Tell us a little about yourselves and Story and a Picture. What inspired the project in the first place?
Christopher: Actually it was just about wanting to work together. We lived together, and we talked about different things, but he had this picture of a design someone did in the sand, and I wrote a story about it, and we realized it was something that was sustainable.

Max: Christopher and I had recently moved to San Francisco and I was in the middle of a photo-a-day project when I shot this photo overlooking Ocean Beach. We wanted to work together on a creative project and started from there. Although, strangely enough, that story never made it onto the site.

Read “How I Got Here“

What do you find rewarding about melding writing and photography?
C: For me it’s just the beauty of having something there that is the visual aid for the one thing I describe that can’t be well described.

M: I love reading the stories Christopher comes up with and comparing it to both the actual background of the image and whatever story I created for myself when I shot it. Sometimes it partially lines up and other times it completely catches me off guard.

Christopher, how has the project affected your writing? Or what has working with the photography done for you creatively as a writer?
Little things, like realizing my reliance on “So” and “And then” and reductive adverbs like “fairly” and “mildly” all have to be culled when I am trying to get the stories to be exactly 1,000 words. In a larger sense, I have gotten better at realizing a moment that can expand or reduce to 1,000 words. It’s too short and too long at the same time.

Read “Shrink Ray“

Read “Why the President Has Pancakes”

Max, how did you get into photography? And what is your gear of choice?
I borrowed my Mom’s Canon way back when and kept going from there, starting with film but getting into digital fairly early on. I even had one of those Sony digital cameras that wrote directly to floppy disks. It was terrible. I’m now using a Canon 5D Mark III, usually with a wide / super wide lens. I recently picked up a 20mm manual focus Voigtlander that I’ve really enjoyed having as a walk-around lens.

Plans for the future?
C: We’d like to do a book and a better t-shirt line.
M: Shooting and posting more in general. We’ve also discussed the idea of a multi-photo series. And photos based on specific ideas that Christopher has in advance.

Read “Hello You Gentle Creatures”

Any advice for anyone looking to expand what they do with their photos?
C: I think if you take pictures thinking about a fiction story that could be told with it, it might open up the narrative people find within your frame.
M: Try to set up an image that viewers can’t help but think of a story behind it – whether you have an exact story in mind or want the viewer to come up with their own.

KEEP UP WITH CHRISTOPHER AND MAX: A Story and a Picture | Store | Facebook | Twitter | Google + | Christopher | Max

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This time around, we wanted to keep the focus on learning, so we brought in some stellar people to lead our workshops:

• Photoshop/Lightroom

  The very awesome Sean Teegarden is leading two Lightroom/Photoshop workshops on Friday and Saturday.

• Lensbaby Photo Walk

  Lensbaby is taking you on an awesome photo walk where you can try out their lenses and optics to see first-hand what the Lensbaby system is all about.

• Wacom Tablets in Photoshop & Other Creative Applications

  Wacom is teaching “Tablets in Photoshop & Other Creative Applications” on Friday and Saturday.

• Nikon

  Nikon has “Small Flash, Big Portrait,” which is sold out, and “DSLR Video for the Still Photographer: The First Steps.”

• Canon

  Canon is leading a sold-out “Canon Cinema EOS Workshop” with a hands-on C100 contest and a $1,000 prize for the best video.

• Landscape/Advertising Photography and Trail Running

  Local photographer Adam Barker is our keynote speaker this year, delivering a keynote address and a sold-out trail running workshop. All those attending the keynote get a free dinner from R&R BBQ as well!

• Children’s Portraiture

  Drake Busath will be leading a sold-out Children’s Portraiture workshop where he’ll show you his technique in action!

View the full Digitalfest schedule here!

We hope you’ll find these classes useful! There’s nothing we love more than supporting photography, and we hope these workshops will inspire you and leave you ready and raring for your next shoot.

If you’d rather not take a class, we’ve also got a vendor show that’s totally free and open to the public. Our vendors have some exclusive deals going on only during Digitalfest, so we want to personally invite all of Utah to come down and check it out. It’s free! Come hang out!

