michaelcsnell.com Blog

Breathing new life

2010-07-24T12:34:22Z

With my recent investment in new hardware and software updates, I’m finally making a real time-investment in putting together my master Lightroom catalog. When I first went digital (after dabbling for a while, I made the serious switch in 2003), I archived all of my RAW files to DVD. Everything that wasn’t ridiculously hopeless got archived. Then I made my tweaks to the best shots and archived those, provided them to stock agencies, etc. My file names are chronological so the only real way of finding things was by searching by the date of the shoot. That, and I had a crude Extensis Portfolio database that provided thumbnails of all of my images and their pathnames, which showed which DVD they were stored on.

That was my system until a year or two ago when I began to migrate to using Adobe Lightroom as my main image cataloging system. I believe it was my trip to China in late 2008 when I began processing everything through Lightroom instead of Bridge and ACR. Everything from that point forward was in Lightroom, but everything prior was still in my old non-system.

Now, as I have downtime between shoots, I’m making the effort to add my digital files from 2003-2008 to my master catalog in Lightroom. After that is done, I’ll need to address my scans from transparencies that predate 2003, but that’s another kettle of fish.

The beauty of re-processing some of these older images is that they can often be improved by the advances made in RAW processing software in the intervening years. The shot at the top of this post is one example. Shot in the fall of 2003 while working on a story about Indiana’s covered bridges, this was originally three vertical shots. The plan was to use them to make a panorama in Photoshop, but it was a time-consuming task at the time.

Here was the situation: This particular covered bridge was located right next to a newer, concrete bridge that replaced it. They were so close together that I couldn’t get the whole bridge in frame with my 17mm lens because there was no room to back up. This photo of the two bridges gives you some idea of the setting.

So, I did what I could do. I backed up under the concrete bridge until it was just out of view. Then I fired off three vertical shots from left to right, making sure I had plenty of overlap along their common edges. I planned at the time to eventually stitch these three photos into a panorama, but I knew it would take some time to correct the wide angle distortion, mask the overlapping edges and tweak the sky and water to get a seamless blend. I set them aside for later.

“Later” came when I imported this shoot into my new Lightroom catalog last week. Seven years have passed and now stitching a panorama is automated. In Lightroom, you can select the three images and go under the Photo menu to Edit In > Merge to Panorama in Photoshop. The software takes it from there and you end up with a seamlessly blended, distortion corrected panorama in no time. Now I have one more covered bridge shot in my library.

Many other tools have been improved in the last seven years and I’ll share some other salvaged photos as I move through the files. It seems like Adobe’s image editing suite has arrived to a point where I can be comfortable making this kind of a huge time commitment to cataloging my images now, without having much worry that I’ll regret taking this path a year or two down the road. Sure, I expect things to continue to improve, but the overall system now feels mature enough to move ahead with confidence that time isn’t being wasted. That’s a good feeling.

Next up: a couple of small things that aren’t completely obvious in Lightroom that make life much easier…

Summer blooms

2010-07-19T21:11:36Z

It’s ridiculously hot out there — heat indexes well over 100 for days now — but the purple coneflowers in the front yard don’t seem to mind. I’m hoping it eases up a little tomorrow evening so that I can make another attempt at a twilight shot of the Eldridge Hotel. Finger’s crossed…

Shooting local

2010-07-17T00:08:17Z

An assignment in my own home town has spurred a new personal project. When I moved to Lawrence, Kansas, a couple of years ago (has it been that long already?) I had intended to begin documenting the town photographically. While it seems like shooting in your own “back yard” would be the easiest thing in the world, it’s amazing how hard it can be to actually get out and do it. It’s too easy to get distracted by work, or mowing the lawn, or just plain every day life. When I’m on the road, I’m there to shoot and nothing else so it’s easy to stay focused. Even if the weather isn’t perfect, I’m out shooting because I only have limited time on location. When I’m home, it’s easy to say “maybe the light will be better tomorrow night”.

But nothing kicks me into action like a paying gig so, when an assignment came along for a story on some local civil war sites, it finally got me out of the house. First stop: the Eldridge hotel.

The Eldridge was burned down on multiple occasions during the years leading up to the civil war by pro-slavery raiders. Rebuilt each time, it is now a local landmark. I wanted a new angle so I contacted my friend, Doug, who offices across the street to see if he could get me on the roof. Being the great guy that he is, he did just that.

