Improvement

Sure, I was hoping to make a little money in Microstock. And I am. Things even seem to be picking up on that front, though I'm far from earning any kind of a living at it. But let's remember the other goal: improving my photography.

I can absolutely see an improvement. In addition, less and less of the shots I really like are accidental. I'm making deliberate choices in composition, exposure, and lighting in order to achieve a shot I want. It doesn't always work out, but I can remember a time when I wasn't considering any of these factors.

Of course I have a long way to go, and a ton more to learn. But isn't that what makes life/art/photography fun? It is for me.

The above was shot with my latest impulse buy: a Nikkor 105mm Micro 1:2.8. I love it.

A break from white seamless: staged indoor images with flash.

To give myself a bit of a break from the white seamless, I've done a couple of shoots in the house with the SB-600's. Both of these sets were shot in TTL mode, on stands, with white shoot-through umbrellas.

It was fun moving around the speedlights to get the look I was after. In the first shoot (on the left), I was attempting to emulate morning window light from the left. I'm happy with the result. In the later shoot (on the right), I tried several different shutter speeds. In the end, I went with a slower shutter to blow out the windows in the background. You can still tell it's a window, but you don't see any of the distracting shapes outside. I also adjusted the depth of field, to blur the background while maintaining a hint of the furniture.

Still wrapping my head around the ability to adjust both shutter speed and aperture to whatever I want, and then relying on the TTL speedlights to expose the subject properly. (Adding +/- to the speedlights to fine tune their exposure, of course.)

My system did tend to underexpose my subjects slightly. I have to remember to watch the histograms and adjust as necessary.

Subject Matters

Yesterday, I submitted three images from a recent outing to a water park.

The response from Shutterstock (always the quickest reviewer by far) is in: Two of the three were accepted, but one was not- blowing a pretty good 100% acceptance streak. Looking at the images today, I agree with the reviewer. I'll tell you what he said in a minute, but first. What would be your verdict on this set? Which would you reject and why?

I had one other rejection, from another set. For the same reason. It was one of these two:

Any guesses?

Here's what the reviewer had to say:

Composition--Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping, and/or composition.

What I think they meant was this: In the rejected shots, you cannot really see a facial expression. This makes it very difficult to form an emotional connection to the image, which evokes no "gut response". Thus, the image isn't really suitable for any kind of storytelling, and probably does indeed have "limited commercial value".

In all of the accepted images, you can clearly see an expression, and can very easily guess the emotional state of the model. You might even connect to one or two of them. Do they evoke any memory or emotion? They do in me, but I am biased.

Of course, there will be exceptions to this general rule. I'm sure there are plenty of great sellers that include a human subject and convey no emotion through facial expression. But, I think that for the stuff I shoot, it'd be a good idea to think about the emotion and storytelling of an image before submitting. If I'm going to all the trouble of creating an image with a human subject, I suppose I may as well include their face. Unless, of course, I have a specific reason not to...

This is probably something that comes up in Photography 101. Unfortunately, that was a class I never managed to squeeze into my ten years of college...

Or...

I haven't lost faith in my original goal of paying back the cost of my gear. However, constantly tracking progress toward short and long term goals, and adjusting and rearranging milestones just isn't that much fun.

How about a new perspective? One like: What new toys can I buy with the money my pictures are bringing in?

This month:

1) A Spider Camera Holster kit, complete with pin, plate, and belt. Seemed like a great idea, I mostly hate straps, though my Black Rapid isn't bad at all.
2) An MD-B10 battery grip for my new D300s. I loved the grip I had for my D90, so I know I'll use this.

There. Wasn't that better than a boring old earnings report?

As far as production went, I had 34 images accepted to at least one of the agencies. iStock's verdict is still out on 8 of these, but they accepted 19 (a few as resubmits) and rejected 3. (The other 4 I didn't submit yet, and may or may not, depending on how many new images I can shoot in May.)

I'd say something about upload or sales goals, but I'm not going to be having any expectations this month. Let's just see how it goes...

One good way to measure a year: Shutter Actuations

Once I was comfortable with my new D300s, I decided not to keep the old D90 sitting on the shelf as a backup. So, I sold it on Craigslist. A potential buyer asked how many shutter actuations it had, which I initially couldn't answer.

