Re-Shooting

On the advice of a helpful reviewer, I re-shot some of my "guy with binoculars" images. This time, I lit the background for better isolation. Of course, I also took a careful look at the first batch. I still wasn't getting the lighting perfect- wisps of hair on the top of my head were getting blown out along with the background. This means too much light was bouncing off the background, and overexposing my hair. As a fix, I moved my mark a bit farther from the background, and this did help a bit, but I can still see slight traces of the problem. I think I need to increase the background-to-model distance a bit more. Here's what I ended up with for the re-shoot, though. (I also dug out my jacket!)



Notes on the lighting: I went from 2 background lights to one, placed directly behind me, and aimed straight back at my background. I used my other two lights as key and fill. Key was a socked beauty dish overhead and a bit camera right. Fill was a shoot-through umbrella about waist level, camera left. (With one light I was getting shadows and uneven lighting on my face.)

If I do a re-re-shoot:

1) Bigger key. (I have on order an Alien Bees PLM mid-size parabolic silver bounce umbrella with a diffuser attachment. It's much bigger than the beauty dish, and my give me enough wrap to replace the fill light with a reflector and put the second light back on the background.) If all else fails, maybe a 4th AB400 will do the trick.

2) I'm using the little metal reflectors on my background lights, but they don't spread the light very much. I will try to even out the background by using two umbrella reflectors instead. This may also mean I won't need gobos to block their spill.

I do get the feeling I'm closing in on finding one lighting setup I like, but I'm not quite there yet. Of course, once I do find one I'll start looking for another...

While I was at it, I dug out another prop. My Glock model 30, a very compact .45.

Rejections

I still catch myself thinking unproductively in the face of a fresh rejection. The word on my "binoculars shoot" is coming in from Fotolia. Of the first batch of 6 shots, four were selected, and two were declined.

Of the two refusals, one was, "Your photograph did not reach our desired level of aesthetic quality," and the other was, "The object will not be easily isolated from the background. The object must be captured on a bright seamless background."

There is nothing I can learn from the first message. The reviewer didn't like it. Maybe they didn't like the lighting, the pose, the wardrobe, the focus, the color, the idea- who knows. Whatever they didn't like about it, they couldn't be bothered or didn't have time to give me anything specific. Since I don't have a clue what the issue is, I'll probably send that same reviewer more shots with the exact same problem.

The second one got me. My first response was, "Oh? But the other four on the exact same background were fine? I must have got a bad reviewer. *grumble* *pout*" What's more, the rejected two images were accepted at Shutterstock anyway, and generated three sales there today alone. So, I almost just let it go at that.

But then I thought about it some more. Maybe I got a great reviewer. Maybe he had other uses of my images in mind, like compositing me into something more interesting than a grey background. And maybe he thought about how much easier that would be if I'd lit the background to pure white for him. And last, he could have just given me the lazy rejection response of "Your photograph did not reach our desired level of aesthetic quality," and been done with it. But he didn't, he took the time to let me know what he didn't like, and for a moment, I was acting like a spoiled child.

So, I say, "thank you!" to the reviewer, for taking the time to help me take a better picture next time. Tonight, I'll get myself back in the garage, don my "business guy" shirt and tie, and put some light on that background for you. While I'm at it, I'll shoot a few in portrait orientation as well.

Lessons learned:

1) Rejections can be an opportunity. They can help me expand my thinking, add a twist to a concept, or give me something technical to work on.

2) I should try to think more about how my images will be used, and not just worry about getting a technically good image. For example, there's not necessarily anything wrong with a grey background, but for many uses a blown-out white one will be a lot easier to work with. I'll try for a mix of both in the future.

3) Not every rejection is an opportunity. If the reviewer gives me nothing specific, then there's nothing I can fix. Perhaps the microstock agencies have some things they could improve upon as well...

Changing the subject, I'd been collecting a list of other blogs I follow for a post "one of these days", but today I noticed that one of them had mentioned me! When I first found ShootingStock (Thanks to Bob at picNiche), I immediately went to the oldest post and read the whole thing through in order. Like me, David is just getting started in microstock photography. I loved getting his perspectives on a lot of the same challenges I face. There's something uplifting about knowing there's other people out there on the same journey as I am. Thanks for sharing, David!

On1 DSLR Remote - Now I can shoot myself!

I've got a few shots in my portfolio in which I am the model. These shots were a pain, as I shot them without a good tethering solution. I did have my camera's video out running to a portable 7" DVD player, so I could watch the LiveView. I also used the Nikon remote trigger to fire the shutter. Adding the D90's few-second delay gave me time to hide the trigger before the shot fired, but since overall the setup was cumbersome, I didn't end up being my own model very often.

Last night, I'm shot myself again, but in a new way. I bought the On1 software for my iPhone, and downloaded the server software to my laptop. I put my camera on a tripod and tethered it to a laptop via the camera's standard USB cable. My iPhone then became a remote trigger, plus a lot much more. I had full access to the camera settings, could toggle live view on and off, could review my shots on the iphone screen as I took them, and could even set the phone to fire the camera every 3-5 seconds while I was in supermodel mode.

I had a lot of fun, stayed up way to late, and ended up with a bunch of images to upload to my microstock sites today.

Planning

A new twist for tonight's shoot is that I actually spent some time planning it in advance! Starting with a 1-word concept, I thought about various ways I could communicate that concept. For each idea, how should I frame the shot? What should I be wearing? How should I be lit? What close variations should I add? As each new idea formed, I could think of other, related, images to either add to the shoot, or try for later.