After popping off a few exposures of the KU campus (above) I settled into the shot I had in mind for the Eldridge. I wanted a long twilight exposure that mixed the sunset with the street lights below. I framed it up on the tripod and attached the release cord. Then it was just a matter of firing off a few shots every few minutes as the light faded and the shop lights came on.

In the end, I combined a few shots to get this one:

Since I had shot several variations while locked down on the tripod, I could easily stack different exposures on layers and “paint in” elements of each using layer masks. The bulk of this image is one shot, from late in the set where the sky was darkest, but I did paint in some of the facade of the hotel from a shot prior to sunset to give more detail and balance the contrast a bit. I also painted in a few people on the sidewalk that appeared in various exposures.

I’m going to keep exploring other angles for this shot. The microwave tower behind the hotel is distracting (I could Photoshop it out but not for an editorial shoot – darn those ethics) and I would rather be on an angle with the hotel to add some dimension to it. Next time I’ll try shooting from street level, diagonally across from the building and see how that works.

It’s nice to have plenty of time for this project. Unfortunately, I can’t always spend so much time on each shot but, in this case, I’m looking at the assignment as an excuse to do some work I’d wanted to be doing for myself anyway. And it all goes into the stock files eventually.

Locals vs. Tourists

2010-06-25T14:53:25Z

While upgrading my computer, I figured it was a good opportunity to start fresh with my browser bookmarks and get rid of the masses of links that I had that no longer went anywhere. Clean house, you know? Of course, there are still bookmarks that I need — things I look at every day or nearly every day — and I’m going through the process of deciding what to re-bookmark, and what to let go of.

John Nack’s Adobe-centric blog is a keeper and it was on his site that I discovered this post that led to the cool graphic posted above. What is it? It’s one of a series of maps on Eric Fischer’s Flicker page (this one is San Francisco) that shows where, in several cities around the world, locals take photographs (blue points) vs. where tourists take them (red points). The yellow points show where it can’t be determined whether it was a local or a tourist taking the photo. There’s an explanation of how the data was compiled on Eric’s page. It may not be 100% scientifically accurate but it’s a really interesting look at how cities cater to different populations. I could look at these things for hours.

Can this be a useful resource to a travel photographer? Possibly. It might show where there are some landmarks or scenic areas that only the locals seem to know about. On the other hand, a dense blue spot might just indicate where some guy lives that takes 30,000 photos of his cat each day. But, given enough data, you’d think some real trends would emerge that would cancel out the flukes. I just think they’re fun to look at.

Google maps to the rescue for keywording

2010-06-20T21:47:54Z

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time. While finishing up the keywording of my Thailand files in the last couple of weeks, I ran across a good example of what I’ve been wanting to discuss, and that is: how I use Google Maps to help me identify my images.

Of course, taking notes on site is always the best practice. I carry a small notebook in my camera bag but, in truth, I tend to take most of my notes with the camera itself. Here’s an example: on my last day in Chiang Mai, I had a few hours in the morning to stroll the old city on my own and photograph the various Wats, Chedis and Prayer Halls. I had heard that Chiang Mai has over 1000 Wats so, suffice it to say, it’s important to keep track of which is which when it comes time to keyword and label for my stock agencies.

I set out from the hotel before dawn and headed for the original, walled city. Once inside the walls, I would pass a small temple complex nearly every half a block. While I had been driven through these streets regularly for three days, I never would have seen many of these buildings without being on foot. They are tucked away and need to be sought out.

When I would begin to shoot a temple site, I would first look for a sign with the name in english and photograph that first. This is my way of taking notes. The images can always be sorted by capture time and I’ll have an “opening title” for each location I visited. Hopefully it will even be spelled correctly, but, you never know.

When I arrived at the Wat at the top of this post, I couldn’t find a sign in english anywhere. Nor was there anyone around that could tell me what it was save for a group of monks (who I opted not to bother), chanting inside this main building:

The site was a monastery comprised of a viharn (the building in the foreground), a chedi (the gold spire behind it) and a ubosot (the roof seen peeking over the trees in the back on the right). The english terms for these might be an assembly hall, a reliquary, and a prayer room or ordination hall. The ubosot, or prayer room, is what is pictured in the opening photo.

As it turned out, I never had the opportunity to speak with my local guide again and I continued on my way to Bangkok. Once back in the office at home, I could have tried to contact him by email but decided to do some detective work on my own first. This is where Google Maps comes in.

