Upde Designs

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | Strobe Lights | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f8.0

A couple more portraits from the December Gala Event.  I must tell you that the fun is back in processing green screen images.  Amazing what one little click of a button can do.  Simply changing my color palette made all the difference in the world.

Above image is of my good friend Mike Stamp and his lovely wife.  Mike works at our bank and he was one of the “servers” at the event.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | Strobe Lights | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f8.0

These two women were having a wonderful time and it was clear that they are very good friends.  I’m not sure if they are related but the enjoyment of each others company was clear.  This is just one of the many things I love about portrait photography,  The capturing smiling, shining eyes.

Enjoy your Friday and thank you for stopping by.  Be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 70 - 200 mm f2.8 lens | Strobes | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f8.0

Just a quick post today.  I’ve been processing portraits from the Gala Event Shoot and it has been going pretty well.  I’m spending about 10 minutes per image, which is about normal.

One of the things I love about portrait photography is helping people look their very best.  When we look at someone during the normal discourse of conversation it is a constantly changing  image that we perceive.  We rarely if ever notice the out-of-place hair or the blemishes we all have or up turned collar.  We take in the whole environment and our focus is not about attention to detail on the person we are interacting with.

When you capture a person’s image it is frozen in time and that is all you have to look at.  I have seen things in a photograph that I would have never seen in casual conversation.  Since it is such a focused and frozen image of a person I believe that minor enhancements are warranted to help make the person seem  appear more as they do during normal interaction.  In other words diminish the things that would detract from the image and improve those areas where possible to enhance the over all experience.

I’d be interested in your thoughts about “retouching photos.”

Enjoy your Thursday.  Thank you for stopping by and be careful.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 24 - 70 mm lens | Strobe lights | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f8.0

Pearl Harbor Day.  70 years ago what a day in infamy.  A huge debt of gratitude to our Greatest Generation.

Yesterday a really good thing happened to me.  It didn’t start all that well but it sure ended well.  You will remember my post two days ago about my love / hate relationship with Green Screen photography.  Well now I’m back to love.

Last year trying to process the green screen images took forever.  Converting the green screen or “Keying” the green out was not hard.  I have a wonderful program hat does  that.  The problem was that the program tended to “Mute” the colors so I would have to go back into Photoshop and try to recover the skin tones as well as all the other colors.  It took forever.  Not only that but it was very hard to always get the colors and tones exactly right.

I worked on an image for almost two hours Tuesday morning (which is why there was no blog on Tuesday.)  At the end of that time I still didn’t have a useable image.  I was very frustrated and demoralized.

I knew it had to be something that I was doing wrong because I had watched the tutorials on the program and they never had that problem and they worked with some really crappy images.   Finally just before leaving for work yesterday I sent an e-mail to the company who makes the software (which is in England)  and enclosed one of my image files.  I didn’t expect to hear from them for a couple of days but to my surprise when I got back from lunch I had a response.

Now I’ve taken on-line lessons on Photoshop and Lightroom for over three years and all the instructors always recommend that you select the “Pro Photo” color palette in PS and LR because it has a larger range of colors than the Adobe RGB color palette.

Seems the program I use for green screen require Adobe RGB color palette (doesn’t say that anywhere but it does) and so what was happening was that it was trying to match two separate color palettes and couldn’t so it would  “approximate” the colors.  I reset my color palette to Adobe RGB and the problem was solved.  Yea!

Now I can make my deadline of getting all those portraits processed before Christmas.  The group of guys above are loan officers from our Clinton Bank.  They were the valet parking attendants and beverage servers for the Christmas Gala.

Great group of guys and great friends of mine.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Happy Monday.  Today I thought I would talk about my love / hate relationship with green screen photography.   This was my set up last Thursday evening as I did portraits for the attendees of the Ladies’ Night Gala.  This year I invested in a larger green screen because of last year’s problems with trying to take group shots.  This screen is 9 feet by 16 feet.  Of course I only have enough light stands to go 10 feet wide and about 6 feet high.

If you look at the floor in front of the green screen you will see the “green blow back.”  The is the green color being reflected back to the subject.  Two ways of mitigating that is to properly light your background and or moving your subjects far enough in front of the green screen to negate it.

Since I only have two lights I opt for the moving the subjects far enough away from the green screen to negate the blow back.  Most of the time it works pretty well.

The two lights I have are really inexpensive beginner strobe lights.  They do not have variable intensity controls so it is hard to control the amount of light they put out and are only 100 watt lights.  Since I do not do a lot of portrait work (right now anyway) they do get the job done.   I also use two 24 inch X 24 inch soft boxes attached to the lights to soften the light and diffuse it.

