Mike's Blog

The Hernandez Family of Oklahoma City

I shot photos of a family on Saturday evening and then took individual Senior photos of the girl graduating from college on Sunday morning.  I was hoping that it would have been a bit more overcast for both shoots, but I was able to get into shady areas for softer shadows.  Saturday night I looked for my soft box flash adapter, but couldn’t find it.  Since I was on a time crunch, I didn’t look too hard.  I winged it and the pictures did turn out to look pretty good.  I do believe, however, that they would have looked better if I would have used the flash.  Once I got home, I found it fairly quickly for use on Sunday.

Last Family Pic of Saturday Night

The individual shots turned out a lot better in my opinion.  Looking back at the shoot, though, I wish I would have brought along my remote and used the flash in an off-camera situation.  I could have side lit the subject so the reflections in the eyes would be somewhere besides the pupils.  Live and learn is one way to look at it.

Jessica Hernandez Senior BYU 2012

I did learn some things over again on this shoot.  I knew this shoot was coming for some time before hand and I didn’t get my gear ready until the last minute.  This should never be the case.  I should always think about what I need and have it ready to grab and go when the time comes.  The two things needed that were left behind were the Flash Soft Box for Saturday night and the Flash Remote for Sunday.  Always be prepared.  It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

First Sunday Picture

Typically I shoot RAW + Jpeg so every time I push the shutter release, the camera makes two separate files.  This particular shoot was good in the sense that the RAW files worked out.  I processed the first image of Saturday and then used Adobe Bridge to batch process the remainder of them using the Previous Conversion command.  I did the same thing for the Sunday images.  Doing this saved a lot of time.  I would open the image and make any necessary adjustments in RAW and then process them in Photoshop with Color Efex Pro 4.  ACR (Adobe Camera RAW) is set on my computer to open as 16 bit ProPhoto color space images. 

Looks like She's Pondering the Future!

I have a recipe that is my favorite adjustment for these types of images that uses Tonal Contrast and Darken/Lighten Center.  I always use the minus button on the skin of women to not add tonal contrast and then set my center point right around the face area of a group. 

After Her Change of Clothes

After I processed the first image, I set up an action to save two files, one of these files in a folder as a layered .psd file and another in another folder as a finished .jpg.  This action also converted the file to 8 bit, convert the image to srgb color space, flatten and close the image after it saved the .jpg image.  One other thing done to make this easier is that I assigned a keyboard shortcut so when I finish I press a function key and Photoshop does the rest. 

Another Pondering Look

Hoping for the best

Future Protector of USA!

Oklahoma City Community College has hosted the Mountain West Swimming & Diving Championship for the past 10 years.  I am lucky enough as an OCCC employee to get the opportunity to photograph this event.  This year the men didn’t compete at this location so I shot the women’s finals on Saturday night February 25, 2012.  This competition started on Wednesday, the 22^nd, but work got in the way of me shooting the first three days of competition.  Athletes being at the pool, and not able to go made me crazy.  I was really wishing I could attend, but work got in the way.

It's a Go!

In the Lead!

Hoping for the Best!

Shooting swimming last night and watching the Daytona festivities for NASCAR, has got me wanting to shoot sports of any kind more and more.  I will be at our pool again this weekend to photograph the NAIA Swimming & Diving Championships, and will go to Texas Motor Speedway to photograph Jeremy Clements’ pit stops in the Nationwide Race in April. 

Yippee, I Won!!!!!

Point of Impact.

My Favorite Shot of the Night!

I have been serious with Photography for about 5 years now attempting to learn as much as I can on a near daily basis.  The drawback of this for me is that my position at Oklahoma City Community College doesn’t allow as much time for photography as I would wish.  I do, however, get to refine my skills in Photoshop.  Teaching the program helps in this refinement, but sitting on my butt for several hours a day makes the need for exercise extremely important. 

Until the fall semester of 2011, I exercised very regularly to the tune of about 4 to 6 days a week.  However, during that fall semester of 2011, I was short handed in my computer lab so the exercise schedule had to suffer.  I went from 4 to 6 to almost no days per week.  I gained about 25 pounds in 9 or so weeks.  This was too much for me, but I should have known to cut down on my calorie intake since I had slacked on movement. 