I knew the route that I had walked through the walled city, and I knew from signage, what the names were of the Wats on either side were. I zoomed in close in this area with Google Maps and switched to the satellite image view. There was my Wat:

You can see the shiny gold chedi in between the two red-roofed buildings just above and to the left of center in this screen capture. There is a label, but it’s in Thai. I tried using an online translator but didn’t trust it so I tried using Google’s street level viewer in Google Maps. That’s the tool shaped like a little man. While the area had not been mapped for street level views, the tool did show several blue dots for the positions of still images that were on file for the site. Sure enough, by looking at some of these images, I was able to confirm that this was the Wat I was looking for and that it was named Wat Chai Phra Kiat, or Monastery of the Renowned Victory.

That’s the image that convinced me. Still, just to be safe, I Googled the name and found several other sites that confirmed it was what I was looking for and provided me with some alternate spellings.

The internet has been one of my most valuable tools for researching images and compiling keywords. I would hate to imagine the time it would take to track sites like this down through books, emails to local guides, etc. I still do my best to identify sites while I’m on location — there’s no substitute for that — but at least in situations like this, I can feel confident that I can come up with the information later when necessary.

The mother of all upgrades

2010-06-15T21:10:42Z

It’s an exciting and scary week around here. I’ve been putting off upgrading my old G5 Mac tower for far too long. It was running fine but beginning to get a little tired. I could respect that. I get a little tired, too. But then Snow Leopard came along — running only on Intel-chipped machines — and I began to fall behind. Still no biggie. No real urgency. And that became my downfall.

Now we have an update from Adobe to the entire Creative Suite — CS5. A few days later, Lightroom 3. I held out until after the WWDC just in case Apple made any updates to the Mac line-up (something without a shiny screen maybe?) but, when there weren’t, I pulled the trigger and placed my order. Or should I say “orders”. Piles of boxes have started to arrive and the installation process has begun but I think I’m in for a multi-day process. Common sense has always told me to just update one thing at a time. Then, if something goes crazy, you know what is likely to blame. There will be no such common sense this time. New hardware and all new software. If there is a conflict, I’ll have one heck of a time figuring out where it is. Luckily, that doesn’t happen as much as in the old days. I also tend to stick with just the necessary software — not a lot of system modifiers, etc. that can lead to trouble. Call me overly cautious but I make my living with these Macs and I don’t care to spend my time trouble-shooting software conflicts when I can be billing hours.

With all of these updates there will be a slight shift in the focus of this blog. I plan on doing more technique and how-to posts, sharing what I learn about the new features in Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, Aperture, etc. We’ll see how it goes but this may be just the first phase of this new direction. Exciting times for sure.

Studio work

2010-06-04T14:46:39Z

I’ve had fewer hours on the road lately but I’ve still been shooting fairly heavily. Instead of travel images, I’ve been working in the studio on some tabletop product shots. I could never be one of those catalog guys that does this stuff day in, day out, but I enjoy it as a break from field work. It stretches a different part of the brain.

When shooting travel, I work in a more documentary way. I shoot 99% available light and tend to work with what’s there. I don’t do a lot of posing or manipulating of objects in a shot, I look for the best angles given what I encounter. In short, I move myself and the camera rather than the subject for the most part. Given that my subjects are often architecture or landscapes, it’s really necessity that I be the moving element.

In the studio it’s different. I’m not working with available light, but typically a set of hot lights on stands. I can move them and alter their qualities with diffusers and gels in ways that I can’t affect the light in the field. There are a lot more decisions to be made in the studio due to these extra elements that are within my control. I choose backgrounds, positioning of elements, light, color, etc. Many of the shoots I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks have involved glass and mirrored products so lighting and reflected light have been a real challenge. I’ve been having a lot of fun experimenting with these products and how different lighting can enhance them and show off their unique qualities.

I find the studio work experience useful in my travel work as well. Having control over lighting helps you to understand the qualities of light so that when you’re in the field, you better understand how to make use of the light you’re given. The light that you can’t control. The sun does move, it just doesn’t always go where you want it or as fast (or slow) as you wish. Clouds and haze can act as diffusers. The difference between the studio and the field photography is really how you choose to control the situation. In the studio, you can control it by acting: moving a light, adding another, etc. In the field, with the kind of travel photography I tend to do, it’s more about reacting: change your position due to sun position, wait for a cloud to pass (or move in front of the sun), warm a cloudy scene by adjusting white balance in-camera rather than gelling the light source, etc.

I’ll be back in the field soon enough. I have some local projects that I want to work on for myself and my stock files and travel is always on the horizon. In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying the air conditioning and the lack of need for bug spray.