Now to my love / hate relationship with green screen photography.  Some of which I have to blame on my lack of skill.   These two lovely folks are my good friends Gary and Lynn Saelens.  You can see one of the problems is that Gary is just a tad bit taller than my screen.  Additionally because of their height difference I couldn’t get them both in the frame with my D3, which had the 70 – 200 portrait lens on it and it was on the tripod (additionally it was tethered to my laptop so I couldn’t move it.)  I had to use my D700 with the 24 – 70 lens.  Then the angel I had to shoot from showed bare walls not covered by the green screen.

So to compensate for the problems I had to extend (in Photoshop) the green screen and then crop the image.  (I didn’t do a very good job on the crop by the way.) I should have left more space at the top of Gary’s head.  This image however was just for this discussion so I didn’t take time to fix it.

Finally after the image looks the way I want it to I take it over to a “Chroma Key” program called FXhome PhotoKey 4 to digitally remove the green screen or to “Key” the green screen out of the image.

I like the excellent job PhotoKey does in removing the green screen but I do not like the fact that it “mutes” the color of the subjects and requires that I go back into Photoshop and readjust those skin tones (which are very hard for me to get correct.)

The obvious question is then why use green screen?  Versatility is the main reason.  I can put any kind of background in the image I choose.  From a cloth  back drop to a winter scene or a tropic beach scene.  But like so many things in life, that versatility comes with a price.

Anyway I have lots of green screen images from the event that I need to process and it will take some time so I had better get after it.  Enjoy your Monday.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

Happy Saturday.  It’s a good day to stay inside and watch the rain come down.   It was too wet to go looking for Eagles today.  DSLR cameras and lens do not like moisture.  Besides my friend Dave called and said that there were no eagles there this morning when he went by the secret eagle place.  😦

So I thought I might as well just stay inside and work on the images I took at the December ladies Gala that was held Thursday evening.    The images today are the last images I have from my Reiman Gardens shoot.  The top image is one of the most beautiful flowers I have ever seen.

Last night I attended a gathering at the Maquoketa Art Experience Gallery to showcase some of the local artists and their works.  It was a fabulous time.  I met Sindi Mueller who is a photography fine artist.  I didn’t get to visit with her too long as there were a lot of people she needed to meet and greet.  Her work is just amazing.

Two years ago she had never held a Digital DLSR in her hands.  She had a point and shoot camera but just took snapshots.  She liked it and wanted to do more so she enrolled in the fine art institute in Chicago and 35,000 images later and a degree she is making some incredible art.

I could have visited with her all night, it was just that interesting to learn about her experience and how she approaches photography.  Hopefully sometime I’ll get to visit with her some more and talk photography.  If you get to Maquoketa it is well worth your time to stop in the Maquoketa Art Experience Gallery.  Rose Frantzen has some of her famous “Portraits Of Maquoketa” displayed there along with many other resident artists’ works.  It is a wonderful opportunity.  Additionally they usually have an artist in residence who is working during the day so you can observe their creative process.

I have to say I was really inspired when I came away last night.  It has caused me to rethink my approach to photography and perhaps has given me some new ideas.  Thanks for stopping by.  Stay dry and enjoy your weekend.  Be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 70 -200 mm F2.8 lens | Strobe Lighting with green screen | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f9.0

Happy Friday.   A short post today as I had a late night and now have an early morning meeting to attend.  Last night was the second annual Ladies’ Night Gala at our bank in Clinton, Iowa.  Once again it was my honor to be able to offer portrait opportunities for the attendees.

Here is a quick image I processed of my good friend Paul Mulholland and his daughter Abby.  I didn’t spend a lot of time on this image so there are some rough edges but I wanted to get something up for you today.

I started setting up around 3:45 pm yesterday and was ready to shoot at 4:45 pm.  It takes about an hour to get everything unloaded, set up, tested, and calibrated.  I shot tethered to my laptop so I could see full screen images of what I was capturing.

In a few days I’ll post process this image the way it should be and then post the two of them so you can see the difference.  Enjoy your weekend.  I’m going to try to get some images of Eagles tomorrow.  A good friend of mine gave me a tip on where some might be hanging out so I’m going to explore that tomorrow.

Thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.

Unbelievable that it is December 1st today.  OMG time is going at WARP speed it seems.  I have a bunch of flower images for you to look at from my Reiman Gardens shoot.  When I say a bunch I mean there are several.

The question is do I show you images from worst to best?  By saving the best for last do I so jaundice your vision of the flowers that you cannot appreciate the best of the group?  Should I show the best first and by the time you get to the last image you may consider them all bad?

Or should I only show you my best three of the entire shoot?  No I think I’ll just mix them up and let you judge each flower on its own merit.  These images were captured with the Nikon D700 with an ISO setting of 200.  I used a Tamron 90 mm macro lens fitted with a macro TTL ring flash.   Shutter speed was a constant 1/60 sec with variable aperture values.

