Gavin is on the road again for 3 months filming and photographing. You can follow their trip here. Barry and Dennis found the keys to the garage. Who knows what will happen. Good job guys.
Vintage 1968 photo magazines I bought. It’s refreshing to see articles on how to make good photos, instead of how to fix ones that were made wrong.
by Gavin Seim: (rev 05/13)
It was Spring of 1968. Motor Trend had just crowned the GTO car of the year, Eddie Adams just made one of the most iconic images in history and in a few months the Detroit Tigers would win the World Series. Pentax was telling us they made “fine photography easy.” and the Polaroid swinger was happily swinging off shelves. Topics ranged from the quality of drugstore printing to the latest spot meters. And yes, publishers knew that bare breasted woman sold photo magazines. Even then.
It was in the Spring of 2011 when I jumped back into film. I had cut my teeth on it back in the late 90’s. That was around the time the Unibomber was captured, scientists cloned sheep and Titanic sunk into theaters with a splash. As I grew, digital did too and soon took over the game. It was fresh, exciting and before long, even practical. Soon professionals everywhere were laying down their film for what were essentially 35mm SLR’s with a bit less detail. It was in some ways a downgrade, and yet digital does offer many advantages.
So I decided to go back and take film seriously. Loading it up for my travels to use it alongside digital. At first it was for the simple reason that a well scanned large format negative could produce vastly more detail than today’s digital. So I bought a classic 4×5 Linhoff and went to work. And it was indeed work, I picked one of the harder formats but it would turn out to be well worth it.
– 4×5 HP400 Film, Linhof Technika IV –
Popular Photography 1968, ad for the Contaflex 126.
A few months earlier in ’68, the world saw Charlton Heston tell his primate overlord “Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!” A classic was born, that would be somewhat tarnished by less impressive sequels. Meanwhile The soft focus filter was in vogue. Forty-four years later my wife would stand next to me in the living room looking at a cover portrait from a 1968 magazine and say. “It’s blurry.”
Back in the twenty-first century we’re making coffee and I grab my Olympus 35RC rangefinder to take a photo of my kids helping out on the kitchen counter. My daughter giggles adorably and I realize I forgot to wind the film. I react quickly before they move and release shutter. One frame and it’s back to lattes.
I’m in New Orleans with my Linhof. Jan, 2012. It quickly draws a crowd and I’m happily chatting. Photo by Jason Eldridge.
I was not the first to be out there rooting for film in this digital era. Many of the best Pictorialists never stopped using it. People like John Canlas,Ian Ruther and a few others had also been sharing their passion for silver for awhile. But I was not so into the romance, I just wanted the quality. People acted like I was a little crazy, but they still were a bit breathless when they saw my Linhoff Super Technika IV that came out around 1956. It started to become a part of my brand. Not just in my pictorials, but in my portrait work.
Next I started talking about film. I started talking about how I blended it with digital. Scanning, editing, printing. I have nothing against the traditional darkroom and I hope to build one when I have more space. But I’m a digital kid and I have a workflow there. There was a method to my madness. I needed to be able to get great images made and printed large in reasonable time for a reasonable cost.
Soon I had a Jobo ATL1000. A remarkable machine in which you load with a small batch of film and a very small amount chemicals and return about thirty minutes later to finished images, color or black and white. The next step was to scan on my V700 using a wet scanning attachment and then into Lightroom and other tools for the finished image. The result was amazing resolution from this 60’s era camera that has not changed much in half a century. I can get around 100-200MP of detail from 4×5 and a beautiful organic feel that digital somehow misses.
Color Fantasies is my latest collection of Lightroom Presets that focuses entirely on color. It doesn’t mess around about it either. CF gets under the hood in Lightroom and transforms images into beautiful color tones that can be applied instantly with a click. Wow I sound like my own PR guy (oh wait, I am).