Once the Christmas break of 2011 came along, I got my larger butt back into the gym and have once again moved my exercise routine to all but one day of the week.  Mostly I do Body Pump, Yoga, and Treadmill work.  Some days I walk outside.  Once I lose about 20 of those 25 pounds I will begin to train myself for a 5K on Thanksgiving Day.  I know that doesn’t sound like much for those who have done this.  I have competed in one in 2009.  I walked most of it and came in next to last in my age group and third to last for males.  I want to beat that, and don’t feel it will be too difficult to do.  Now I will discuss the parallels to photography. 

When I started back at the gym in December, it was extremely difficult both physically and emotionally.  I was fat, out of shape, and felt like a total loser in comparison to all of the individuals in the classes.  But now, I feel like I’m getting some place and making real progress.  Yoga is especially perfect for this analogy.  The instructor that I use is named Debbie.  She explains everything in great detail and how we should “take our practice into our everyday life events.” 

In this I believe Debbie means;

• ·         We should slow down to be more efficient. 
• ·         Be aware of your limitations and don’t do more than you are capable of. 
• ·         Always strive to reach the next level.
• ·         Compete with yourself always and don’t worry about what someone else is doing.  You can’t control them anyway.

These are just a few of the lessons that I take from Yoga, but I was able to put them into photographical practice last night.  I was able to photograph a high school basketball team in an extremely poorly lit gymnasium and wasn’t allowed to go away from the stands.  I slowed my thought process down to make sure I had my settings right for the conditions.  I shot at 3200 ISO, 2.8 f stop, and my camera turned down 2/3 stop to increase the shutter speed to freeze action.  I did get a few decent shots even though they are pretty noisy. 

The Tip Off!

Two years ago, I didn’t even know what turning down 2/3 stop even meant.  Thank you Moose!

I will turn 54 on Sunday, January 22^nd.  I still feel like I’m only a teenager. (In my mind at least)  Sometimes, however, my old-man body makes me feel 154.  Oh well, now for the rest of the story. 

Alzheimer’s disease runs in my family.  Getting this dreaded diagnosis is really my only fear in life.  With this in mind, I try to learn as much as possible on different topics on a daily basis.  Right now I am immersing myself into learning a program called Game Maker.  I sort of got thrown into learning this, but I’m really glad I did.  I applied for a faculty position here at Oklahoma City Community College for Professor of Game Design.  I did not get the position because of a lack of knowledge.  However, I am teaching this Intro to Game Design in an adjunct capacity this semester.  I do know that I will do fine, but I also know this will be a challenge teaching so many young minds about a topic in which they know so much more than I do.  Photography and Photoshop are the subjects I do know a lot about, but need to learn more.

I learned a great deal at Photoshop World, Las Vegas in September as I always do when I go to this excellent convention.  This next Wednesday, January 25^th, Ben Willmore is coming to Oklahoma City for a one-day seminar with Kelby Training.  I already know this will be an eventful day of learning. 

My whole mindset is on learning more about more daily.  I personally feel this is what made the world what it is today, and continued learning by everyone will make the world a much better place.

I am not getting any younger like any of you who may read this.  My health is okay, but I definitely have some issues in that department.  I’m overweight, I’ve got high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, high triglycerides and I have a slight case of gout in both of my big toes.  Over the years, my body has gone through six back surgeries, with both anterior & posterior fusion between L4, L5 & S1 vertebra.  I’ve also had an infection inside of my left hip socket that had to be surgically cleaned three different times, and with that I was supposed to have a hip replacement within 10 years of which I’m 14 years overdue.

I haven’t always been smart with my money or my ability to have a good relationship with women.  This said, here are my goals for the year stated in a sort of abstract way.

I would like to simply say that I want to lose weight as my goal, but that’s not realistic without a plan.  Typically I eat fairly fattening foods and I do this late at night on most days because I work a lot of evenings.  My plan is to switch a lot of the bad fat from my diet, replace it with good fat and eat earlier in the day.  Breakfast is meal I skip on most days, and there aren’t many fresh fruits & vegetables in my diet either.  I work at a college so my mind set as a calendar is usually thought of in a semester, and last semester I worked a lot & didn’t exercise a lot.  I have set my schedule to be able to exercise every morning before I come to work. 

Personal Goal 1: Eat Better, Exercise More to hopefully lose weight

I have had the habit over the years of living beyond my means on a fairly constant basis.  My credit card balances are through the roof.  Between my wife and I we make pretty good money, but are always strapped at the end of the month because of the debt load we have.  I plan on using this knowledge of over-indulgence to pay down some of this debt and save a bit more. 

