If you follow David duChemin’s blog and other activities, you know that he is very fond of Eli Reinholdtsen work. Maybe you even saw her Flickr photostream or visited her blog to see her astonishing images. But this e-book she authored, “Chasing reflections”, third one in “The Print & Process Series”, provides you with something more. You will find a series of images, followed by Eli’s explanation of “why” and “how” they were created.

Like all previous e-books in the series, this one is divided into three distinct sections. It gives you the opportunity to just enjoy good photography, or to learn from another photographer’s experience.

You start from studying screen-size 37 images. Unless you are viewing the book on iPhone, you can really distinguish all the details. Spend some time looking at those images. Eli’s compositions consist of many layers, all of them contribute something to the whole story. I think those images remind me a bit of Picasso’s painting, where many items, often just fragments, are overlaid on one another. Pay attention to what is behind, and what is in front of the “mirror”, as well as to the background.

Next section is devoted to all the technical details for those, who want to go out and find their own “reflections” project. Eli talks about aperture, angle and point-of-view and importance of light. But foremost, she describes that those images are as much due to careful planning, or visualization, as they are of patience and waiting for that Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, just a right person showing up to finish the composition.

The last part of the book is the one I found the most interesting. Each image is analyzed and explained. What was the idea behind it, what artistic decisions were made, what worked and what didn’t. Some show “behind-scenes shots”, like the broken glass, which provided the most intriguing images in the e-book. As I mostly just browsed through images, after reading about them in detail, I found myself going back, to look for the things I missed, for stories I didn’t realize where there.

And here is how the book is described on Craft&Vision:
Chasing Reflections is the third in the series The Print & The Process. Eli Reinholdtsen is a creative photographer who, through her unique and skillful approach to reflections, captures moments and juxtapositions that are truly an art form at its finest. Reinholdtsen digs deep and shares tangible ways to scout, setup, and shoot complex and magical photographs that push the envelope of visual poetry. Her playful descriptions aren’t shy of digging deep into the techniques required to capture movement, timing, and contrast. Chasing Reflections is an inspiring collection of 37 photographs that stand on their own a pieces of pure art (The Print) followed by a discussion of the creation of those visual moments (The Process).

Chasing Reflections is a available now for $5. And as usual, there’s also a special offer:
For the first four days only, if you use the promotional code REFLECT4 when you checkout, you can have Chasing Reflections for only $4 OR use the code REFLECT20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more books from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST August 1, 2010.
As a full disclosure, all the links in the review as well as on the right side of the blog are affiliate links.

Also, stop by the blog tomorrow if you want to see my take on urban reflections.

“Safari – a monograph” is a second e-book in The Print and The Process series from Craft and Vision, also the second authored by David duChemin. Within 62 pages of this e-book you can find as many as 36 great photographs from his trip to Kenya. The book organization, introduced already in the first monograph, enables to enjoy the photographs first, before we learn more about the story behind, and all the technical and post-processing details.
The post-processing is strongly dividing images into 3 stories. One has focus on Africa- landscape, people and animals. This images were treated in a very original way with the Lightroom preset, which is available for download, a bonus of the book purchase. The preset turns images into chocolate-colored duotone, reminding me a bit of a color of dried soil.
Second story, consisting of just a few images, is hard to describe. Maybe solitude or emptiness, for some, but for me it is all about clouds and tress, and space.
The third story is about safari itself, balloon trip, camp life. With very basic, natural post-processing, the images are kept in photojournalistic style.
The e-book is not just about the photographs. After all, David DuChemin enjoys teaching his photographic philosophy and does it well. The worth taking lesson from the monograph is that for a skilled vision monger the subject doesn’t matter that much. Author is not a wild-life or landscape photographer, but he still finds a way to photograph his surroundings in an engaging way. It is also a lesson on patience, on taking your time and looking around, on slowing down instead of thoughtless snapping pictures.
You can also find some great great tips for a safari type of photo outing.
The last part of the book, explaining the reasons and techniques behind each image is a great tutorial as well. All the mistakes, points for improvement and notes to self for next time are honestly outlined. You can take second look at all the images, notice them in the context of lost chance on triptych for example.
Regardless if you just want to browse through David DuChemin images and want to learn something about photographic process, the book is certainly worth buying.

