So far in my pursuit of photography, I’ve spent much more time shooting images of landscapes, architecture, buildings, etc. than I have taken portraits. Oh sure, I’ve taken lots of family photos along the way – snapshots – but not much serious portrait work. Well, then there’s Lily – portrait above!

As I wrote in my summary of my learning about photography in 2011:

I began, for the first time, to try to learn more about portraiture. I’m still a relative novice at it – there’s a lot of difference between shooting a landscape and a person – but I’m beginning to appreciate and try to apply those differences. Portraiture is definitely an area I want to continue to focus on in 2012!

One of my learnings came from a portraiture class taught by Neal Menschel at Stanford’s Continuing Studies program. Neal’s a great photographer and his approach to critique and instruction helped me make some early progress. As so often happens, we learned a lot from each other in that class – as we were each progressing week to week. Definitely a valuable experience!

Of course, there’s really nothing better to build skills than to practice – but that’s been more difficult for me. Part of it is my social skills – not being much of a “chatter” (!) – along with my other pursuits. I’m sure it’ll come – as I get more comfortable with it.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working my way through Roswell Angier‘s “Train Your Gaze: A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography” (aff link) – a seriously wonderful book about photographing human subjects “in many different ways and from a number of different perspectives.”

Each of the twelve chapters in the book includes three elements: a discussion of one aspect of portrait photography, example photographs illustrating that aspect and a shooting assignment to pursue. I’m reading through the book now – and plan to go through it a second time to work through the assignments.

Here’s an example assignment – from the first chapter “About Looking”. You put the camera on a tripod, and find a willing subject able to spend an hour. The goal is to use the full hour and take a “36 exposure roll of film” of that person over the full hour – not in the first five minutes. Angier’s using this technique to highlight Richard Avedon’s approach to stillness. Turns out that Angier’s got my concerns about banter with the subject in mind:

First and foremost, the photographer must be quiet, thereby relinquishing the responsibility to keep the subject amused with reassuring banter. This is markedly different from the chatty masquerade that characterizes commercial portrait studios… The process may be uncomfortable or it may not be. It may seem like a quiet struggle or it may feel like a seduction. The end result will be witness to the process. Whatever quality the result may have, it will not feel like a picture that has been caught on the fly.”

Earlier this week, at the Google+ Photographer’s Conference, Peter Hurley – master of the head shot – spoke. Hurley’s technique is effectively the opposite of this – he talks A LOT to his subjects – continuously from the way he described it. And he gets some great head shots.

So, what to learn from these two approaches? Hurley’s certainly more of production “machine” – being paid by his subjects for his work. Avedon, for much of his work, didn’t want any personal connection with his subjects. Different strokes – both producing strong images.

Like most things in life, this feels very situational – for me to apply, it depends on the situation. If I was shooting senior portraits, a Hurley-like chatty approach makes sense. If I was shooting, for example, strangers – the dispassionate, disconnected Avedon approach would likely capture them at their most realistic. Bottom line for me: spend more time doing portrait work and try to find my technique.

By the way, here’s a great review of the book on the Luminous Light blog. It includes notes on each chapter and links to related content.

What makes great photographs? On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I attended (Tuesday) and watched (Wednesday) the first Google+ Photographer’s Conference in San Francisco. It was a great event and I enjoyed it very much. Lots to absorb, much to learn.

Something that is fascinating to me about where we are now with photography is how much it’s about “living online”. On Wednesday, Trey Ratcliff spoke about what he’s been learning about sharing images online – and what seems to provoke more significant responses from the rest of us. I thought his list of photographic elements found in great photographs was useful.

He spoke about his most popular images having five elements: water, distance, trees, path, and weather.

For each element, he briefly reflected on how we, as humans, value each of them – which he believes influences our response to images that contain them:

• Water, especially fresh water, being within walking distance
• Having trees – and shelter – nearby
• Wide open spaces with prairies and grass – space to separate us from predators and grains for food
• Some distance to see any weather coming
• And a path or road – some sign that there’s human habitation someplace nearby

A good list, I think. Lots of great photos exist without any of these elements – but when landscape photographs contain these elements (think Yosemite, Point Reyes, Point Lobos, etc. in my portfolio), they’re usually pretty strong images. The image above – while not having much of a path or road, contains most of these elements. It’s a shot of Three Brothers in Yosemite along the Merced River in October when the river flow is slow and the reflections are almost perfect.

Be sure to download this free iPad app from the California Historical Society celebrating the 75th birthday of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Beautiful photographs! And great lessons from history!

Enjoy!