If you’re not from our Salt Lake City neck of the woods, be sure to follow us on Instagram to join the party from afar!

SEE YOU THERE!

The post Don’t Miss Digitalfest 2013! appeared first on pictureline.

It is tight, your neighbor is snoring, the engines are crying – a baby in the last row is, too. Yet just having this bird’s eye view down on our tiny planet can be so calming; at least in my head this is how the scenario plays out every time I get a window seat and spend a lot of time just looking out at the the world.

A few years ago I started shooting footage out of airplane windows instead of just gazing. I was mostly flying around the US at the time. The results, after some excessive post processing, were great. I captured some beautiful night shots, a great Miami skyline with epic clouds, suburbs covered in beautiful golden hour light, and packaged everything into the short video called “heimkehr.”

Fast forward to 2013 . I was returning from a video shoot in California and had window seats booked for the flight from San Francisco via Salt Lake City to Philadelphia. The result of this flight is the video “Drift.”

A lot of people have asked me about the technique, how I shot it, how I processed the footage, etc., and I would love to explain the whole process a bit more in detail.

To start off, all of the footage is shot handheld without any stabilizer or viewfinder on a Canon 5d mk3 with the 24-105 kit lens and an old school manual Nikon Nikkor 50mm 1.2 for the night shots.

The form factor of this DSLR is great. It allows you to get the best position and angle through the tiny bull’s eye; at the same time, it is probably the least ideal camera, as it has a huge problem with the vibration and shakes that the airplane transmits, creating a rolling shutter wobble that cannot be fixed. Also, with the highly compressed footage the possibilities for grading are much more limited and need further treatment such as de-noising and de-flickering to control banding and noise. It is certainly not a painless process, but you end up with a somewhat pleasing end-result.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The way I shoot is fairly simple: using a very flat picture profile (also known as pro-lost setting), 1080 30p, open aperture (to minimize the influence of the often scratched airplane window), the lowest ISO possible, and a fairly high shutter speed.

The result of the raw footage captured looks terrible. It is a super flat, desaturated, foggy, shaky, and pretty much useless video. Here are some examples of the raw Drift footage.

The first step is usually to figure out if a shot can be fixed or if its completely unusable due to the rolling-shutter issue.

Now this next part might get a bit boring, as I will just talk about software and post-processing. Just look at the embedded clips if talking about After Effects bores you.

For the whole stabilizing and grading part I am working in After Effects. First, I set the interpretation from 30fps to 23.976 – it slows down the footage a tiny bit and therefore gives it a smoother feel. For stabilization I always try to use the plugin “Mercalli” by proDAD first – if the result is not satisfying I will give the built-in and much slower “warp-stabilizer” a chance. There are other ways to stabilize, especially for more complex shots, such as using Mocha 3d tracking, though that would take way too long, especially for this kind of quick-turnaround project.

After stabilizing the footage, the next step is grading. With Magic Bullets Look I create a simple, flat black and white image—with the After Effects levels and highlight/shadow tool I will get the right contrast and turn the flat shot into a nice looking picture. I used the third-party plugin “Lenscare” by Frischluft to add some out-of-focus, tilt-shift elements, and, last but not least, I have to de-noise the clip—Neat Video does a great job on that!

With all of the 1080 24p rendered clips the actual editing and cutting process in Premiere starts. For Drift, I chose a super wide Cinemascope frame-size of 1920×600—this gives it a super cinematic feel and also allows to re-frame the shot, as I can move it up and down and also add tilt movements in post (such as 00:12 min and 01:58).

That’s it. After shooting less than an hour of raw footage and spending a few hours in front of the computer, including a never-ending search for the right music, this short video is finished.

I hope this is helpful to you in some way. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any more questions.

You can find more of my films on my website: timsessler.com
and you can also follow me on Vimeo and Twitter.

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a Rafflecopter giveaway

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If you’re here in Utah, be sure to check out Adam Barker next week at Digitalfest! He’s our keynote speaker and is also teaching a trail running workshop. Visit digitalfest.com for the full schedule of events.