One bloomin’ lupine

2010-05-25T18:46:51Z

I took the shot above in July of 2007 on the Gaspe Peninsula on Canada’s eastern coast. The lupines were in full bloom and they were everywhere — planted in people’s lawns and growing wild in big patches like this one. I’ve wanted to grow lupines at home ever since but they may not appreciate our hot summers. Everyone in town that I’ve talked to about Lupines that has tried to grow them has had a tale of woe and disaster. Unfazed, I’m going ahead with my plan. Living my dream. Planting my lupines.

Inspired by the hillside of blooms in the photo, I chose a little lump of a hill in the yard not too far from the front door. In my mind it will be just like the scene in Canada — lush green and thick with blooms. I bought one largish potted lupine and six smaller ones at the local greenhouse. The largish pot had a good sized bud so I figured that if everything went south, I might at least get one bloom before the hillside returns to wasteland. Lo and behold, a couple of weeks later I have my bloom.

This may be all I get this year. Heck, it may be all I get ever. I’ve been chasing rabbits out of the patch nearly every morning and the dreaded heat has not even set in yet. My fingers are still crossed, though. If these survive, I’ll supplement my little hill with more next spring and keep at it until you’ll swear you’re in the Gaspe when you walk up to my front door (except there won’t be a vast sea of blue in the distance — but I could leave a couple of kayaks in the yard just for effect).

Ayutthaya, Thailand

2010-05-23T11:37:22Z

After an ugly week in Bangkok, the protests have been dismantled and everyone seems to be waiting to see what happens next. This has been a tough time for Thailand. For a country that thrives on tourism, more tough times will likely be ahead. But this is a resilient region and hopefully the situation will remain calm and the tourists will return soon.

If and when you do find yourself in Bangkok, make sure you get to nearby Ayutthaya, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The three chedis of Wat Phra Sri Sanphet are shown in both of the photos here. Ayutthaya was the second Siamese capital (founded in 1350) and the city was nearly burned to the ground in 1767 when the Burmese invaded — proof that this region has bounced back before. The remaining ruins are scattered on and around an island created by the confluence of three rivers — the Chao Phraya, the Lopburi and the Pa Sak — as seen on this map from Travelfish. I only visted three or four of these sites and could easily spend a week or more here continuing to explore.

I’d seen photos of these ruins prior to visiting but still wasn’t prepared for their scale. The woman in the white skirt (above) gives you some idea of just how big these chedis — the bell-shaped towers — are. In this case, the three chedis were built to house the ashes of kings.

One day here was not nearly enough. While it would be hard to say what my favorite spot in Thailand was, this would certainly rank up there in terms of places I wish I could have spent more time. There is so much to see and I only scratched the surface.

Bangkok erupts

2010-05-16T12:54:22Z

The situation in Bangkok has ramped up again. Red Shirts maintain the protest they began over two months ago and the government’s patience is wearing thin. While I was there in March — oddly enough arriving on the same day as many of the Red Shirt protesters — things were quite peaceful and the protesters were scattered around various parts of the city. There was a sense of tension but, other than some traffic problems, the situation didn’t really affect one’s ability to go about their business in Bangkok.

Toward the end of my time in Bangkok, I began to see a few more scenes like this one — streets blocked off and guarded by police. Still, only one tour stop was cancelled due to these blockades. In other parts of the city, life went on as usual. After I left, things began to heat up and violence erupted. Eventually, as I understand it, the protesters regrouped in one area, just a few blocks from where we had dinner at a rooftop restaurant just a few days earlier.

This is the view from that terrace toward where the protesters now have their camp. This area is approximately the intersection of the red lines on the map in this article posted on the BBC site. (The shot at the top of this post was taken from the same place on the same evening but is looking the other direction.)

A writer I have traveled with in the past, Kevin Revolinski, has been living in a borrowed condo not far from this part of Bangkok and has been posting some reports of the recent events on his blog. It’s odd to feel so connected to a situation happening half way around the world but the combination of having been there so recently and knowing the area somewhat, along with reading these reports of violence written by someone I know who is still there and whose voice I can hear in my head as I read the posts is all very disconcerting. I can’t claim to know exactly what’s going on or who’s firing live ammunition (police or terrorist snipers trying to elevate the tension?) but I hope for the best for the people of Bangkok and all of Thailand. It’s a beautiful country full of wonderful people — gracious and welcoming.

It is the warm people that I’ll remember and it is them, and the amazing places I visited, that I will continue to tell people about, encouraging them to visit for themselves in the future.