I'd had it just over a year, every day of which I took between 0 (shame, shame) and 4-500 pictures. Probably 30 a day on average, so I guessed 10-15k. But, suddenly I *had* to know the actual figure, and no matter how much I looked, I couldn't find it anywhere in-camera.

Opanda Iexif 2.3 to the rescue! 18,504 shutter releases. (Just open any image from the camera with IExif, and scroll around to find all sorts of cool embedded info.)

Poking around a bit more, I noticed that my Lightroom catalog had grown by only about 6-7k images in that same year.

What did I learn?

1. I shot approximately 50% more than I thought I did in the past year.
2. I throw out about two images for every one I keep.

Upon deeper reflection, of those thousands of new images on my drives, I'm pretty sure that only a few hundred are any good. I think I shoot a lot that I shouldn't bother with, and I keep a lot that I really should be tossing. I'm going to look into a better selection process.

Oh, and an image from yesterday's stock shoot:

Just a bit underexposed. Looked fine on the back of the camera, but I should have looked more carefully at the histogram. Not catastrophic, but needed a little brightening, then some noise reduction and smoothing in the darker tones. And then some color correction, which still isn't perfect. I'd switched my shutter speed to 1/250, the flash sync speed of the D300s, but I am wondering if the delays that come from optically triggering the AB-400's (which also sync at 1/250) are moving some of the light outside of my exposure window.

There's three things I can think of trying:

1. more power
2. shoot at 1/500, 1/250, and 1/125 with the same strobe settings, and compare exposures
3. use a sync cable

We'll see how it goes.

Online Lighting Diagram Creator

I'm playing with a really cool online lighting diagram creator today, you can find it here:
http://www.lightingdiagrams.com/Creator

I used it to create a diagram of my current setup, which is:

It's still not perfect, but I'm a little bit constrained by the space I'm in, which is pretty narrow. Also, the walls and ceiling are white, and the floor is white tileboard, so I do have a bit of light everywhere no matter what I do.

Typically, I have to do a lot of floor cleanup in Photoshop, and with the model pretty far from the background, I need to stay above 50 mm or so to keep the equipment out of the shots. I want more space to work in!

Failing that, I do have a few ideas to try out, more on these later.

Here's a shot using the current setup:

Optical slaves, a cautionary tale.

I spent about an hour last night thinking my new camera was defective. After repositioning a few of my strobes, trying for whiter backgrounds with less spill onto my subject, I took a few test shots, and noticed that my background wasn't blowing out. This was not completely unexpected, I had moved the lights after all... I watched carefully to make sure that all the strobes were firing for every shot, and they were.

So, I bumped the power a little on the strobes, from 1/2 or so to 3/4 (AB-400's). No luck. Wondering how far off I was, I opened up a lot, from f/8 to f/4. Nope. Dropped from 1/250 to 1/125. That started to help, now some of the background was blowing out. Bumped the AB's to full power, and now I had it, but this seemed like way too much light.

Spot metering with the light meter I almost never use, the background read f/22. So why no blowout? Worse still, as I kept shooting, the background would blow out sometimes, but not always. Had I really moved the lights that much? I didn't think so, but I put them back where they were, and the problems remained.

Before pitching a fit, I sat down and went through all the camera settings, hoping a clue would hit me. And that's when I noticed it. The on-camera flash was set to manual, as usual. But A and B were set to TTL! Ugh. So, my TTL pre-communications were firing all the strobes. After they fired, or at the end of their output, my shutter opened and an image was recorded. Obviously, all of this was way too fast to see by eye. It looked like everything was working fine, until I checked the exposure, that is.

Switching off the A and B units in the commander mode menu fixed everything, almost. Now, at 1/125 f/4 and all strobes at full, EVERYTHING was blown out. Way blown out. Back to about 3/8 power on the strobes, f/8 and 1/250. All better after a few more deep breaths.

Perhaps I should try a sync cord, now that I have a camera with a port... But more importantly, I need to remember the lesson: When it seems like my gear isn't working properly, assume user error, and re-check the setup.