Yesterday, I attended day 1 of the first ever Google+ Photographer’s Conference in San Francisco. Since its limited invitation launch ten months ago, Google+ has had a great reception by photographers around the world who enjoy how it handles our images with care and provides a social media platform that works for gaining feedback and sharing discussions,

Along with my photo buddy Doug Kaye, we attended most of the first day sessions – splitting up for a couple of the breakout sessions. Kelby Training produced the event and did a wonderful job. The venue, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, was perfectly suited to the conference – a wonderful facility.

Here’s my list of sessions and my reflections on what I learned:

• Opening Keynote with Bradley Horowitz – Brad shared a lot of his personal background and how it influenced the work he’s put into helping lead the Google+ effort – and his delight at the response of photographers to the service. He didn’t have any new announcements or surprises to share – just the usual “watch this space” corporate talk. One of his points about future opportunities got me thinking: how it’s still too hard to sell stuff online.
• Hangouts with Trey Ratcliff and RC Conception – Trey and RC provided an intro to the two types of Hangouts on Google+ – private and “on air” along with what they’ve learned about using each kind. Trey mentioned the insights he gets into others from the backgrounds in their screenshots – kind of fun!
• Building Your Brand with Guy Kawasaki (photo above) – Guy’s life these days seems focused on sharing interesting stories on all of the social media platforms – it’s core to building/sustaining the “brand of Guy”. In his talk, he shared how he finds interesting stories – relying heavily on his Alltop service, NPR, and a few other sites – and the tools and techniques he uses to post them to Google+. He’s a real believer in big images being very important so he doesn’t use the default linking technique but rather does a screen capture of images and then embeds them in his posts. They’re much more noticeable that way. He also shared his thinking about the comment stream and how he feels it’s important to share back with commenters whenever he can. Given that he’s got over 2 million users who have circled him, he gets a lot of comment activity!
• Art of the Head Shot with Peter Hurley – Peter gave a very lively (!) session on his techniques for taking great head shots. He talks a lot with his subjects and, in the process, gets them to open up to the camera in a natural sort of way. Fascinating – and lots of tips about how to make better portraits – something I’ve been trying to work on!
• Crush the Composition with Scott Kelby – I had seen Scott present this session last fall at an Adobe store in San Francisco and enjoyed it then. It was worth watching again. Scott has fun talking about the basics of composition – rule of thirds, yada, yada… – and then the realities of what it takes to work a subject. Two important take always for me – pay attention to your muse and be a ferocious editor. The muse point is to respect your gut instinct when you first shoot an image – you saw something so take the time to work it and try to draw it out. The editor point is to cull your portfolio down to just the very best of your work – something I need to spend more time doing! (Doug told me he’s now actually removing an image from his portfolio when he adds a new one – forcing that discipline. Makes sense that over time this process would distill out just your best!)

Other items of note:

• App – the conference had its own app – for both iPhones and Android devices. The app provided schedule info, venture maps, messaging about changes, and a way to ask questions of the speakers.
• iPads – each session had an iPad dedicated to delivering questions in real time to the speakers.

I’m looking forward to the day 2 sessions today – but will be participating remotely via the session Hangouts that will be broadcast all day. Thanks to Kelby and Google for enabling those!

Tonight’s edition of Trey’s Variety Hour (Episode #34) is hosted by my friend Doug Kaye. The topic of the show – totally unrelated to gear for a change! – is “How do you learn and improve your photography?” A great topic – and one I’m sure I can learn from.

As I think about the topic before watching the show, it’s caused me to do a little reflecting back on what has been important to me as I’ve been learning and exploring photography over the last five years or so. I happened to get back into photography in a big way about that time when my first granddaughter was born. That gave me a great excuse (!) to go out and buy a decent digital SLR. Since then, it’s been mostly about practice – but sometimes new inputs are very helpful in lifting you from plateau to a new level!

So, unlike the show topic, let me first talk about my experience with gear – because that’s been an important part of my learning of photography…

Gear

How did I decide which DSLR to buy? Well, I happened to come across a blog post by Doc Searles – he had taken a memory card into a camera store and shot a bunch of images using both a Canon and Nikon body. After looking at his results, he decided to buy the Canon EOS 30D DSLR. It took me about three minutes to read Doc’s review – which caused me to then pull the trigger on Amazon.com and order my own 30D! Amazing how social recommendations can be so powerful! As any DSLR photographer knows, that first camera body decision effectively locks you in – since once you start adding “glass” (lenses), you’re committed to that manufacturers system.

My 30D was a great DSLR to get me back into photography. When I bought it, I didn’t even know what a crop (APC) sensor was – I learned that after the fact when I bought an additional lens. I’ve got many images on Flickr shot with that 30D – see some of them here. Mostly snapshots of family and local environs.

About a year later, Canon introduced the 40D – and for no good reason I decided to upgrade to it – selling my 30D to help pay for the new camera. About this time, I became acquainted with HDR – High Dynamic Range photography – and some of my images from this period have that “over the top” amateur HDR look. I remember one of my first attempts at handheld HDR at Stanford – the rapid fire bracketing of the 40D was just right for my early experiments. Heck, I didn’t even own a tripod then!

