TimeLine Media Blog

My photography has been primarily been in color. Ballroom dancers especially, love to show off their dresses and costumes in the vibrant hues with which they were made. In photography classes, I was first introduced to the color wheel and how the information it contains can help photography composition.

Color Theory

Examining the color wheel, you can see where lots of branding and logos get their colors. Complimentary colors lie across the color wheel from each other – red and green, or purple and yellow for example. Analogous colors are adjacent to each other on the wheel such as red and orange or blue and purple. This is another added element of creativity you can use in photography. As an example, here is another flower shoot that had some challenges.

This day lily has some beautiful color – newly bloomed, and early in the morning when the sun is lower in the sky, and not too harsh. It helps to keep the photographer cool too! So here is the first photo showing the flower with all the background elements surrounding the plot where they are planted.

A nice snap, but I don’t like a few things in this frame. There is an older lily that does not open any longer in the right side background of the frame. Then in the far back of the frame is a brown/gray area of the fence that was immediately behind the flowers. The first change I made was how close I was to the subject. Using a macro lens, you can get very close which easily eliminates some of these problems.

Adding flash to the photo also let me darken the background more than the first photo. This helps to take the fence out of the frame even more. The final change that I made was to use color to make a more pleasing background. Here is where card stock and a holder of some kind could help, but I did not have any of that available. So, I moved a large recycling bin into the background! It is a large, BLUE, plastic can that was easily maneuverable. On the color wheel, the reds/oranges are across from the blue range, so I thought it would be worth a shot.

I am happy with the results! It is subtle, but it added to the saturated look of the entire image. Try a color wheel experiment the next time you are shooting flowers, product shots, or fashion. The information from the color wheel can add to your creativity.

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When photographing ballroom dance events, the action on the dance floor is the focus. Especially at a Showcase event where there are choreographed routines that are performed by solo couples, the action photos take priority over all the other photos of the day. Other photos that I make during the day include the decorations, the table centerpieces, and posed portraits. Some dancers like to have their photos taken while not under the pressure of being in front of the audience and judges during their routines. I can understand! You can face the camera exactly how you want to be angled, and you can hold lines perfectly for the camera which is difficult to do while dancing.

Event Workflow

This brings me to the point of the post today regarding memory cards. I took some photos off the floor of some couples at the event. In the hustle and bustle of the day, I did not download the card with these photo right away, and kept them in my Nikon D4. I then went back to photographing action with my other camera, a Nikon D700. When I started to run out of space on the card in the D700, I reached for the card in the D4 to continue shooting. One of the limitations of the older D700 is that this camera cannot display files created by the D4. It is also a good practice to format cards prior to using a new card to ensure that files are not corrupted when re-writing to a memory card. Well this is where my problem started. When I checked the D4 card in the D700, it said that there were no images on the card. So I reformatted the memory card before starting to use it in the D700. GONE! Of course, I did not discover this until yesterday as I was editing the photos from the event.

Is this still a common practice by photographers? Am I being too cautious by always reformatting cards prior to using them in a camera? If I had not done this to the card prior to shooting, I would likely still have the images. I am trying to see if any data recovery software could possibly get any of the images back, but I am not hopeful. Please let me know your thoughts on the subject!

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

Continuing the post from last week’s Tech Thursday, I want to post about the reason against switching to the Creative Cloud subscription-based software model from Adobe. There has not been more negative posts on a photography project in a long time! Change can be difficult for businesses especially if drastic change affects the software that is at the core of so many studios.

Adobe Review

Will you still be able to access your *.PSD and *.AI files that you created in Photoshop and Illustrator even though you no longer pay monthly for Creative Suite? What happens if you get out of the business – will you have a way to access these proprietary files? Adobe has stated that they will update the last “boxed” version of the suite, CS6, with updates for new cameras and file types, but will not add new features. I question, though, how long that will last. Even Microsoft cannot Windows operating systems forever no matter how popular, or how many computers still run versions that are 3 or 4 generations old.

Another view is that the subscription model means that you are just renting software. For the time that you are paying, you will be getting all the updates, and features that you expect from licensing software. After the subscription is ended, no matter how long you have been paying, you will have nothing to show for it. With boxed versions of software, studios would have flexibility on when they will invest in their core software. Plus, Adobe would give you incentives to upgrade when you are ready, with discounted pricing for returning customers, and different pricing models to suit studios. For example, Web Designers could get a suite with different products for them, while photographers would buy a package more suited for them. The new model gives only 2 options – $20 a month for 1 application, or $50 a month for all applications.

Software Subscription

After the initial reveal of the Creative Cloud, and the uproar from the Internet forums, it looks like there is still discussion at Adobe whether this is the final setup of the Creative Cloud. There are discussions of having photographer specific versions of the cloud, and I’m sure there are others also being explored. So for now, I will be sticking with my CS5 suite, and waiting to see how this will fall out. This is definitely the wave of the future – subscriptions models make sense for software companies, so it is only a matter of time where all software will be done this way. This is just part of the growing pains of change.

In any case, I will not be worrying about this until I can’t open a file or edit a photo, so not to worry! I’ll still be shooting and putting out the best images I can no matter what software will be on my workstation. Stay tuned to the blog to see more-

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