Financial Goal: Live Below Our Means, Pay Down Debt, Save More

Like I said earlier, I haven’t had the best luck with women over the years.  I have been through multiple marriages and until now none have lasted longer than seven years.  Jennifer, however, has changed this as we have been married for more than a decade now.  I suppose one could say she’s a keeper.  With the others, I didn’t have an education.  Jennifer’s support has helped me in my educational goals and I now have two associates’, a bachelor’s, & a master’s degree.  I say this because I am one of the most stubborn people I know.  Without an education, I was right no matter how wrong I was.  Now that I do have an education, I know that I am not always right.  However, I do have to force myself to keep “Stubborn-Uneducated Mike” locked away in that little compartment in my brain.

Relationship Goal: Try Even Harder to Treat Jennifer with the Respect She Deserves

I would like to think I am a pretty good photographer.  I would like to think I am really good with Photoshop.  I know I’m not good with computer gaming at all.  Rick Sammon says that a good photographer should be able to know what setting she/he needs and just do it similar to the way Eric Clapton knows what is next when he is playing his guitar.  Each and every year I get closer to this analogy of Rick’s, but I am not there yet.  Composing photos is another area of photography that I am improving, but I still need to work on making photographs instead of snapshots.  One thing about Photoshop is that it is such a complex program that one could work in it every day for years and still learn new ways of doing things and new things to do with it.  Since I teach Photoshop at Oklahoma City Community College, I need to continue to immerse myself in the program to learn as much as possible.  I am also going to teach Introduction to Game Design in the Spring 2012 semester.  All I know about game design is what I have learned by going through the first few chapters of the text book at the end of the last semester.  I have really spent a lot of time going through this book to figure out the ins and outs of the Gamemaker program.  There is some computer programming involved in this as well.  Programming is one thing that I am not at all good at but I have vowed to figure this out when the time comes.  I mean, how can I see if the students are doing it right if I don’t know how to do it?

Professional Goal 2: Work on Getting Better at Photography, Continue to Learn New Things in Photoshop, and Educate Myself on Gamemaker to Better Help Students

First, let me say that I received some nice new aids for my photography as early Christmas gifts from my beautiful wife, Jennifer.  I did order the products so I would get what I wanted, but she bought them.  A White, Black, Gray card set and a Flash Soft Box were two of the products I used on this photo shoot.  I must say, using a gray on the first shot when your lighting won’t change is a must.  The soft box on the flash makes some extremely soft shadows instead of the harsh shadows with a direct flash. 

I took some Christmas photos for a friend of a friend’s family.  The group included a husband, wife, and one small child.  This post isn’t for how amazing the photos were, but for the time I saved processing them with Photoshop Actions and Batch Processing in Adobe Bridge.  The family didn’t know what they wanted as far as pictures so I agreed to pick the images to work with, process them, and crop them to 8 by 10, 5 by 7, and 4 by 6 so they could print what they wanted.  I took about 140 images and processed 48. 

Typically I shoot RAW + jpeg which I did on this shoot.  I opened the first image with the gray card and let Adobe Camera Raw set the White Balance, closed the file, and copied the settings to paste the White Balance to the rest of the RAW images.  I then opened the second image and set the Camera Calibration to Camera portrait, set the check mark in Lens Corrections, set the Point Tone Curve to Strong Contrast, and then set the Clarity and Vibrance in the Basic tab.  Again, I copied the RAW Settings and pasted them to the rest of the images after which I would make small adjustments in the Basic tab if necessary on an individual image basis.  Once opened in Photoshop, I simply used NIK Color Efex Pro 4 to put a Darken/Lighten Center on the first image and then set the actions for the cropping process.

I chose the crop tool and set it to 8 by 10 and then saved a preset.  Once I did the crop, I started the Action script.  As you can see I named it Save for x and set the F2 key to make it quick.  I always work from RAW in ProPhoto, so I went to Edit and Convert to Profile to convert it to sRGB.  Once it was converted, I saved it to the 8 by 10 folder as a .jpg with an image quality of 12.  Then, I went to History and undid the convert and crop (select history state…) and set my crop to 4 by 6, cropped the image, converted the profile to sRGB, saved the image in the 4 by 6 folder and undid the history again.  I did the same thing with the 5 by 7 size image and then stopped my Action.  I then went and put the stop action at the crops so I could crop each image where I wanted.  I figure this saved me about 3 minutes per image or at least 2 hours. 

Action showing stops for Crops Circled

One thing I didn’t think of, however, when I was doing this was the dpi of the images.  I shoot with a Canon 7D which is 18 megapixels.  So the dpi of the images was anywhere from say 375 to 650 or more.  So, I had to run a batch process on each folder to save them back to 300 dpi, which I could have done during the crop. 