Then, in January 2009, I upgraded again to the Canon 5D Mark II – again selling my 40D. I listed the 40D for sale used on Amazon.com – and the buyer ended up being another local Menlo Park resident. We met at my office to give him the camera – small world sometimes!

The 5D Mark II has been my main camera for serious work over the last three years. Along the way, I’ve added some additional lenses – including the Canon 70-200MM f/2.8 L and the Canon 24-105 f/4 L lenses – both of which have been my workhorse lenses. I’ve also got a few primes – 28mm, 50mm f/1.4 and the 85mm f/1.8 which see less frequent usage.

Along the way, I had a serious rotator cuff injury in my right shoulder such that I couldn’t even lift the 5D for shooting. That’s all been fixed – but, along the way, I bought a Canon PowerShot S90 to allow me to continue to shoot pre-surgery. Since then, I’ve upgraded my tiny camera twice – to a Canon PowerShot S95 and am now using a Canon PowerShot S100. These are great tiny cameras! On most of my serious photo sessions, I’ll have my 5D Mark II over my shoulder (thank you Black Rapid!) with the PowerShot in my jacket pocket. I’ll always also have along my iPhone which, now with the iPhone 4S, also takes some amazingly great images! So, I’ve got three cameras with me in the field! Go figure!

Learning

On to learning. So what’s been my learning process? Of course, since I’m an avid online reader, I’ve soaked up a bunch of articles, etc. that have taught me new things. My early infatuation with HDR was fueled by Trey’s own Stuck in Customs blog – and his tutorials. Trey also taught me about the use of textures to enhance images – and I’ve had fun with that for a few of my shots.

I’ve taken several photo workshops along the way including one with Ken Rockwell and Dave Wyman that was a lot of fun out in the field. Perhaps the most valuable workshops for me have been the two I’ve taken with Derrick Story at his studio in Santa Rosa. Derrick’s a great teacher and these workshops with seven other colleagues were very helpful to me – highly recommend what Derrick does.

But I think, as is so often the case, the real learning takes place by just doing it – trying new things, experimenting, and pushing myself. The best approach for me is a combination of regular solo shooting – photography really is mostly a solitary pursuit – along with regular venue shoots that Doug and I have been doing over the last couple of years – here’s a list of my posts about our adventures.

I find a two person photo walk with a good friend to be very rewarding – we see through each others eyes in new ways, things we might otherwise have missed. We slow down, we work a venue – and things just open up for us in the process. After the shoot, we each go home and independently work on our images – and then slowly share them. It’s so much fun to see what we each pick to work on first, how we approach post-processing, and then sharing our comments back and forth. My son and I also did a one day workshop in Yosemite with Michael Frye – a very similar experience. These sessions have definitely been the most valuable learning opportunities for me.

More

As I’m finishing up an already too long post, I realize that I’ve skipped over the post-processing learnings that have also had a big impact on me (including an amazing 2 hour 1:1 Skype workshop last year with Jaime Ibarra). I’ve also unfortunately overlooked the learnings from the late Chris Gulker – my good friend and walking partner who taught me so much about the power of black and white photography in the short time that I knew him. I’ll have to share more on those later. One final learning – in 2011 – was the begin curating what I thought were my best images – you can find them in my gallery here: http://photos.sjl.us – I’d love to hear your feedback on them! Click on the Contact link in the nab bar above to email me your thoughts.

Note: see also my 2011 wrap up post: What I’ve Learned about Photography in 2011!

After being reminded by a friend that we’re in the peak of rose blooming season here in Menlo Park, I headed out this afternoon with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a Lensbaby Muse to see what I could find. Here in Menlo Park, St Raymond Church on Santa Cruz Avenue has a beautiful rose garden on its property – and that’s where I headed.

The Lensbaby is an unusual accessory for photographers – it’s a low cost add-on that provides a very sharp in focus area combined with seriously out of focus areas in the same image. I first bought my Lensbaby Muse about five years ago and did a bunch of shooting with it at the time – including several fun visits to the nearby Filoli estate in Woodside. But since that time, my Muse has mostly been in the bottom of my camera bag.

I was stimulated to pull it out today after listening to one of Nik Radio’s podcasts earlier this week with Kathleen Clemons. Kathleen does some amazing work with her Lensbaby gear and stimulated me to pull mine back out and go shooting today.

The picture of the rose above is classic Lensbaby style. It’s been tweaked a bit in Photoshop using Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 to adjust the color and provide a vignette. This image was shot handheld at a high ISO on my 5D Mark II to stop the movement of the rose in the gentle breeze blowing at the time.

