Well, as poetic as I may have made that sound, it turned out that our summer weather has stuck around for a few bonus weeks. But even though the warm and dry days have remained longer than anyone would have guessed, I resisted all urges to squeeze in any additional shooting, thereby ensuring that this was in fact the last session of the season. Let it be known: Summer 2012--as measured by my underwater shooting schedule--did in fact conclude at the end of August.
I first met Nina a couple years ago when she took part in my Common Thread project. A year later she was one of the first to volunteer to be in the Ant Farm, in which she donned a shocking red wig and stuck a very animalistic pose, one that most viewers tended to linger over when they were looking at the project. After the Ant Farm shoot, we started talking about doing some underwater work, and many months later it finally happened.
One thing that was very different about this shoot relative to others is that we did not run through very many different outfit/prop combinations. While this may have reduced the overall variety of the shots a bit, it gave me a lot more content to work with within each style. Even though I ended up taking fewer shots than I typically do, it ended up taking me longer to sort through them Funny how that works.
The final thing we did was play with the red rope from the Common Thread project, which turned out to present its own set of challenges. The rope was annoying buoyant and kept trying to do its own thing. Bad misbehaving prop! Still, Nina was able to wrangle it into submission; there was no way we were going to let the rope win that day.
And with that, I bid farewell to the 2012 underwater season. I set out with the goal of doing relatively few shoots, and I managed to hold it to just four (which I think is the lowest number ever). I also wanted to work exclusively with models who were knew to me and I met that goal as well: I had never shot any of these models underwater, and two I had not even met prior to our session. I'm calling 2012 a success.
Sep
18
Nina: Final Underwater of 2012
Well, as poetic as I may have made that sound, it turned out that our summer weather has stuck around for a few bonus weeks. But even though the warm and dry days have remained longer than anyone would have guessed, I resisted all urges to squeeze in any additional shooting, thereby ensuring that this was in fact the last session of the season. Let it be known: Summer 2012--as measured by my underwater shooting schedule--did in fact conclude at the end of August.
I first met Nina a couple years ago when she took part in my Common Thread project. A year later she was one of the first to volunteer to be in the Ant Farm, in which she donned a shocking red wig and stuck a very animalistic pose, one that most viewers tended to linger over when they were looking at the project. After the Ant Farm shoot, we started talking about doing some underwater work, and many months later it finally happened.
One thing that was very different about this shoot relative to others is that we did not run through very many different outfit/prop combinations. While this may have reduced the overall variety of the shots a bit, it gave me a lot more content to work with within each style. Even though I ended up taking fewer shots than I typically do, it ended up taking me longer to sort through them Funny how that works.
The final thing we did was play with the red rope from the Common Thread project, which turned out to present its own set of challenges. The rope was annoying buoyant and kept trying to do its own thing. Bad misbehaving prop! Still, Nina was able to wrangle it into submission; there was no way we were going to let the rope win that day.
And with that, I bid farewell to the 2012 underwater season. I set out with the goal of doing relatively few shoots, and I managed to hold it to just four (which I think is the lowest number ever). I also wanted to work exclusively with models who were knew to me and I met that goal as well: I had never shot any of these models underwater, and two I had not even met prior to our session. I'm calling 2012 a success.
Dec
05
I’ve Been Podcasted!
Aug
27
Rant: Edit Your Galleries!
- I begin by importing all my shots into a new folder on my hard drive. I prefer to organize these folders by date, but you can do whatever works best for you. I also have Lightroom convert the raw files to DNG and rename them to something relevant.
- After the images are all in Lightroom, I make my first pass. This involves going through the images very quickly, and rejecting any that have obvious flaws. Anything out of focus, poorly framed or incorrectly exposed is out. This is when I’ll also ditch anything that has subject flaws, such as closed eyes or a sneeze caught by the shutter. This pass can eliminate up to half of my original shots. I delete these immediately because I know there is nothing in there that I will ever need.(Disclaimer: When I’m doing underwater photos, my vision is very limited so I error on the side of taking a LOT of shots. As a result, I might take a dozen shots where the model’s eyes are closed because I didn’t notice it when it was happening. I’m sure I end up with a much higher percentage of immediate throw-aways than when working in a more traditional setting.)
- On the next pass, I’m looking for similar images, ones that were taken very close to one another where the subject is not changing much from shot-to-shot. My goal is to find the best shots from within that range and ditch the rest. This can easily chop my collection in half again.
- On my next pass, I try to view the entire remaining collection to look for any other commonalities that I may have missed before. For example, some shots that happened toward the end of the session might be almost identical to ones I took at the beginning. Again, I’ll pick the best and lose the rest.
- By now my 2000 original pictures are probably down to less than 100. I will probably end up keeping all of these images long term, but I still want to distill them down to the very best for what I show to the world. For this, I start doing a lot of A-B comparisons, pitting one image against another. I may have two images that are both strong, but if one conveys a certain look or mood better, it’s going to win.
- Sometimes I’ll put the whole thing aside for a few days and work on something else. It’s amazing the new things you will see when you return with fresh eyes.
- At some point I’ll finally have a collection that I like. There’s no perfect number of final images, but it should be a reasonable amount for your viewer to enjoy and to leave them wanting to see more from you.
Jun
07