Single-Serving Photo

How many times have you held up one of your photographic prints in the light of day—actual, real day—and thought That’s not at all what I bargained for? Never? Well that’s good. You must be one of the lucky ones, or one of the blind ones.

Even with the best equipment that money can buy, ICC profiles, spectrophotometers, an iron-clad color management workflow, and a high-end monitor, your eyes are the ultimate judges of your work. But eyes, they don’t work alone; you can’t see anything without light, and the quality of the light will have as much an effect on what you see as the color of the print itself.

I got onto this topic after reading Michael Johnston’s overview of his Viewing Station. All these years I’ve been experimenting with lights in my studio space, let’s call it Single-Serving Photo HQ—or, as my friends call it, my bedroom—and I never once thought to write about it.

After the jump I’ll tell you how to dramatically increase your viewing conditions for about $15. (more…)

If you have, let’s just say, a trunk-full of strange and wondrous objects fresh off the barge and out of the splintered shipping crate from lands afar, chances are good you’re either the kingpin of an international smuggling ring or you’re going into business for yourself. If you’re my friend Eli, you’re the owner and operator of Old Man Hodapp’s Worldly Treasures, peddling only the finest of… Completely weird stuff from all over the globe.

After you’ve come to terms with the concept of selling parts of animals you can’t readily identify, you will surely need to take some pretty pictures to entice the prospective customers who crawl through your website, and that means you’re going to want to build a low-cost lightbox (or cloudbox or cloud dome or… diffuse light chamber) to get that snappy catalog look.

I got together with Eli and got him to explain how he constructed a very serviceable lightbox for less than $20. We also talked a bit about post-processing and how to streamline the task of readying hundreds of product shots for the web without going insane. (more…)

It’s not so much that flash photography is actually complex, but more that the available information tends to skip the fundamentals. In short, I love Strobist very much (and I’m not alone), but I felt left in the dark (pun intended) about a couple of small items after reading a recent post and I felt I should share the answers I came up with. (more…)

I don’t think there is a single digital photographer who hasn’t, at one time or another, looked at a histogram (much like the one below) and thought What the fuzz is this thing trying to tell me? If that describes you, or if you just want to know more about this ubiquitous and curious graph, you’ve come to the right place.

Today I will unclothe the common histogram and show you not only how to read it, but also how you can use it to strengthen your work. (more…)

Most (if not all) digital SLR cameras have a variety of “modes” that they can be operated in, such as Av, Tv, Portrait, and so on. To the novice it may seem as though some of the modes are redundant, and certainly to some degree that is true, but they all have their uses. Today I will attempt to demystify these modes and explain how to use them most effectively for the greatest creative impact. (more…)