Yesterday I was off to a commercial kitchen to shoot a chef for a chef type magazine. I don’t know, Chef Monthly or All about Chefs or, perhaps, Hunky Chefs … who knows? Anyhow, the Chef was a fun guy to be with and I can say this without a word of a lie, there were no tantrums and there was no swearing. It’s not like TV you know.
He didn’t miss a beat until I asked, “hey Pedro, can you juggle potatoes?” I just wish I was ready to shoot when that puzzled look crossed his face.
As it turns out, he can.
I posted recently on my brief experiences with Phase One’s Capture One 4 and I think it’s worth revisiting it now that I’ve had more experience.
I’ve been extremely busy this month shooting for a commercial client almost daily and that has lead to a large number of images requiring processing. I’ve used Capture One 4 as my primary workflow tool and I can say, without hesitation, that it has been a real benefit.
From RAW to TIF to JPG to client web galleries, it has withstood the assault of literally thousands of images and has performed extremely well, saving me oodles of time. The unreliability issue I was experiencing has not manifested itself again.
So a thumbs up to the guys at Phase One. It looks like a great product and will be a part of my workflow for the foreseeable future.
These lego remakes of famous photographs are a lot of fun.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks and looks set to remain busy for the rest of June. I’ve been shooting commercial properties for a single organization, inside and out, and have twenty or so more of them to do. It’s a hectic schedule as we’ve been trying to do at least two properties each shoot day with each comprising building, gardens, interior rooms, people and some lifestyle photography. It’s worked out to be a pretty physical job with lots of moving of furniture and the like. Having to work around the exceptionally busy working day of the people in the business properties has also impacted on the available flexibility of the shooting schedule.
This all translates into one thing really. There has been and will be no time for the setting up of lights. This introduces the problem of getting the exposure right in most of the interior room shots when, generally speaking, large windows dominate the internal lighting situation and I am often shooting directly towards the windows. No fill flash means one thing to me really and that’s High Dynamic Range (HDR) imagery.
I’ve been shooting sequences of nine exposures, one at normal exposure settings and another eight at one exposure stop increments/decrements. These are then blended in Photomatix to produce a single well “exposed” base image. Because the camera handles the exposure increments/decrements automatically it’s just a matter of operating the shutter nine times for each HDR shot. It’s fast on site but does introduce extra steps in the digital studio workflow.
It’s an interesting process and one that has allowed me to deal with the limited shooting time.