Learn more about the Manfrotto Befree Tripod!

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As he made the transition, he made adjustments in approach, style and content to account for the differences between photojournalism and weddings in the photojournalistic style.

The photojournalist, he knew, is always looking for the grabber image. If the reader’s attention isn’t instantly caught, the page is turned. But a wedding isn’t a news story. People linger over wedding photos, and they return to them again and again.

Greg also realized that while there’s a “catch the moment” aspect to wedding photography, there’s also a fashion and beauty side, a “bride as model” consideration, and he was able to balance those elements in order to present the complete aspects of wedding photography.

He also had to adjust his ideas about composition. “As a photojournalist, I was taught to shoot tight, to get big, bold images that fill the frame,” he says. “There was very little negative space, very little white space. A lot of the photos I take for weddings are actually pretty much environmental portraits, and I had to learn how to put people in a really big space.”

“I took this near the Capitol building. We had plenty of time, but were not getting the most flattering light. So I positioned them to make use of the backlight and then stopped down to f/22 to get the starburst.” D3S, AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED

“For this first-look photo I wanted to use some layering and some framing elements and picture them from an almost fly-on-the-wall perspective. She was so happy and excited, and he was overcome with emotion. I got exactly what I’d hoped for—the feeling of somebody witnessing this great moment from a bit of a distance.” D4, AF-S NIKKOR 85mm f/1.4G

Greg photographs in and around Washington, DC, and often his clients want specific locations as backgrounds. “They’re Washingtonians, and that’s important to their relationship,” he says. “Sometimes their choices are based on what they saw in photos from my portfolio or website, and that can be difficult because I don’t want to do the same picture. I need to make their photo different for them. I tell people that being a wedding photographer is sometimes like being in Groundhog Day. You’re basically living the same Saturday over and over again. But that’s the challenge, handling the similarities: anticipation, buildup, the bride in the white dress, the ceremony, the party.”

What goes a long way toward meeting the challenge is choosing a place that makes the couple comfortable, and that often means a place away from the rest of the wedding party. “I want it to be just the two of them,” Greg says. “I don’t want people hanging around. Sometimes they want the wedding party along for some photos, but I tell them, ‘That’s okay, but when I’m photographing the two of you, I want the wedding party to stay in the cars.’ The thing is, I can take them out to the Jefferson Memorial, in front of a thousand people they’ve never seen, and I can get the response I need. I can get them to be comfortable and relaxed because they don’t have to worry about the people around them; they’ll never see those people again. But if I put that same couple in the same place and the best man or the bride’s sister or the groom’s buddies are there, they become inhibited because those people are not only likely to give them a lot of kidding, they are also going to see the photos. It’s easier for them to relax among strangers.”

A comfortable place; a minimum of distractions; sometimes, with the right couple, an invitation to be adventurous; and the suggestion to discuss important things to get real feelings going between them. “And then it’s up to me to pull it all together.”

“I like very strong, directional light, and late in the day I got this beautiful light at the chapel. We positioned the bride to get the highlight on her face, and my assistant helped the windblown look of the veil by tossing it up and sometimes holding it.” D3X, AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II

Tips from Greg Gibson

• Secret sauce of photography

  “Where you place the highlights is the secret sauce of photography. Your eye is attracted to the brightest part of an image, and how you place the highlight is how you guide the viewer through the image. For the photo of the bride and groom on the stairway, I wanted to underexpose slightly, half a stop or so, but have very crisp light on them so your eye goes right to the kiss. Then I toned the edges of the photo in post production to further draw people’s attention into the image.”

• Shoot concisely

  “As a photojournalist, I was taught to shoot concise, to tell the story within the confines of one frame. Today I still try to include as many elements as possible to covey information about what’s going on.”

• Long lens for pulling together

  “When I photograph people with buildings or monuments in the scene, I often try to place them some distance away from the buildings. Then I can use a long lens and lens compression to pull everything together, make my subjects pop and shoot the building slightly out of focus so you get the feeling of what it is without having to be beat over the head with it.”