Here is what the author himslef says about the e-book:
SAFARI, A Monograph is the second in the series The Print & The Process. David duChemin unpacks the images from a 10-day safari in Kenya, first letting the images speak for themselves then diving deep into the process behind the photographs. This eBook offers an honest discussion about the issues connected to the creation of duChemin’s SAFARI monograph, including the gear used, the techniques employed, and the lessons learned. It’s a 62-page PDF eBook that will provide you with inspiration amidst the details of the Why and the How. This is not so much about how to photograph your first safari, though you’ll learn that too; it’s a look at the lessons learned, and re-learned, by a photographer who is now 25 years into his craft. Also included are the Adobe Lightroom settings used for Serengeti Chocolate, the duo-tone look in which much of his SAFARI monograph has been styled, and a downloadable Lightroom Preset. SAFARI, A Monograph is a available now for $5.

And… As usual, there is a special offer. For the first four days only, if you use the promotional code SAFARI4 when you checkout, you can have SAFARI, A Monograph for only $4 OR use the code SAFARI20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more books from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST JULY 11, 2010.
As a disclaimer, all links in the review are affiliate links, as is the box on the right. If you chose to click on it and buy the e-book, I will make a small profit on it.

I am one happy snapper. A two-day air picnic I went recently resulted in 3206 images. Let me share with you, how I dealt with so many files from the moment they were shot. And add on the side, that it took me a week to organize it all.

I have only two 8 Gb cards. It meant quick download in the field and formatting. When the card in the camera was getting full, I was just downloading them on one of the laptops we had with us, and used the other card for shooting. Not very good choice, because when the card was getting full, I was loosing a bit of time to change and format the card before getting back to shoot. Point for improvement here.

After the event, I had all the images in one folder on the computer. I used the driving time back home to import them all into Lightroom, keyworded with general description of the event.

The first look through the photos was used to find obviously out of focus, or badly composed images, with missing parts of planes for example. I was just browsing through in Grid view, and using Reject (X on keyboard) to mark unwanted images. At the same time, I created the Collection Set for the whole event, and Collections for each type of plane (in general terms, I divided my event into sub-sets of photos, so it is easier to pick the best, representative images for each subunit). I keyworded the images in Collections with additional keywords- I was able for example to batch add the plane type, colors etc.

The second look was already when all the images were placed in respective Collections. Here, I couldn’t use Reject anymore- the mark will not show in Folders view, so I wouldn’t be able to delete from disk unwanted images. I used rating of 1 (1 on keyboard) to mark those rejected images. At this step, I was checking each image magnified 1:1 for sharpness inspection. Also, I started to chose my picks. Again, I could have used Picked (P on keyboard) but it would not show in any other view of the Catalog or Folder, nor would I be able to make a Smart Collection of favorites. I used the Color Green instead (8 on keyboard, different colors are keyboard shortcuts 6 to 9). I believe the fact that Picked and Rejected images are not recognized in all views it is this one thing which changed from Lightroom 1.

After I was done, I went to Folder view, chose all the images marked with 1 and deleted them from hard drive. If I deleted them in the Collection view, they would be still visible on hard drive and in Lightroom.
At this point, when I have all unsharp, uninteresting images removed, it was probably high time to archive all the remaining images on the DVDs. I was left with less then a half of all images I shot. 1493 images, to be exact.

After that, me and my husband went and each chose its picks, the best, most interesting, representative images. From those, I made separate Collections to send out images to stock (mostly editorial), to personal gallery, Facebook, blog. I was down from 3206 to only 67 images, which is already a manageable amount for a post-processing. Most of those picks you can see up in the grid view from Lightroom.

Is your workflow similar to this? Would you do some of steps differently? Share your thoughts in the comments or link o your blog entry!

Couple of weekends ago, I spend two very hot and sunny days at a small, private airfield close to Warsaw. It is a place where air picnic “Goraszka” is organized for last 15 years. It was my first time here, in Poland, and fourth air show overall. After great disappointment after last years’ Airventure, photographically, I must have learned some, because I am quite happy with my images this time. And I wrote down few lessons for the future reference.

