I really enjoyed this blog post by Joe McNally called Rub a Dub Dub in Dobbs

Yuri Arcus gives us a tour of his humble stock photo studio (picks up jaw from floor)

This dates back from April but it’s just wonderful. Zack Arias pushes the creativity envelope to make a group shot of a bunch of pro photographers. No pressure.

Lightroom 2.4 came out not long ago. If you haven’t updated it, you can do so here.

So there ya go! short and sweet! Stay tune next Monday for your next Photoshop video tutorial.

Check out these other great tutorials!

• The Adjustment Brush – Lightroom Video Tutorial
• Non Destructive Dodging & Burning – Photoshop Video Tutorial
• Photoshop Video Tutorial – Adding a Reflection

Step 1 – Keep Yourself Dry

This one’s a no brainer right? You would think… but I saw photographers out in the pouring rain holding an umbrella in one hand and a DSRL camera in the other. It didn’t take long for the camera and lens to get wet. Not to mention shooting one-handed with a 70-200mm lens! A disaster just waiting to happen. Forget the umbrella unless your standing still and you clamp it somewhere to act as a shelter. You need both hands to shoot. Wear a raincoat and maybe even some rain boots if it’s pouring. Cold and wet feet don’t make for a happy photographer.

Step 2 – Get an All Weather Camera Bag

Before we look at what to do to keep your camera and lens dry while shooting, it’s important to keep it dry from point A to point B. My suggestion is to get a waterproof or “all weather” type camera bag like the Lowepro DryZone 200 or the bag I currently use, the Computrekker AW which has a protective outer shell that can easily be tucked away. The AW bag saved my gear when I got caught in a flash storm a few years back while in a canoe 1 hour away from camp. Never underestimate Mother Nature. What’s $200 to protect thousands of dollars worth of gear?

Step 3 – Keep Your Camera and Lens Dry

Off course we’re dealing with electronic equipment and it doesn’t mix well with water last I checked. There are many solutions that I’ll suggest so just use your best judgment depending on your personal situation.

1- Don’t go in the rain. What I mean by this is to stay under cover under a shelter. If it’s just drizzling, a tree can do the trick. I’ve seen people shooting from their car or even out their window.
2- Purchase a pro rain cover. B&H has a great variety ranging from $39.95 to $219.95 like the Tenba or the Aquatech.
3- Make your own DIY camera rain cover by using a ziplock or garbage bag and elastic bands for just a few pennies. Try making 2 holes on either side of the ziplock bag and pass the camera strap through it and reattach it to the camera.
4- Buy cheap rain pants and use one leg and elastic bands.
5- Attach an umbrella to your monopod using a superclamp so that where ever your camera goes, the umbrella follows.

Step 4 – Changing Lenses

If you need to change your lenses out in the rain, you absolutely need to keep the inside of your camera, and the lens element attaching to the camera, dry. My first suggestion would be to get out of the rain completely. If you can’t, cover your camera and lens as best you can and point the camera towards the ground while switching lenses.

Step 5 – Use Your Lens Hood

The lens hood has many uses. It not only used for lens flair. I have it on primarily to protect it from bumps and nicks. But it’s also good for keeping rain drop away from your lens. I my opinion, your should have your len hood on all the time, but if you don’t this is a great time to put it on.

Step 6 – Something to Dry Your Equipment

Even if you used the 5 previous steps mentioned above, you might still end up getting some water on your gear so it’s very important to have an absorbent cloth in your bag. I actually have a small piece of ShamWow with my all the time but you could bring a few folded up paper towels or a dish cloth.

Step 7 – Bring a Monopod or Tripod

Rainy days means clouds which means no sun, which means less light. Less light means you’ll probably have to shoot at slower shutter speeds.  A tripod or monopod will prevent you from taking blury images due to camera shake.

Do you have any other suggestions?

Check out these other great tutorials!

• The Adjustment Brush – Lightroom Video Tutorial
• Non Destructive Dodging & Burning – Photoshop Video Tutorial
• Photoshop Video Tutorial – Adding a Reflection

PhotoForge

By far the closest app out there which resembles Photoshop.  In conjunction with the drawing side, the photography side of the app is great. It’s very intuitive and the touch features work well. Here are some of my favorite features in PhotoForge:

• RGB Curves: you can play with red green blue curves on top of your normal curves adjustments.
• Unsharpen Mask: let’s face it. The IPhone camera is prone to camera share thus creating movement blur so having the ability to sharpen your image like Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask is a no brainer.  You can control the Amount, Radius and Threshold.
• Simulated HDR: This is basically Shadow/Highlights
• Hue/Saturation: Tweak the hue, saturation and Lightness with sliders just like in Photoshop
• Exposure: surprisingly, this feature works a lot better than I thought it would! A lot less black/white clipping. Love it!
• Sunset/Blue Sky: a neet little feature which adds an orange (sunset) or blue (blue sky) gradient to your image. Kindda like the graduated filter in Lightroom.
• B&W and Sepia: gotta have those and they’re there.