• Maximize opportunities

  “Working [with the couple] in one or two locations maximizes the opportunities [but] often they want four or five locations, and I have to talk them out of it. They think, we’ll go to the Capitol and bang off a couple of pictures, and the Jefferson and bang off a couple, and the Lincoln, and then down by the river. It doesn’t work like that. Those results are not what I’m showing them in my portfolio or at my website. Those pictures take an investment in time—time to get them in the location and comfortable with one another, time to get them in the moment and then time to dial it in and nail it.”

Post courtesy of Nikon Learn & Explore. All images ©Greg Gibson.

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Cliff Mautner and One Off-Camera Flash with the AC3 ZoneController from PocketWizard on Vimeo.

Cliff uses one light on a monopod off-camera to achieve his stunning wedding photography. The light he chooses to control manually via his AC3 ZoneController creates depth, personality, and vibrant colors. Cliff chooses to deliberately avoid flat lighting, using his one off-camera flash to create these scenes where the focus of the photo is clear and the bride and groom are stars. By using manual control, he can switch lenses, distances, and adjust with the ambient light – all the while knowing that the things that normally trick TTL will not affect him.

We have other good news for photographers in the USA – if you purchase a MiniTT1 & FlexTT5 (or two FlexTT5 units), you can receive a FREE AC3 by mail after purchase!

Buy the FlexTT5 today! Buy the miniTT1 today!

All videos and quotes in this post are used with permission and ©Cliff Mautner, all rights reserved; story is ©PocketWizard. Please respect and support photographers’ rights. Feel free to link to this blog post, but please do not replicate or repost elsewhere without written permission. Post courtesy of PocketWizard and can be found here.

KEEP UP WITH POCKETWIZARD: Blog | Facebook | Twitter

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Warning: Timelapse movies can be very large files and often will not play back smoothly until they are down-sized in an editor Like Premiere Pro CS6. If your movie does not play back smoothly, it’s most likely because your computer just can’t keep up with the movie. To remedy this, export a lower-res version of your movie. If you want to be able to preview your movie before exporting, I recommend lowering the preview quality in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 to 1/4th before clicking play.

METHOD 1: USING QUICKTIME 7 TO COMBINE AN IMAGE SEQUENCE

Using Quicktime 7 is perhaps the easiest way of creating a movie from images captured during a time-lapse sequence. The steps to this method are pretty simple, but your overall editing and exporting options are quite limited. However, if you’re looking for a quick way to crank out a time-lapse and don’t specifically want to do much post-production, it’s a great method and gets you a movie file fairly quickly.

Step 1: Open an image sequence in Quicktime 7. That option can be found under the “File” menu in Quicktime 7.

Step 2: Navigate to your images, select the first image, and then click “Open”.

Step 3: Select your frame rate and click “Ok”. I typically choose 23.976 frames per second for my time-lapses. Quick Time 7 will then create a sequence for you to preview and export. There is no status bar during this process, so just be patient and Quicktime will eventually load the preview when it’s done putting the sequence together.

Step 4: Once the preview is loaded, click “Export” under the “File” Menu.

Step 5: A dialog box will appear and ask you where it should save the file. Assign a filename and a save location to your time-lapse movie and then click “options”.

Step 6: Click on “Settings” in the Movie Settings Dialog Box.

Step 7: Make sure your compression type is H.264 and that the compressor slider is moved to the “Best” position. Verify that you’ve made the changes and then click “Ok”.

Step 8: You will be returned to the Movie Settings Dialog Box. From there, click “Size”.

Step 9: Change the dimensions of your movie by selecting the “1920×1080 HD” option. Click OK.

Step 10: You will be returned to the Movie Settings Dialogue Box. From there, click “Ok” and wait for your time-lapse movie to export.

Step 11: Load your time-lapse movie file into an editing program like Premiere Pro CS6 to down size and export out to a smaller file.

