Kelvin Photographer » For Photographer

Bridal Shoot with Larry

kelvin — Wed, 19 May 2010 22:23:05 +0000

Few weeks ago Larry asked me if I’m interested to do a bridal shoot together. Of course I’m interested. We worked together before when I help 2nd shoot with him last year. With the help from Lori from Arizona Family Florist, and modeling/makeup/hair by two fabulous ladies, Hillary and Courtney from The Beauty Mark. We’re able to create this wonderful experience. This is so much fun and we’ll definitely do it again!

Hair Stylist Hillary from The Beauty Mark

Breathtaking florist design by Lori from Arizona Family Florist

Makeup Artist Courtney from The Beauty Mark

Hillary is thinking about her love one!

Really like these two!

We were having fun before right before sunset

Headpiece by Lori from Arizona Family Florist

Thank you so much for Hillary & Courtney’s wonderful modeling!

Film Photography

kelvin — Tue, 18 May 2010 00:01:48 +0000

Learning photography is nothing easier than using digital camera because it provides instant review where film photography can’t achieve. However, that LCD review can be a big distraction for us as a photographer. Simply because we’re so busy checking the picture every time after we press the shutter. A term called ‘chimping‘ is introduced to digital photography which describes the habbit of checking every photo on the camera.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a great feature that we can see the picture instantly to make sure if someone has eyes closed. It is very useful for photographing children because they run / move / jump so fast that most likely you can’t get the shots you want with just one snap. However, if we spend a lot of time checking the pictures, we might not be able to capture things happening around us.

I like using film camera to capture daily life. The good thing about film camera is that I don’t need to worry about checking the LCD anymore. I just need to focus on framing, timing of the objects. One of the best thing about film photography is that I don’t get to see the pictures right away. I need to take the film rolls to the lab for development. The anticipation of the picture creates the desire for taking better pictures. Try it and you will see what I mean.

These pictures were taken with a manual focus rangefinder camera with black & white film. No photoshop work has been done to them. It really helps me to focus on framing, lighting and timing in photography.

I also did an entire engagement session with film lately, you can check it out here.

Film Photography

PUG meeting – Joe Buissink

kelvin — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:08:44 +0000

Last night I attended the monthly meeting of Phoenix PUG (Pictage User Group) in downtown Phoenix. It’s co-hosted by Arizona PPA. Joe Buissink was the special speaker. Joe has been a favorite wedding photographer among many celebrities such as, Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey. He came to share his passion for photography and how develop his style through the years. It is very inspiring and refreshing. Special thanks to Melissa Jill for organizing this event.

Photographers without cameras:)

Some are working, Joe is getting ready to speak

Me and Joe – with some emotion – shot in P mode:)

Scott Robert Next Level Workshop in Las Vegas

kelvin — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:40:28 +0000

I spent 4 days in Las Vegas last week to attend Scott Robert’s Next Level Workshop. The theme for Scott’s 2009 workshop is “The More You Know, The Less You Need”. Scott is very artistic and talented photographer and speaker. He has the heart to mentor young photographers to get to their next level in photography. He just won a Kodak award in the WPPI competition.

Scott shared things and challenges he struggled when he first started out as a photographer. He has great artistic sense and his approach to photography really renew my philosophy in photography. Throughout the three days workshop, each day we mostly spent half day in classroom and half day to practice shoot in the Stripe. Photographers in the class are so energetic and have the same vision — to bring their photography to their NEXT LEVEL. They came from different countries around the world including Africa, Canada and UK. It’s great to hang out with all of you (I know you’re reading:) It’s such a great experience and I really hope I can attend Scott’s other workshops in 2009 (Venice, Hawaii, Beijing, LA)

Glad to meet some new friends from the workshop

Lynn-Kai Chao, Sarah Dawson, Roy Rogers, Marie Lyssa, Cindy Fong, Eric Fung, Amber Hughes, Paul Huynh, Brian Baker, Dorene Nash, Jenna-Marie Lamb, Arielle Langhorne, Junshien Lau, Rockie Lee, Chantal Miliane, Stephen Ng, Bryan O’Neal, Gurm Sohal, Linda Tamarpirat, Wing Wong, Tauran Woo, Bandele Zuberi, Michael Kawasaki, Takashi Nakano.

Lightroom 2.0 Beta

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Lightroom 2.0 Beta is available! There are some new neat features in this beta:
1) Localized Corrections
2) Better Photoshop Integration
3) Post-crop vignetting
4) Multiple Monitor support
5) Picture Packages in the print module.
6) Output Sharpening in the print module
7) Smart Collections
Printing directly to a JPEG file in the Print module
9) Suggested Keywords
10) New filter panel in the Library module + Slideshow and Web modules both have Content panels as well as Collection panels

– Download Lightroom 2 beta here
- NAPP’s online learning center
- John Nack’s Blog
- Scott Kelby’s blog

Gmail and Thunderbird

admin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:18:00 +0000

Gmail is a very popular webmail and I believe most of you have one or multiple gmail accounts. It has a lot of advantage over yahoo or hotmail. The interface is simple and fast. The mail search is extremely powerful. If you like me, want to archive those emails into your own computer. You would probably use some kind of email clients in your computer. I use Mozilla Thunderbird which is completely free, just like his sibling Firefox. Lately Gmail starts supporting IMAP, which makes it extremely powerful for using with offline email clients. However, setting up Thunderbird with Gmail is not straightforward. I found this link giving out the complete procedure to sync between your Gmail account(s) and Thunderbird. The neat things such as sent, trash folders sync. Labels in gmail syncs with folders in Thunderbird. Once you got it setup, it is extremely convenient.