I took these images after I left the butterfly room.  This was at an indoor garden but there were no butterflies around.  I was talking to my friend Steve today and he use to live around the Ames area.  He said when he was visiting the gardens there was no charge for entrance.  I suspect the charge came when they became a Federal Butterfly Preserve.  Anytime the government gets involved in anything it’s going to cost money.

There were some pretty exotic flowers in the garden.  Some that I had never seen before.  I think I enjoyed shooting the flowers as much as I did the butterflies.  It was a lot easier to capture them.  🙂

Tomorrow night I have a big shoot in Clinton, Iowa.  I will be making portraits from a woman’s event held at our bank.  I did this last year and it was a lot of fun.  This year promises to be bigger and better than every.  I can’t wait.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 HDR 3 image bracket at f8.0

Only one image today but I really like it.  I had Monday off and so having some business to attend to in Cedar Rapids I drove down there in the morning.  My intent was to take care of business in the morning and then devote the afternoon to photography.

Best laid plans as they say.  Anyway on my way home I turned West on highway 20 at Manchester and headed toward Dubuque.  I went by this large pond that sits parallel to highway 20.  Out of the corner of my eye I caught this makeshift dock reflected in the water.  This going 70 mph at the time by the way.

So one of my infamous u-turns and back I went to capture the image.  Fearlessly I walked through the high grass (knowing that most snakes have long since departed for lower levels.)  This image cried for HDR but alas the tripod was clear back at the car so resting trusty camera on a fence post I shot this in HDR.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your mid-week day and be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 800 1/50 sec @ f4

Some more images from my visit of Reiman Gardens on the ISU campus.  I would think that most people who visit the butterfly garden spend a lot of time there .  I saw people who were already there when I arrived and they were still only half way around the garden by the time I left.   Reminded me of a scene from “Family Vacation” with Chevy Chase when he looked at the Grand Canyon in 10 secs and said “Okay  let’s go.” 🙂

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 800 1/100 sec @ f4

Anytime a butterfly would hold still long enough to get a lens on it I would fire off a burst of shots.  While I was processing these images I noticed that I had about 80 images of the same butterfly.  Taken at different locations around the garden, it must be a very common species.

An interesting bit of information about this giant butterfly.  A woman was sitting in a wheel chair with binoculars, reference book and drawing pad observing this guy.  She said he only lives for 3 days once he emerges from his cocoon.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 800 1/320 sec @ f5.6

Here is another large butterfly.  I never saw the really big ones fly.  There were several with their wings pressed together sitting on a leaf but the two big ones I did capture were up against one of the windows with their wings at full expansion.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 800 1/50 sec @ f4

Finally this interesting looking guy.  His wings suggest a beautiful array of colors but he would never open his wings.  I watched him for over 5 minutes hoping to see him spread his wings.  You are forbidden to touch them in any way including blowing on them so I just waited but he never moved.

Well that’s it for butterflies.  Not many different species for 90 minutes of observation but still something you don’t see every day.  I did tour the flower garden inside the building and shot a few macro shots of flowers although I’m not happy with the looks of them.  I may show them at a later date.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Tuesday and be careful

Good Day and happy Monday.  While in Ames for Thanksgiving I decided to go out to Iowa State University’s Reiman Gardens.  I wanted to go because a friend of mine had told me about how wonderful it was and because I wanted to try to capture some images of butterflies.

Reiman Gardens sits right next door to Jack Trice Football Stadium.   There is an $8 charge to get in and you have to take this short lesson on what you can and can’t do in the butterfly garden.

I have to admit I was a bit taken aback by the lack of friendliness of the staff.  I guess I expected people to warm and welcoming and that is not what I encountered.  When the one woman saw my camera she demanded to know if I was taking pictures for personal use or professional use.

Once you go through the first doors of the garden you are met by another person who explains the rules to you all over again.  Finally I was allowed in.  It is a tropical climate inside with plants and greenery growing everywhere.   Butterflies are fluttering about everywhere you look.

I found it very difficult to capture images of the butterflies.  You are not allowed to take a tripod into the garden so it is hard to get a macro lens on the butterfly.  The other thing I noticed was when I shot with a flash it tended to blow out the highlights of the wings.  So I raised the ISO and tried it without the flash.

I did use a macro lens on some of the images I captured but it was a challenge.  The other challenge is that you are restricted to the walk way and some of the butterflies didn’t follow the rules.  🙂  Still I don’t want to sound all negative.  It was a fun experience.

I don’t know anything about butterflies or the different species that I encountered.  I know there were some really spectacular looking butterflies and some that were just ugly.

More tomorrow on my adventure at Reiman Gardens.  Thanks for stopping by and enjoy your Monday.  Be careful.