METHOD 2: USING ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS TO COMBINE AN IMAGE SEQUENCE

As you can see, using Quicktime 7 is pretty quick and easy, but there are some limitations to what you can do. For example, it’s impossible to crop or recompose your frames before exporting the final movie. This can be a problem if you want to scale, crop, or position your images before exporting. With Adobe After Effects CS6, not only can you change the sequence before exporting, you can also make a variety of other edits and adjustments to the sequence as well. It’s a night and day difference when compared to Quicktime 7, but the flexibility comes at the price of increased rendering time. A simple rendering and export of a movie can go from being a few minutes long to being hours long if multiple edits are made to the sequence. For many, the trade off between flexibility and time is well worth it because Adobe After Effects CS6 provides filmmakers with an ability to control everything about the movie from start to finish. This is a very powerful proposition, especially if the sequence is going to be inserted into a larger project.

The following is a basic guide on how to import and export time-lapse sequences using Adobe After Effects CS6. While Adobe After Effects has a lot of features that will allow you to adjust your time-lapse video before exporting, I wanted to keep this tutorial simple and easy to follow. Please stay tuned for future tutorials!

KEEP UP WITH VICTOR: HDSLR Video Shooter | Facebook | Twitter | Google+ | Instagram

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Matt uses a program called Magic Lantern and uses its intervalometer to capture the time-lapse sequences. It’s a small file you put on your memory card, and the program loads with new menus. When it comes to processing the Timestacks, Matt described the process in detail at dpmag.com:

“I couldn’t figure out how to properly automate the stacking process in Photoshop, so I searched online and found a script from Star Circle Academy that worked great.

Basically, it opens the first image, then pastes the second image on a new layer and changes the Layer Blending mode to Lighten. The script adds all the parts of the second photo that are lighter than the first photo. Repeat that as many times as you like with your succession of photos.

Sometimes, I’ll use only 30 photos, and other times I’ll use hundreds; it’s all about the desired effect and what looks best to me, so I usually start out by stacking all the photos from the time-lapse and then try fewer photos if it’s too crazy.

Once I’ve found the segment that looks good, I do a final adjustment of levels and contrast, mainly to bring the darks back, because it gets a little washed out from adding lighter parts together.”

Matt uses a Canon EOS 60D, a battery grip, a Tamron 10-24mm zoom lens, and a tripod. Matt says you’re free to contact him with any questions on trying the technique out for yourself! You can see more of his Timestacks on his Flickr or at 500px.

KEEP UP WITH MATT: 500px | Website | Flickr | Facebook

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The best advice I can offer for shooting in NY (or any dense urban area) is to force yourself to stay in a single location long enough to make at least one interesting image before moving on. That advice sounds really simple and obvious, but many photographers think that shooting great unstaged photographs relies only on being in the right place at the right time. Don’t embrace that mentality. There are many ways to make interesting images that don’t involve serendipity or something miraculous happening right in front of your lens; you just need to spend some time studying your surroundings.

Learn to see both macro and micro, try looking up, try looking down, pay attention to color, light, symmetry, and scale, shoot a subject through vegetation or objects, hop a fence when no one is looking, ask a stranger if you can shoot his/her portrait, etc. Basically the longer you shoot in one location, the more familiar you and your camera become with it, and as a result, more interesting images can be made.

GEAR OF CHOICE: Canon 5D Mark IIs, a Fuji X-Pro 1 (which I carry everywhere), iPhone, and some polaroids.

With this advice in mind, my biggest warning would be to avoid the “pics or it didn’t happen” mindset, which is sort of a tourist mentality that’s been infamously inflamed by both social media and ownership of an iPhone or DSLR. We all see far too many posts on Instagram or Facebook from people who snap thoughtless pictures that they’ll never look back on, just to tell everyone that they were there. If instead, you learn to take the time to discover new places through your camera, when you review the images you can see the exact moment when you finally started to understand what made that location or moment special. From that point on, the images are always far more interesting and memorable than the first few. So even if you’re shooting to post to Facebook or Instagram, spend a little more time on site and try to make a picture that will survive as something meaningful without the accompanying status or geo-tag.

Lastly, always keep a camera on you, have fun, and be patient.

KEEP UP WITH JAMES: Website | Blog | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

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