I took this image with HDR in mind when I was walking around Greenwich Village in New York in December. I was exploring NYU campus, as my husband suggested few nice photographic opportunities. I found this shaded walkway in front of School of Law and stopped by to photograph. I love the detail the HDR provides for architectural photography. Just look at the texture of the ceiling.

The image was taken here.

There is a series of best National Geographic images photo books. “Wide angle” with photographs of places, “In focus” with most interesting portraits and “Through the lens” with general best images. We picked them up from the local library – it was a few pounds of books . They made for an interesting browsing for few evenings.
I am an avid reader of National Geographic magazine (although their marketing mail drives me nuts!), and I am really fond on their images. But when you really have a chance to look at them without the context of the story, you are going to be surprised. In the books, there are new and old images included, some are from digital era, some from film times, there are pictures as old as from 1910! They are often grainy, out of focus, technically not perfect at all. Although composition in most cases is sticking to the rules. Some of them work, some are … weird? Which makes you consider, that image does not to be technically perfect to do what it needs to do – illustrate the story. And then it is better to take high ISO image or no image at all .
Another observation I made was how often I do not pay attention to photographers name on the articles. I knew few names of the artistss included in the collections, I recognized Reza (I heard about him on some podcast in context of war photography), Annie Griffith Belt (I read her book some time ago) and Frans Lanting (from his column in Outdoor Photographer). But there are people I never heard of before, like Sam Abel, Jodi Cobb, or Gerd Ludwig, and these are people whose images are dominating in the series!

Another Orton effect. This one was shoot more by accident, when we were photographing pears in downstairs studio. We were trying to get rather shallow depth of field and difference between first and second fruit. Tomasz was manually adjusting the focus, starting from totally unfocused image, which I used as the bottom layer for this “sandwich”.

A few weeks ago, we went to see how the water release is going in winter in Coralville Dam. We were looking for slow shutter speed images, I think, but were not very successful in capturing the power of water. However, the pattern of water made for an interesting image. I took some photos with “big camera”, and some with an iPhone. I decided to post-process the iPhone image. The recipe for the image can be viewed on BestCamera site.

In food photography (or for that matter in almost any kind of photography) most of the times the difference between great and so so picture is in second plan. Total image experience is built not only by the main role player but also by all those props that are nicely blurred out by bokeh in the background.

The problem is that building nice second plan set can quickly add to quite an expense. In pursuit to save some green (and any other color for that matter) we decided to go and browse through local thrift stores. I was quite surprised actually how many there are. After spending better part of last Saturday shopping we brought home quite a collection of different things we intend to use in our shots. Here is just a sample (wine is ours ):

And here is the best part of it – all those things cost less than gas we burned to drive to all those stores!

Sometimes best ideas come to me just after we called it a day in the studio and started to put things down. This time was no different. We’ve spent a couple of hours playing with this bunch of tomatoes. But it was when I take our flash case when I saw gel lying there and instantly wanted to play with them a little more. Using 1/3ev orange filter on key light made tomatoes look like they were catching some morning light. I like this one the best from the whole series.

Ice fishing is not as popular in Iowa as it is in Minnesota. But there are some fans, and several weekends ago when we were hiking around Coralville Lake and Lake Macbride, we saw some of the tents. When we were coming back towards the end of the day, the fisherman were preparing to leave their positions as well. I found the spot and was waiting for those to to position themselves against the sunset sun for this image.

Last time we were visiting New York, we took camera with us for two evening walks around Manhattan. We were taking series of images for HDR processing. It was our laziness, we did not use the tripod, so even with steady hands some of them did not turn out too well. Some I had problems getting around people moving all over the frame. But this one turned out just fine.

I want to come back to writing my impressions and experiences with stock photography. It is a month or so since I last mentioned it on blog. Mostly because it is how long it took me to come back to submitting anything there. The current count: iStock portfolio has 6 images, BigStockPhoto has 14. Shutterstock liked 4 out of 10, but they need to accept 7 on first submission and you need to wait a month before another try. It expired this week. The count should change through the week, as I just uploaded a bunch to each stock. Which leads me to my first observation- I have a month worth of images, and I was barely able to pick up 10 for submission. Some of them were shot with stock in mind, some with learning to shoot food in mind, not very successful, it seems. But I loaded up on books, read a lot on the Web- hopefully it will get better soon.
Meantime, I discovered how to avoid apple problem in BigStockPhoto- if you have an apple (as in fruit) in your title, description and keyword, you can just ignore the red alert on copyrighted brands . The submission goes through. Anyway, what I want to focus on today is image management and software. At the beginning, I did not have a habit of putting titles and descriptions on my images in Lightroom. Bad decision. The first batch of images I edited 3 times, for each stock separately. What a waste of time. Now, when I pick images to submit, I will post-process them, keyword again with stock in mind (mostly remove technical keywords like flashes and stuff), put titles and descriptions. It plainly saves time.
The next step is submission, and both BigStockPhoto and Shutterstock allow ftp uploads. With well prepared files in Lightroom, it takes minutes to process 10 or 15 images, as all you need to do is pick up categories from pull-down menus and submit batch. I am perfectly satisfied with my workflow here. But iStock has rather unfriendly submission process, the web-page based interface makes you submit large file one at the time, which is tedious. You really wish you had better tools. I tried to search solutions on iStock forums, which are rather famous for their usefulness and loaded with information. Probably, but I was not impressed with my ability of finding the relevant answer. Google search for software was more successful. The first program I downloaded was Image Manager. It allows you to manage first 15 images for free (it is important, not to upload 15 images at the time, but manage portfolio of 15 images!). I used it for two uploads, run out of space, didn’t like the interface much (although it was doing its job) and decided to look for more money worth before spending $20. The ProStockMaster was a second hit. It allows to submit images too many stock agencies, but with iStock allows you to just upload them on site, you need to keyword and categorize on the page (no two-way communication), and they have subscription based pricing (per month or per year, either not cheap). And then my husband came with the idea of looking for Lightroom plug-in. I wish I figured it earlier. It takes some intelligence to figure out how to keyword image, but it takes keywords from metadata and checks them with iStock database. You still need to go through one image at the time, but you can keyword and categorize all of them before upload. If you need to, there is a field to add model releases as well! Same functionality as in Image Manager, but far better fitting in my workflow. It is also a donnationware.

It almost was no-blog Friday. I want to look through all the images in took in last few weeks and pick up some stock uploads. I checked the blog to see the stats, and here it is – no post scheduled for today! I new it will happen, I am so busy recently, that I am scheduling most of the content on weekends for the following week, and then forget about it until I have time next weekend.
Either way, we took some neighborhood photowalk last Saturday, and this is one of my favorites of the day.