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Posts Tagged ‘Lightroom’

Commercial, Event, Photography | 0 comment

Carahsoft 2019 Gov Con

Headshots at the Carahsoft 2019 Gov Con event in Washington, DC ©TimeLine Media
Headshots at the 2019 Carahsoft Gov Con event in Washington, DC ©TimeLine Media

Washington, DC

Stemming from a referral from another photographer, I covered the Carahsoft 2019 Gov Con in Washington, DC. On this occasion, their event was held at the Grand Hyatt, a hotel fitting of the name. Attendees would be in the conference center, attending lectures and breakout sessions during the day. For the most part, I would be outside of these sessions creating headshots at a step and repeat.

Since the booth was a little slow on traffic at the beginning of the day, I went into the conference center to see the opening remarks. Of course, I am familiar with so many of the Adobe products, and these attendees would be discussing their newest tools for government agencies.

Carahsoft 2019 Gov Con headshots
Carahsoft 2019 Gov Con headshots

For the most part, I was outside at the step and repeat. The background was branded for carahsoft, and Adobe the two sponsors for the event. When people would come by, I offered them an updated headshot. Not only was this a little out of my comfort zone, but it is immediately broke the ice. The subsequent quick headshot session was much less awkward to go through comparatively! As I warmed up to the situation, I had a nice long line of people that wanted to get new portraits made. I ended up having a great time, and I hope I made a good impression for carahsoft and their guests!

Carahsoft 2019 Gov Con headshots
Carahsoft 2019 Gov Con headshots

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Photography, Technology, Travel | 0 comment

Photo Spot Check – Tech Thursday

Air Force Memorial, Arlington, VA - ©TimeLine Media

Ever go through a series of photos to see a spot at the same place on every image? Digital cameras have made so many advancements in convenience, and accessibility to photographers. Just going around the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC to look at cherry blossoms, you can see the impact. I can remember going walking around the blooms when I was younger with many cameras around, but not nearly to the extent that there is today.

Shooting with film, however, did have some advantages. One of them was that the “sensor” was cleaned EVERY single time a photo was taken. The film was nicely protected in a hard plastic cartridge, fed through a tiny slit that wiped the sides of the film clean before it was placed in position to be exposed. After an exposure was made on the frame, it was moved out of the way as a new part of the film was moved into place – there was no reuse of the same section – unless you had a failure of your mechanical system, or were very advanced in your multiple-exposure plan for your image.

Arlington, Virginia

Air Force Memorial, Arlington, VA - ©TimeLine Media
Air Force Memorial, Arlington, VA – ©TimeLine Media

When taking landscape or other travel images where you are exposing large parts of clouds or open sky, digital cameras will show you spots where there is dust on your sensor. When shooting landscapes from a tripod, you have the luxury of using low ISO and a stopped-down aperture. Using these settings, it will be very evident where dust spots are on your sensor. When the using more open apertures, the dust will be too close to the sensor to be seen in your images. Regularly shooting at f/4 or below, you may not notice that you sensor even has any dust!

Air Force Memorial, Arlington, VA - ©TimeLine Media
Air Force Memorial, Arlington, VA – ©TimeLine Media

This image looked perfectly fine at the time I took it at the Air Force Memorial. When I brought it into Lightroom and took a look at the images at 100%, there were so many spots. Here is a screen shot of the image where each circle is a point from the “Spot Removal” tool. I have made them larger if you would like to download and see how bad this case was.

Spot Removal tool in Adobe Lightroom - ©TimeLine Media
Spot Removal tool in Adobe Lightroom – ©TimeLine Media
Close up of spots from sensor dust - ©TimeLine Media
Close up of spots from sensor dust – ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Ballroom Dance, Event, Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Photo Proofing – Tech Thursday

Standard Ballroom Dance - ©TimeLine Media

Still have thousands of photos waiting to go on the website! I am still working late in to the night and getting up early to get as much time to go through the photos. My email is mostly on hold, and I only check in to social networks sparingly to link to new blog posts from here. This is all because I want to get these photos onto the proofing site as soon as possible. Why does it take so long? The reason is I want the images to look as good as they can before they are released for viewing.

Baltimore Dancesport Challenge

Showcase Dance - ©TimeLine Media
Showcase Dance – ©TimeLine Media

Images that are out of focus and immediately deleted. For ballroom dance and other events, any photos where the hands or other objects are obscuring the main subject are also removed. All of our cameras are set to shoot RAW files. This is a less-refined version of the JPG files that are more common. Shooting in RAW allows us to recover more detail from photos where the flashes did not pop, or to adjust the exposure in post.

Standard Ballroom Dance - ©TimeLine Media
Standard Ballroom Dance – ©TimeLine Media

In setting up the lights for competitive heats, we keep the flashes behind the photographers so they will light the faces of dancers as they pass in front. With ballroom dance floors being very large, there is a gradation of how far the flash will go. If dancers are closer to the photographers, they will be brighter than dancers that are farther away. Shooting in RAW means that there is a lot more data in each file that can be recovered. So to compensate for these differences, I can adjust the Exposure, Highlights or Shadow sliders in Adobe Lightroom to make the photos look similar to each other.

USA Dance Mid-Atlantic Championships

Latin Dance - ©TimeLine Media
Latin Dance – ©TimeLine Media

With the change in the amount of flash, there can also be changes in the color temperature of the photos. We set the cameras to be balanced to the color of the flashes. However if they do not fire, the photos take a very warm, yellow/orange color. This can also be easily adjusted with the White Balance slider. You do not have as much leeway when using JPG files. So again, the RAW files are necessary for this kind of shoot. It does take lot of space on the hard drives, and it takes a lot of time to make the corrections, but I think it’s worth it!

Smooth Ballroom Dance - ©TimeLine Media
Smooth Ballroom Dance – ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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