I'm sorry to say this, but until now I haven't really given my shoots very much thought. Sometimes I had an idea of what I wanted, but other times I just grabbed a camera and a kid and started shooting. I usually got some images I could use, but I always threw out a LOT of rejects.

I'd love to hear more about how other stock shooters plan for their shoots.

I'll follow up tomorrow with some finished images.

The following image is unrelated, but is my favorite shot of the day so far. It's just a snapshot, but I really like it. It makes me happy I decided to keep my camera handy at all times!

Blue Battle Fairy

It was hot as heck, but we shot a quick series in the garage yesterday anyway. Since I had to mess around with the lighting a bit, I thought I'd describe where I ended up.

The background is a wide (104"?) roll of white paper, hung high on the garage wall on L-brackets. It is lit by 2 AB-400's each aimed across the paper, for overlapping "field of fire". I have a light meter, but just winged it this time to play around. I adjusted strobe power and placement,the model's distance from the paper, and my camera settings until I liked what I was seeing.

She is standing on the flip-side of some speckled fiberglass bathroom paneling I got at Home Depot. It's not perfectly smooth, but it still blows out really well when I blast it with this much light, and it's not too hard to clean. I've been walking on it for 2 weeks, every time I go in and out of the garage, and all I had to do was hit it with a wet sponge for 2 minutes.

The Blue Battle Fairy has her own light, too. A 22" beauty dish with a third AB-400 in it, and a diffusion sock on it. It' is close to straight on, a little above her head, and aimed down to light her from head to toe. It also adds some light to the floor, whitening it up. I tried some shots with the dish to her side, with a white posterboard to fill her other side, but it was tough to get all that close enough while still leaving her some room to play. So I backed up, centered, raised the dish, and then angled it down some.

I really had to push my main light a lot harder to do these full body shots. (Mostly I've been in a lot closer until now.) In close, it is easy to get the beauty dish really close on one side, and a reflector in really close on the other side. For these wider shots I think it'd be really nice to have 2 lights on the model...

I edited four of the images last night. In Lightroom I cleaned up the background, darkened the wings a bit, and did some basic global adjustments. Then, I made a path selection with the pen tool in Photoshop to remove the shadows under her feet, as I just didn't like the way they looked.

The first four are up at Shutterstock and 3DS already, and as usual I'll wait a while to hear from iStock, Fotolia, and Stockxpert.

Education

Sometimes it seems like the more you learn, the more you can appreciate how much you don't know or understand. I got this feeling in a bog way when I first entered graduate school. After college graduation, I felt and acted like an expert on Math, Engineering, Science, and therefore the world in general. In the first week of graduate school, I quickly learned a few painful truths: Nobody knows very much at all about everything, and nobody knows everything about anything at all, everybody knows more than I do about something, and the killer: I didn't really know very much at all about anything.

I'm getting that feeling again in my photography. This means I'm transitioning from the blissful ignorance of "not knowing what I don't know" to "becoming painfully aware of what I don't know". This discomfort and uncertainty means the opportunity to grow is at hand. How will I learn?

Reading: Books, Forums, Blogs, Manuals - I read a lot every day.

Multimedia: Podcasts, Videos, Websites, Flickr, Microstock Sites, Lynda.com, Kelby Online Training - I follow a bunch of great podcasts and blogs, I'll make a list one day. I also have subscriptions at both Kelby Online and Lynda, and always have at least one course in progress. I can't recommend these two sites strongly enough, they offer a HUGE value for a small monthly cost.

Other People: This is a gap. I'd love to take a class, and join a photography club, but I don't feel like it will fit my schedule at present. Someday, definitely.

I do have a tendency to let the above get in the way of actually taking pictures, which is invaluable. So, I've started taking my camera with me wherever I go. I probably look like a bit of a dork, dropping my daughter off at Kindergarten with my D90+17-55 2.8 on my across-the-chest Black Rapid BR-4 strap. Probably more so this morning when I was lying chest-down on the sidewalk taking pictures of snails and flowers. But I can live with being a dork, especially if I learn a little in the process.

A Shifting Monetary Perspective

I've noticed a slow shift in the way I'm spending my money. Watching my daily microstock sales tick by, I get excited at $0.25 here, $1.88 there. The plan is, a lot of these small sales will add up into a meaningful revenue stream at some point. But here in the beginning, they add up to very small daily and monthly totals. So, where's the shift? When I hear, "That will be $14.42 at the window." at the drive-through fast food joint, I think to myself, "That's more than my stock earnings last week." At a finer level of detail, I get to decide whether I want to erase the day's sales by ordering dessert.

The point is not that I want to become some sort of miserly old fart. But, as I moved from an hourly to a salaried worker, I changed. Moving from cashing a paycheck to watching for a direct deposit to not even worrying about it anymore, I'd lost my perspective. Once I decided it'd be fine to budget $500 a month, and later $1000 a month, on whatever whim I felt at the time, I started to literally spend without thought. Any book on personal finance will tell you that the first step to better finances is to track every cent you spend. I've just never felt the need, until now, and now I can't help but pay attention.

An unexpected benefit of the microstock experience may be a new awareness of money. I have earned a little over $100 to date. I have spent $10,000. *gulp* If earning the occasional $0.25 or $0.30 can add up to a significant pile of cash, then so can saving the occasional $0.25 or $0.30, right? What's the old Ben Franklin quote? "Take care of the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves." Was he talking about budgeting, or microstock?