There are many more features like unlimited undos and tons of presets so as you can see, get a lot of bang for your buck! Here’s a video on some of its features. It’s usually $4.99 but as of this writing it’s on sale for $2.99. What a deal.

Camera Bag

This is a fun app with some fun presets to post process images quickly on the fly. My favorite preset is Helga (and looking at Chase Jarvis’s photos on Twitter, his too ) which puts a vignette, slightly desaturates the colors and does a square crop. In total, you get 10 presets for $1.99.  I sometimes save my image with the Helga preset and then tweak it a bit more in Photoforge.

Pano

I tried a few free panorama apps but they don’t even come close to the precision of Pano! I was very surprised by the stiching quality. I love using this feature. Seeing the app icon on my phone reminds me of panorama options that I tend to forget with my DSRL. It’s as easy as taking your photos with Pano and then clicking “make my panorama now!” button. You can take upto 16 photos with a max resolution of 6800 x 800. You can get Pano for $2.99.

PhotoFlipper

This is a brand new free app that is much welcomed! Finally an app that lets you rotate your image (at 90 degree increments) or flip (horizontally and vertically) them. It’s simpl, effective and super easy to use.  I’ve been wanting to horizontally flip quite a few of my IPhone image and I was forced to to it the long waay via Photoshop. Not anymore! Woohoo!

Scissors

This is a very intuitive app that uses multi touch technology to crop and rotate your image. It’s basically a combo Crop/Rotate app where you can change the crop rectangle size and also, by using 2 fingers, rotating your photo. This is great to straighten horizons or get funky angles. I use it mostly for straightening and cropping. And at $0.99 it’s well worth it.

There are tons of IPhone photo apps out there! Please share the ones you are using and what you like about them.

Check out these other great tutorials!

• The Adjustment Brush – Lightroom Video Tutorial
• Non Destructive Dodging & Burning – Photoshop Video Tutorial
• Photoshop Video Tutorial – Adding a Reflection

Here are more photos from my trip.

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[View with PicLens]

 

Oh, and this 360 degree panorama shot of Times Square. Stay tuned for a panorama tutorial as well.

You liked this post? Then check out these ones as well!

• How to Create a Web Photo Gallery – Lightroom Video Tutorial
• Off Campus Learning Links for June
• Off Campus Learning Links for May

Nikon D3
Nikkor 12-24mm lens (bad ass lens!)
4 x SB-800s
4 x Pocket Wizards
1 shoot through umbrella
2 x Manfroto clamps with ball heads

Since Joey shoots Canon (we still love you Joey!) and Martin and I had all the lights, we used his D3.

We set up 2 SB-800s on the Manfroto clamps and secured them to the bridge rail on camera right at around 30 degrees behind the model. We would have liked the lights to be higher by around 2 feet but we were limited t the rail’s hight.  The sun was acting as a backlight on camera left. We taped the other 2 SB-800s together and secured one on an umbrella clamp and secured the umbrella.

Now, we wanted the sky to be as dark as possible which is pretty difficult to do when the sun is your backlight so we did what we could…. cranked up our 4 SB-800s to full bad ass power! At full power, we were able to bring our aperture down to f16 at 1/125 sec and ISO 100.  Also important to note is how close the lights are to the model. The diagram is pretty accurate. The speedlights had to be that close to compete with the sun.

You’re probably wondering why we used Pocket Wizards and not another SB-800 on camera to trigger the flashes. The answer is simple. The sun was so bright that we didn’t want to chance missfires from the CLS system. In any other circumstance we probably would have taken my D300  and used the built-in flash in commander mode to trigger the strobes.

All right here are the final shots!

All you need are 4 speelights, the sun and a cool place to shoot!

You liked this post? Then check out these ones as well!

• Introduction to Macro Photography – Part 3
• Introduction to Macro Photography – Part 2
• The New Nikon SB-900 Speedlight