1) Airplanes don’t look very attractive from far away. Just look at the two images of glider Solo Fox and see, which one you like more. The glider started the show far above, and was lowering its position during the program, enabling me to take better shots.

In my case, 18-200 mm lens was the only choice I had, and I felt it was not enough. I not only looked funny with this lens on the press podium, where the least “pro-looking” guys had 70-300 mm (or whatever Canon equivalent is). But I also think I could have used those 300 mm to sometimes look through the windshield to see pilots face. And 300 mm would be enough, too. Because on the other hand, filling the frame too much often results in missing pieces of the subject .

2) Airplanes look better when propeller, if any, is shown in movement. Just look at the difference the moving rotor and the propeller makes between those two images of Xenon gyroplane.

It is good to have a basic knowledge of planes or somebody knowledgable with you. I had at least three people in my company constantly whispering – 1/250 for this one, and you are safe with 1/500 for this one, no propeller there. Or you can just make a few tries to see what works and what doesn’t. You just need to remember about the effect. And use Shutter priority mode on the camera.
But…. 1/250 sec is not a fast enough shutter speed for 200 mm, especially if you don’t have a steady hand.

3) Turn on the burst mode, and just shoot as many images as you/your camera/your card can. According to Scott Kelby’s theory, something in the middle will come sharp. Or sharp enough. At the same time, you have a chance of catching the most interesting moment in the sequence of the events. Or just ensure a better composition or cleaner background, as you can see at the two consecutively shot images of landing CSS-13 Kukuruznik.

4) Train your panning technique. With airplane moving fast in front of you, and rather slow shutter speed, you are introducing additional movement with panning, which can result in blurry image. And good panning will give you an interesting photo, like this one of TS-8 Bies over Goraszka airfield.

5) Airplanes look most interesting when photographed from above and from up front. Obviously. Those are hardest to achieve when you watch the show happening in the air from the earth. But see for yourself the difference between those two shots of the most interesting aircraft of this year Goraszka air show- newly restored LIM-2.

6) The continuous focus is probably your best friend in many air show situations. Although it is not perfect, and will be sliding all over the sky, it will often help getting sharper images, especially combined with burst mode. After all, there are fast moving planes in front of you.

7) With shutter speed limited by propeller movement anyway, you can go up with your aperture. I was using the medium apertures from f/7.1 to f/16, hoping to get better depth of field which would help hiding imprecision of continuos focus. Or situation like in the first shot here, where the other plane came out soft in the common flight of Spitfire and Hurricane.

As you can see from the sample images, I made all the mistakes I could, but I learned and trained it all at the same time. I am sure next air show will give me maybe less then almost four thousnad pictures, and hopefully more than 67 great keepers.

Craft and Vision released today yet another e-book. This one is different from the previous releases as it introduced a new subject to the site. It is not a book about photography, but about a video. And this is a good news.

Today, each of major DSLR manufacturer has a camera recording video in their offer. In many genres of photography, still images, even the greatest, don’t cut it anymore. Photographers needs to embrace something called convergence or fusion, to create the multimedia content. But it requires gaining a new skill- shooting a motion story, which can be quite different from what they normally do.

On only 20 pages of “Vision in Motion”, Trevor Meier skillfully summarizes the most important points in building a good movie. The book is well organized, and divided in three chapters, Story, Sequence, and Technique, each loaded with practical information and tips to get you started. The familiar to still picture professionals topics, like exposure control or focus, are discussed in a new way and attention is directed on how they differ when shooting video. The author also mentions things photographers normally don’t need to worry about, like recording sound, and gives advice on necessary equipment and accessories. It is a great book to get you started on recording your first digital video.

Here is what David du Chemin says about the new release:

Vision In Motion is an introduction to digital video for stills photographers. Written by Trevor Meier, both a professional stills photographer and film-maker, this eBook discusses the core issues of motion storytelling.

So go and check out the “Vision in Motion” e-book for yourself. For the first few days, you can use the promotional code MOTION4 at checkout to get the latest e-book for only $4 OR use the code MOTION20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more e-books from the Craft & Vision collection. They are all well worth the price (they are actually worth far more, with all the tips and great photographs). They are also presented in a very portable, PDF format, suitable to be read on iPad, laptop or desktop computer, great to buy for yourself or for somebody as a present.