I really enjoyed my 20 minutes in the rose garden this afternoon – getting reacquainted with my Lensbaby and its unique style of photography!

I continue to be amazed at the beautiful photography that’s possible using just the iPhone 4S and a few of the photo adjustment applications that run on it.

This is my latest example – titled “Mad Men – Chicago – 2012” – an image shot with my iPhone 4S inside the Sixteen restaurant at the Trump Hotel in Chicago. Tweaked using Nik’s Snapseed application on the iPhone, it features a lovely contrast between the old city landmarks outside and the sleek windows and diners inside. A bit of tilt-shift treatment also added in Snapseed adds just enough blur up top and down below to keep things interesting!

A friend commented: “I expect Don Draper to walk in at any moment!”

Photography on the iPhone 4S is just so much fun!

In January, Doug Kaye and I headed out for some photography along the Half Moon Bay coastline. We headed first for the beautiful trees of the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve – and, as we were heading back, I shot this image looking down on the beach at Moss Beach. The image above is straight out of the camera – a Canon 5D Mark II with a 70-200mm f/2.8L lens. This particular image was shot at 1/800 sec at f/7.1 at a focal length of 135mm.

The final image – after post-processing – is below – titled: : Windswept – Moss Beach – 2012.

The steps from the original image out of the camera to the final result involved some tweaking first in Lightroom 4 – mostly about alignment – and then exporting the image to PhotoShop CS6 for some tweaking using Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 and Silver Efex Pro 2. In Color Efex, I used the Detail Extractor, Tonal Contrast and Glamour Glow filters to enhance the color image. I then opened it in Silver Efex to convert it to monochrome – and tweaked the brightness, contrast and structure settings to enhanced the layered image effect. A bit of selenium color was added along with a subtle vignette – before saving it and bringing it back into Lightroom.

A few final tweaks in Lightroom included final alignment and cropping, and an additional subtle vignette. I also updated the keyword meta data and added a title/caption.

Hope you enjoy it!

Yesterday, Doug Kaye and I headed out for another one of our duo photo walks. These are always great fun – as we get to catch up and chat while having a fun time photographing things that we see. We usually pick a venue and work it pretty thoroughly – but this time we tried something different.

The weather forecast looked like it might be a nasty day to be out and about – so Doug suggested we try hopping on BART and then getting off at a couple of the more interesting stations to just see what we could find that might be interesting.

Sounded like a plan – we agreed to meet at the Powell St. BART station – me arriving from Daly City and Doug from North Berkeley. We both got there within 5 minutes of each other and could see some blue sky up through the exit. So, instead of staying underground, we headed outside to Market Street and began taking pictures.

The one above is of the Muni cable car turntable at Powell and Market Streets. This image was shot with my Canon PowerShot S100 and post processed using Adobe Lightroom 4. Because of the weather and our original plan of mostly being underground, we both left our big cameras behind and just brought along small cameras – the S100 in my case and a brand new Fujifilm X-Pro 1 that Doug had rented for the weekend.

From there, we walked down Yerba Buena Lane to Yerba Buena Center where we explored “puddle photography” – taking pictures of reflections in puddles of water, glass reflections, the kids’ carousel, and more such as this game board.

After lunch at Mel’s, we walked back to BART and headed toward the Glen Park station – apparently known for its architecture.

After that, on to SFO Airport and the Aviation Museum there. I’ve been to that airport hundreds of times – but never to the museum! We had fun talking with the curators there and were able to have some fun taking photos of an Italian motorcycle exhibit in the large International terminal. From there, we headed home – to begin looking at what we had captured during the day – some 115 images in my case!

It’s always fun to see what we each captured and what (and how) we choose to interpret our images in post-processing. You can see some more examples on our respective Google+ pages (Doug’s and mine)!

Why this 11-inch MacBook Air? I decided I wanted a “killer” writing machine – something I could just use for writing. This little Mac was going to be it. And, it is!

I happened to swing by the Palo Alto Apple Store one day and it turned out they had the max config of the 11-inch Air in stock – amazingly – so I decided to just go for it. (I suspect Apple’s gotten very smart about stocking their top of line configs in their stores – just for folks like me!)

What’s the max config? Currently, it’s a 1.8GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 with 4 GB RAM and 256 GB Flash storage (instead of a hard disk).

I bought it, brought it home, quickly configured it, installed some essential software and was quickly up and running – quite seamlessly. By the way, today, I mostly live in Chrome – using it for email, calendar, etc. Chrome screams on the Air. For that matter, Safari does too. Most things do – even PowerPoint!

I couldn’t be happier with this little Air. It’s an amazing machine – no spinning beach balls, super fast performance, and a delightfully tiny form factor – and a beautiful display. This is the future – these amazingly fast, Flash-based machines – a great way to “fly”!

But, then, there’s also the new iPad…