techniques – Fotomonkey Photography

Aug 02

by FotoMonkey in techniques 0 comments

iPhone Night Mode

I got a wild hair to do something I’ve never really done. I walked around at night with just my iPhone and a tripod. Things die down at the Key Largo resort pretty early and aside from a couple of workers heading home for the day I had the property to myself. The entire beach and marina areas were clear. The pool was all mine. It was an excellent evening. Even the breeze cooperated! I’ve been experimenting a lot on this trip. Not only am I trying to push the most out of the Fujifilm X-H1 but I’m also trying to build my confidence and artistic results with the iPhone. I always have the phone with me and I really want to do more than just grab quick snaps that are uninspiring. This deviates a little since night photography is obviously going to be better with a tripod but I wanted to try out the phone’s night mode on the tripod before going handheld. Overall, I think the results are pretty amazing. It doesn’t work 100% but when it does it’s very nice. When you’re working with long exposures (upwards of 30s) you have to expect some motion blur. In […]

Jul 22

by FotoMonkey in exiftool 0 comments

Managing Images with Exiftool

One of the hazards I’ve run into now that I’m really digging into the film simulation capabilities of the Fuji X cameras is keeping track of which recipe I used on a particular image. I often shoot the same scene with multiple recipes to compare/contrast. Sure, I could do this in Fuji X Raw Studio, but I find it’s easier to do it the old fashioned way. The downside is that sometimes I don’t record it accurately in my pocket notebook. Or I leave my pencil behind like I did today. That’s where exiftool can come in handy. If you’re not familiar with it, exiftool is a very power command line utility for reading/writing image data (EXIF, IPTC, etc.) You can read everything or just a particular group of data. In its most simple form, you simple pass it the image filename. There isn’t a lot here that’s real useful, so let’s see what Fuji writes to the image. Now we’re getting some cool stuff. I can see things like the Color Temperature and even the Film Mode (sim) that I used. Unfortunately, Fuji doesn’t write the custom setting anywhere (at least that I’ve been able to find). Let’s break […]

Dec 14

by fmadmin in lightroom 0 comments

Salvage Thine Images!

In photography, as with most other pursuits, a thirst for knowledge will help keep your skills honed and your interest piqued. To that end, I’ve been on a mission lately to get serious about knocking off the cobwebs and really using my post-processing tools tho their fullest. Today I was reading Piet Van Den Eynde’s Dodge & Burn from Craft & Vision and after spending some time digging a little deeper into the Develop module I decided to revisit some earlier pictures. On my recent trip to Savannah there were several shots that were pretty much blown. When they happened I was really more in snapshot mode and didn’t pay attention to how the camera was set. In one case the scene was incredibly overexposed and in then the pendulum swung the opposite direction leaving me with an image so dark that the scene was barely visible. Here is the result of just a few minutes worth of work. [twentytwenty] [/twentytwenty] I hate to admit that the image took quite a bit of work. I boosted the exposure more than I’d ever like to. Heck, I boosted just about everything. I also played around with dodging and burning the […]

Nov 29

by fmadmin in lightroom 0 comments

B&W Conversions

Yesterday I took a trip to the Georgia State Railroad Museum and had a great time. It made for a great trip back in time and one of the things that really caught my eye was the 1913 steam locomotive #30 made by the American Locomotive Company (ALCO). After posting this image I thought I’d share how I created it. I found #30 in the roundhouse sitting with some other engines. I really wanted to focus on this beautiful locomotive, though, so the first thing I did was crop everything but the front of the engine out of frame. I think this gave the perfect look and focused the viewer’s eye where it needs to be. The first step was to apply the generic B&W conversion within Lightroom. For this post I’m using Lightroom 5.6 on my Macbook Pro. [twentytwenty] [/twentytwenty] The histogram looked pretty much perfect to me. There wasn’t any clipping on either end and I was happy with the overall tone of the image. However, I still felt it was a little too bright so I dropped the exposure about 2/3 stop. Next I dropped the highlights and boosted the shadows with a very small increase to the […]