The other cool thing I found from Google is the Google Apps. I just set it up in my upcoming “Kelvin Photographer” site.

Retouching

admin — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 16:49:00 +0000

The technology of digital photography brings the photography business into a whole new world. Digital post processing helps a lot of photographers in refining their pictures. It’s especially crucial for lifestyle type pictures which the photographers don’t really have a lot time to get the lighting right before the precious moment goes away. I’ve been creating my own photoshop actions for a while. Lately I decide to do a housekeeping work in my action palette. With the button mode in Photoshop action palette, it’s extremely easy to retouch pictures ’straight out of the camera’ in couple of minutes. Here is an example of lighting, soft filter and sharpening actions.

My Photoshop Action Palette

Aperture 2.0

admin — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:01:00 +0000

Apple release a new version of Aperture. The Aperture is a pioneer software in photo editing. If you like Lightroom and you should check out Aperture. It’s a great one-stop tool from RAW image to book print and web slideshow. I enjoy using Lightroom in my workflow but I see some cool new features from Aperture for healing/fixing and vignetting. It’ll definitely save you a lot of time in your workflow… For Windows user, you’ll need to get a mac to use Aperture:)

RAW Thumbnail Viewer – Free

admin — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:22:00 +0000

I usually use Bridge CS3 to quickly go through the RAW pictures. Even though Bridge CS3 is faster than CS2. But it still takes some time to generate the thumbnails from the RAW (.CR2) files. Just found this FREE RAW thumbnail viewer. It’s a plugin to windows explorer. You can download it here.

The software is capable of previewing the formats:

* Adobe (DNG)
* Canon
* Hasselblad
* Kodak
* Leica
* Mamiya
* Nikon
* Olympus
* Pentax
* Ricoh
* Samsung
* Sigma
* Sony

The speed is very decent, here is the screen shot of one of my RAW folder

Digital Darkroom – Sharpening

admin — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:00:00 +0000

I used to use Photoshop CS / CS2 for digital darkroom before Adobe Lightroom came out. CS2 provides complete solution for digital photography post processing, including batch processing (water marking, framing). Since Adobe Lightroom came out, I’ve been using it to process events and portrait pictures. It requires higher computer power but it is definitely more convenient than Photoshop in terms of labeling, ranking and synchronization.
When Lightroom 1.0 came out, one of the complain is the sharpening tool. The USM and Smart sharpening in CS2/CS3 is very powerful comparing to the sharpening in Lightroom. So most people ended up using CS2/CS3 for sharpening with pictures exported from Lightroom.

WHY SHARPENING IS NEEDED IN RAW?
The reason for sharpening RAW image is that when most DSLR camera capture RAW picture, it has an anti-alias filter to reduce the pixel grid effect from Moire pattern (see Digital SLR handbook). This is common to digital photography and picture scanning. To counter the softness from the anti-alias filter, digital camera has a built-in sharpening software to convert the RAW image into JPEG format and the level of sharpness can be customized in the camera menu. However, for most professional photographers, they prefer to do the sharpening using Adobe Photoshop because it allows precise control of the sharpness of the pictures. Also RAW saves pictures in 16 bits format where JPEG is in 8 bit format. So from the moment the RAW image is converted to JPEG, some information of the picture is lost and it cannot be recovered without going back to the RAW file. That’s why I solely shoot in RAW for all my pictures.

REAL LIFE EXAMPLE
Now, with Lightroom 1.3, the sharpening tool is significantly improved. I want to share some real life examples of sharpening between Lightroom and CS3.

The first picture is the original RAW file taken from the Canon 20D without any sharpening. You can see how soft the picture is. Sharpening is definitely needed to enhance the picture.

The second picture is sharpened using the CS2 Unsharp Mask (USM). This method sharpen the entire picture with one setting. You can tell by the face of the object, which is oversharpened due to single sharpening setting in USM.

The third picture is sharpened by CS3 Smart Sharpening. It enhances the USM in CS2 and provides Shadow / Highlight masking. So the picture can partially sharpened. It’s a big improvement over USM.

The fourth picture is done in Adobe Lightroom, with sharpening set to 100. Lightroom also provides masking (similar to Smart Sharpening in CS3).

I’ve been using Lightroom to sharpen most of my pictures and it provides great results and I can save a lot of time without jumping back and forth between Lightroom and Photoshop.