of camera and after applying my default settings:

Obviously the exact settings need to be custom tailored for every photo. Usually saturation value goes down to 10 if it is a portrait I am working on or it could go up to 20 if it is a nature shot of some kind.

You might have noticed that in the above screenshot the Working Space is set to Adobe RGB. That is also included in my default kit, but this one is up for everyones own taste... Just like any other setting too. If you are doing any other adjustment to almost all of your pictures, might as well save it into your own defaults.

So once you are done with this, every picture you open up with Bibble will have the S curve and saturation applied. You can also revert to your defaults at any point by pressing Ctrl+R, in case you get carried away postprocessing and need to go back to square one :)

//M.