In tradition with my other collections, here’s a FREE sampler pack that includes 5 presets from Color Fantasies. There’s more image samples and a video on the product page so feel free to take a peek. The complete set come with more than 45 presets, plus an action. So when you like what you see, go check out the complete collection 😉
by Gavin Seim: I find myself fascinated with film of late. I don’t use it anymore, but I realize that some are pretty passionate about it. I posted on Pro Photo Show recently with a few thoughts and a poll on the topic. Quite a few still use film it seems. Why? Is it the texture, grain, color, or is it just the reminiscence of really old photographers? Kidding, not that old. I used film when I started out. By the time I started getting good however I had moved to digital, so those romantic feelings some have towards film are not strong in me.
I’ve been taking notice though. Thinking about how film looks and how we edit these days. Don’t get me wrong I love a well processed photo, but I’ve started experimenting a little. Making effects that use classic tones and film inspiration. Here’s an article I found where Travis Easton compared a MK2 digital file to a Velvia image. What’s remarkable to me, is how even without editing it the film image looks great. Here’s another look at film vs digital over on Luminous landscape.
Now I don’t intend to start shooting film, I just don’t think it makes sense. But understanding what makes a great image is my livelihood. I want to know what it is about film and use that knowledge to make my photography and my effects better. We should always learn from the past, even if it’s grainy.
As a test I decided to try for the Velvia look, so I spent awhile very subtly tweaking a LR preset. If you mouse over you’ll see the before/after of what I’ve come up with so far. You’re also likely to see more in future updates of my effects. Bottom line though. I think what we’ll see over time are the good things from both mediums converging and becoming a better digital than ever. Neither film or digital will be the same as the other, but I think the future of digital will look and feel great. What say you?
One of today’s big hurtles a good photographer must overcome is getting that amazing final edit. If you take your image straight out of the camera and leave it at that, you probably won’t get much notice. But if you over edit you may not either.
Standing out is about being excellent as well as being different. Being different however is more than it suggests. Just looking different isn’t good enough if it’s not attractive to your target audience. The post production details count and are a process of learning when and where to apply them. Today lets analyze a recent image and talk about it.
I call this shot The Gazebo. Though it’s a new favorite, it’s not an HDR or any other special acronym. It’s just a good foundation image, edited right. What I did to it was not so amazing, I just used the right effect at the right time.
The left side is straight out of camera. It’s good. I used my Canon 70-200 @ 150mm 1/125 at 2.8 ISO 320 with just a little fill flash. I got nice compression and blur in the background. The evening light was coming from the right side and worked perfectly but was not really unusual.
I knew right away it had potential, so I started playing. Playing is the the keyword here. I use Lightroom presets and Photoshop actions not because it couldn’t be done manually, but because I want a great variety and I would not have that variety by doing it all manually every time. The effects I used were my own, that are sold here in Seim Effects, but this applies to whatever you happen to use. I started with a vintage preset from Power Workflow2. I tend to use the vintage looks sparingly, but it worked well with this simple scene.
Then it’s on to Photoshop. I used the Old Fashioned Love Song from Hollywood Effects. This helped me manipulate the light into something more interesting and glowing. Then thinking it needed a touch more I ran Simply Soft from Creative Essentials Actions. This is a skin softener. As I did this I used the masks to remove blur from areas of detail like the face.
Finally I finished up the way I normally do, by working with burn and dodge. This is a tool that most people overlook, and it’s one of those editing gems that’s right in front of us. I can draw the eye wherever I want it using burn and dodge. If you want to learn more about that see this post.
So there we have it. The finished product took only a few minutes and had that dreamy loving look to it. My point here is not that you need to use these specific effects to get your look. It’s that you need to do things other than just taking the picture if you want a portrait.
Set up your system so it’s easy to add effects, because otherwise you’ll avoid them. I have my favorite actions or Lightroom presets a click away, and when I’m working on a good shot I’m not afraid to try various looks because I can try ten different effects in the time I could do one of them manually. Also use direction. Just because you find an effect yon love don’t apply it to everything. balance is key and one of the most common mistake it to over do things. I often apply an effect and the fade it back so it’s very subtle, but makes my image more powerful.
What do you see in this image? How would you have done it differntly? Share your ideas in the comments… Gavin Seim