File Size Actions

I watched the Painting with your Camera exclusive NAPP Member archived webcast with Fay Sirkis a week or so ago.  I was intrigued so I downloaded the brushes she gave away and got started with a few images to play a bit and then found this image that my wife Jennifer took in the Klondike area of Canada when we were on our Alaska cruise in May, 2011.  I fell in love with this image when I saw it and wanted to do something with it, but didn’t really know what I wanted to do until I stumbled across it after watching Fay’s webcast. 

Click on the images for a much bigger view

Before Painting

Let me say this isn’t a fast process.  I zoomed in and out to capture the details and to fill in each and every pixel.  I would say I spent between 30 & 40 hours total on this work.  I am very proud of how it turned out. 

After Painting

I am going to teach a class next spring called Introduction to Game Design.  My disclaimer to this is that I am really not a gamer at all.  I do understand the draw to games and why they are so popular.  After all, the graphics in most games are amazing. 

This is a completely new adventure for me.  For the past five years I have been devoting a lot of time learning photography and Photoshop.  Quite frankly, the best resource I have found at any price is NAPP and Kelby Training.  I have even spent my own money to go to Photoshop World in Las Vegas, Nevada four different times.  This is quite expensive on the salary I get at Oklahoma City Community College, but worth every penny.  The books that Kelby Enterprises produces through PeachPit are amazing as well.  I have several books by Kelby, Cross, Kloskowski, Peterson, McNally, and the newest book that is in transit right now Down & Dirty Tricks for Designers by Corey Barker.  This book by Corey should help me help a lot of students with their future.

Now back to Game Maker.  We are using a book called The Game Maker’s Apprentice – Game Development for Beginners by Jacob Habgood and Mark Overmars, with a forward by Phil Wilson.  This book comes with a Lite Version of Game Maker 8.  This is a program by YoYo Games.  After going through the first three chapters of the book, I know I am in for a challenge.  However, I know it will be very rewarding at the same time. If anyone out there reading this would like to give me any pointers, please shoot me an email at mreeves@occc.edu

TimeLapseOCCC

I tried Time Lapse for a tutorial to teach to my Photoshop Class on Monday.  I am quite happy with it given the limited time I had to do this along with the poor view I had to do it.  This is 999 still shots tken at 2 seconds apart.  Click on the link to see the storm clouds move over the south side of Oklahoma City.  This is taken from the 3rd floor of the Library at Oklahoma City Community College.

When I was at Photoshop World Las Vegas in September 2011, I bought the not-yet-released version of NIK Color Efex Pro 4. I have to say that this software package NIK has put together is amazing.  It is really my go-to plug in when I want to process images to get “The Look” at least in my eyes.  This is true most of the time for me.  This particular time I also used NIK’s Viveza 2. 

Road to the Rocks

Be sure to click on the images for a much larger view.                                                                                     

I started processing these .DNG images with Adobe Camera Raw.  In ACR I usually do the same things.  One word about this is that if you have .jpg images, some of these settings aren’t available.  I always choose the White Balance on the Basic Tab first, go to the Camera Calibration and go through them.  This time I chose Camera Landscape.  I then go to The Lens Correction Tab & put a check mark in Enable Lens Profile Corrections.  This particular box does an amazing job and it’s automatic.  I then go to the Tone Curve tab and almost always choose Strong Contrast as I did here.  I then go back to the Basic Tab.  If my histogram is okay, meaning it is strong from left to right, I go to the Clarity Slider and move it somewhere to the 60 to75 mark and then increase the Vibrance to somewhere around 50.  If the histogram is lacking on one side or the other I will increase the brightness or the blacks accordingly.  I then click the Open button.

Once the image is opened in Photoshop I went to NIK Color Efex Pro 4 and a recipe that I have saved.  This recipe is the Tonal Contrast with all sliders left at the factory defaults, and Darken/Lighten Center with a few alterations there.  I usually click on the second filter, click on Place Center, choose a spot on the image that I believe to be the focal point and click.  I then click OK to apply the Recipe.  Saving a Recipe is new in this version of NIK Color Efex Pro.  Meaning that you can stack several filters inside the User Interface to something you like and save it for use later.  This saves an incredible amount of time. 

Just Before Slot Canyon

I did use Viveza 2 by NIK Software on these images to increase the structure and decrease the saturation a little bit.  These images were taken at the Valley of Fire State Park North of Las Vegas. 

Slot Canyon Entrance