The promotional codes expire at 11:59pm PST June 27, 2010.

Sometimes, buying an expensive lens which you use only occasionally doesn’t make any sense.
For a while we were considering getting a fish-eye lens. We bought it eventually for an event, thinking of selling later, but didn’t and are in fact using it quite often.
At the same time, doing mostly landscape and food/product work, it doesn’t make sense for us to keep a long focal length, fast telephoto lens. Especially that you can easily rent it from BorrowLenses or LensProToGo if needed. Turns out, it works only in US.
This time, we are in Poland, and had to figure out how things are done here. And we came back… empty handed. Google search and browsing through number of different forums revealed, that there is no company renting Nikon or Cannon lenses. Not a single one! You can rent only Sigma lenses, luckily with Nikon or Canon mounts, from Sigma Pro-Centrum. Sound good? Not at all. They have a handful of locations (8 in June 2010), and apparently no mail orders. In Warsaw and in Wroclaw, they have only Canon-mount lenses, no Nikon. I found Nikon-mount lenses in Chorzow, Poznan and Gdansk. Only one of them is within practical driving distance for me. Not only their offering seems very limited, I was stunned to find out that you need to pay 2-4,000 PLN of deposit … in cash. I think I don’t need 50-500 mm that much. My conclusion is, that although lens renting services are present in Poland, they are far from being useful and user-friendly. Yet.

You can read David DuChemin’s new e-book, “Venice- a monograph” as a how-to book. It is a lesson of defining, starting and re-defining the boundaries of a photographic project to fit the reality. The monograph images have more then one link- there is a common location- Venice, time of shooting- evenings in the rain, color theme present even in black-and-white images (blue), making it a concise body of work. All of those elements serve the main idea of the book- to show author’s feelings at the time of shooting- loneliness, solitude, isolation.
But the truth is, what you take from photograph depends also on your, the reader, state of mind. What I see on those images is, otherwise busy with tourists, town of Venice catching a well deserving breath. There are far fewer people, the waiters and gondoliers have time to stop, to take a break. It has a relaxing feeling to me.
The book is also a showcase of David DuChemin’s unique photographs. You can just take a pleasure in browsing through them. They have very simple, yet a story-telling composition. Unique colors, combination of time of shooting and skillful, unified post-processing, give then the feeling of calmness and peace. At the end of the book, each of the images is shortly described, how and why it was shot. There is also a little something about post-processing for those interested.
Bottom line- the book is worth far more than 5$ you will pay for it, if not for the photographic tips, certainly to see his view of Venice- quite different from most tourists impressions. Even better, if you buy it before 11:59pm PST JUNE 12, 2010 and use the promotional code VENICE4 when you check out, you can have the book for only $4 OR use the code VENICE20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more books from the Craft & Vision collection. Make up your mind quickly.
And reserve more founds, as it is just a first of The Print and The Process series! I cannot wait for more.

Another month is coming to an end, so it is the time again to look back at my stock business. It was a very successful month for me, maybe not in the scale and earnings, but certainly in the progress I made. I am selling very systematically on Shutterstock. Since they finally accepted me in middle April, I sold already 12 images. Not much, but I am still to get a sale on iStock or Bigstock. Also, I started submitting to Fotolia just in May, and I have already two sales scored.
As I mentioned before, you got to love Suhtterstock subscription program. But I really have very ambiguous feelings about them. First, I read yesterday here some critical view on the vicious cycle you can get yourself into. And it kind of makes sense. With all the troubles I had with “getting in” and being able to submit beyond trial batch, I expected them to have the hardest criteria out of all stock agencies I submit to. These are iStock, Bigstockphoto, Shutterstock and recently, Fotolia. But it happened to me today for the second time that Shutterstock accepted the whole submitted batch, and I generally get more images in there then for example in iStock. I also used to have far more images being accepted in Bigstockphoto, but recently, they seem to be the pickiest.
A grand summary- I have 66 files with Fotolia, 60 files with Shutterstock , 55 in Bigstockphoto and 29 in iStock, mostly because they are two batches behind.
That’s another thing- the review time. iStock is by far the worst, I am getting feedback in a week, sharp. I submit Friday evening, I will start getting decisions next Friday evening. Fotolia is not a master speed either. But Bigstockphoto and Shutterstock update my portfolio with new images after barely 2 days. Or less. I just got decisions from Shutterstock in images submitted yesterday in the morning.
Being on forced vacation, I am getting ready a batch of 10-15 imags a week. Good, but I thought I might do more. It is not that I am not picking up the camera, but I spend a lot of time photographing flowers for example. I don’t have spots to photograph flowers around my home, and here they are just everywhere. And I don’t submit those to stock at all.

I was listening to this interview by Matt Brandon (@digitaltrekker) with Trey Ratcliff today and after leaving a comment on his blog I decided that I will write a post about it here as well. Towards the end of the interview Trey is explaining his reasons for posting images on-line under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA, one of them meaning no commercial uses. And the question was asked – what if an non-profit organization asks to use images. And Trey explained, that they would have to pay. Those organization would not only use those images to bring in revenue, but they also have budget to cover costs of running business, such as employees are being paid their salary, thus it is only logical that they pay to use images. And this are in fact great arguments, and I totally agree with them. But.
Just take a look at this blog post to see how important it is for NGOs to have in hands good quality images, which they may not necessarily be able to afford. I wonder then, if those organizations, for what their mission is, shouldn’t be treated differently from other commercial entities. If the images for them could/should be treated as charity donations or received at a discount price because of limited budget and importance of what they do.

I have been looking at ever growing list of plug-ins in my blog Dashboard. Honestly, there are several which are not even active, couple which doesn’t seem to work with my theme (?), and probably few I have no idea why they are there and what they do, but they probably are important (or not?).
I thought that while at it, I will compile a list of them as a post, explaining why I have and what they do. Maybe you can pick something useful for your blog. I am not sure how to asses importance of some of the plug-ins, so I went with alphabetic list.

Akismet and Mollom – my janitors. This plug-in filters out spam from the comments my posts receive.

All in One SEO – I installed the plug-in out of curiosity when I read about it in this blog post. Search Engine Optimizations is very trendy nowadays, but if you don’t want to spend time understanding what all the fuss is about, the same post gives you example of most basic settings to use.

Better Cloud Tag – displays the list of most popular keywords from my posts, adjusting the font size to popularity. I think it is more useful then plain list, and at the same time is not as irritating as those moving clouds.

Broken Link Checker – goes through all the links in the blog posts, even links to other posts within my site, and alerts me when the page cannot be find. I find it especially useful when I move for example galleries and other sub-pages around the site.

ExZo – certainly one of my favorites. It lets me display the Exif data from each image – you can see what my camera settings were for each picture. Side note- doesn’t work with iPhone images .

FeedBurner FeedSmith – counts how many people subscribe to my blog. Adding the number to what Google Analytics shows (below), and I know how many people read what I write. Keeps me motivated .

Google Analyticator – it is a cool tool, as it not only follows my site stats, but also adds a widget right to my Dashboard. I can check how many people visited my blog in last months and which posts were popular whenever I enter my admin panel.

Lightbox 2 – is a special plug-in for blog readers, or more – watchers. It let’s you to see image separated from the blog post on a dark background, when you click on it.

PictPocket - a very useful plug-in. It alerts me when somebody hot-links my images. Most of the time, these are search engines, like Google, but sometimes people hot-link my images on their blogs, and although I check the site each time, more often then not I will block this additional traffic.

PollDaddy polls – lets me create and embed the polls in the posts.

Wordbooker – recent addition, to automate posting the new blog content on the Facebook page to increase blog exposure.

WPtouch iPhone theme – I installed it after reading a Twitter discussion prompted by Scott Bourne (@ScottBourne) asking about best plug-in to adjust blog display on mobile devices. Works well for me, too. And was something I simply haven’t thought about previosly.

YD Zoomify – special plug-in working with Zoomify software to display panoramas in a cool, browsing way like here.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – I guess the name says it all, but finding the plug-in working to my expectations was a big pain. I finally asked around, and got this one recommended by Jeff Revell (@photowalkpro).

OK, that’s it. If you made it that far in all technical and maybe even boring details, something more fun. A poll. And a chance to introduce yourself.

If your answer is yes, please leave a comment with link and a short description of your blog, so me and other readers can go and check it out!