NEW BOOK COMING

My 14th book will be published this September. It is a compilation of all the factors I feel are essential in taking great photographs. The attached image shows the cover design and the title. The book is published by Lark Books, and the interior design of the book is especially beautiful. The book contains some of my favorite images. Look for it at the end of August or September.

NEW PHOTOSHOP COURSE

I have a new on-line Photoshop course at Betterphoto.com. I call it Photoshop: Thinking Outside the Box, and the photo of the sphere you see here is an example of what I teach. It is an eight-week course, and applying a two-dimensional photo onto a three-dimensional sphere is lesson 8. I present some very unique techniques that will stimulate and expand your creativity.

Here is a link to the course if this may interest you: http://www.betterphoto.com/courseOverview.asp?cspID=212

This image first started out with a Mardi Gras mask into which I pasted a photo of a glass eye. I then mirrored the image, added an abstract background, and then 'texture mapped' the photo onto a sphere (per lesson's 8 instructions). Finally, I pasted the sphere into another abstract background and then used my favorite Photoshop plug-in, Flood (made by flamingpear.com), to apply a reflection both top and bottom to the image.

MANUAL EXPOSURE MODE

I have no idea why other photographers love manual so much. It doesn't make sense to me. It's a very slow way of shooting, and it's too easy to miss the action if you are shooting moving subjects like wildlife, sports, children playing, etc. Had I been fiddling with manual exposure in shooting the giraffe drinking at the waterhole, I would have missed the shot.

In the end, when shooting on manual you are still relying on the camera's meter and you must physically turn the dials to use the shutter speed/lens aperture combination dictated by the camera. What's the point of doing this when the camera can do it for you? If you want to over- or underexpose a scene based on what the meter is giving you, then use the exposure compensation feature in the camera.

I use Program mode for 85% of my picture taking. I know this surprises many of you, but listen to my rationale. This mode assumes you are hand-holding the camera, thus it gives you almost the fastest shutter speed possible. If I am shooting landscapes, architecture, and other subjects that aren’t moving and I want complete depth of field, then I use aperture priority along with a tripod (because the shutter will be slow). For specific shutter speeds, such as when I am shooting flying birds, dancers, motorcycles in motion, etc., and I want to freeze the subjects or blur them, I then use shutter priority.

I only use manual exposure mode for certain situations such as lightning, when doing macro photography with flash, and night photography when I know the meter will not be accurate.

AN ATTEMPT AT CREATING LIGHTNING

In one of my on-line courses at Betterphoto.com, a student asked me if the images of lightning I use in my composites are real or if I drew them somehow. I assured her that the lightning photographs are, indeed, real. I explained, however, that a few years before I had lightning images in my photo library I tried many things to simulate it. Nothing ever worked. It's impossible in my opinion to create artificial lightning and make it look real.

I did try one experiment for which I had high hopes. I passed electric current through a piece of 4x5 inch color film in the darkroom and then developed it normally in E6 chemistry. Unfortunately it never produced the kind of bolts that we see in real lightning pictures. The image I got was pretty interesting, though, and you can see it here. I've used this as a background for some of my composite work, and I've attached one such example. This is one of the techniques I demonstrate in my home Photoshop courses (click here for more information on this). Putting images together is a way to create visually compelling photographs, and I've been doing this from the beginning of my involvement in photography.

When I joined my first stock agency in 1987, the owner of the company told me they needed lightning shots. Since I had always wanted to capture lightning, I was excited to do it. I lived in Southern California at the time, and there is virtually no lightning at all in that part of the country. Therefore, I drove about 5000 miles over a two year period throughout Arizona, Utah, and Nevada looking for storms in the monsoon season which is July and August. In that time, I got seven marketable pictures that still sell for me more than 20 years later.

CHANGING A BACKGROUND -- WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

I had this picture of a green basilisk for years and never liked it. It was taken with film in the 90's, and the boring and unattractive background made the photo unappealing and unsalable. Last week after I conducted the frog/reptile workshop, I came upon this picture again and decided to add an out of focus green foliage background from my files, and that gave new life to this image. I have about 20 different foliage backgrounds I use for this kind of purpose, and it makes an amazing impact on pictures that otherwise would be mundane at best.



If your Photoshop skills are not up to par, you should consider taking the time and expending the energy to learn how to use the program. You don't have to learn all of it. I teach Photoshop in my on-line courses, in my home workshops, and in the books I write, and I certainly don't know the entire program. It's just too big and there are many ways of doing the same things. I've learned how to do everything I need, though, to make my images look as good as they can possibly be. That's what I suggest for you.

My next home workshop in Photoshop is the weekend of April 24, 25. It is conducted in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee. If you would like to take an on-line course in Photoshop, check out the outline to this course. It began today, but it's not too late to sign up: http://www.betterphoto.com/courseOverview.asp?cspID=75

HDR LOOK-A-LIKE

HDR, or high dynamic range, is a great technique and I use it all the time. However, when elements in the scene are moving like these gondolas in Venice, Italy, it's not possible to use HDR unless you can accept a lot of ghosting. The several pictures you take from a tripod should be combined in such a way that they exactly blend together to produce a sharp picture.

In this sunrise situation, instead of using HDR I used the remarkable tools in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw), the RAW converter built into Photoshop. To darken the sky I used the graduated filter (the fourth icon from the right in the ACR tool bar) to make this look like I had used a graduated neutral density filter at the time of shooting. For the water, I used the fill light slider to open up the shadows and give me good detail in the foreground. The result is exactly like what HDR would have produced.

FROG and REPTILE WORKSHOP A SUCCESS

As usual, the people who participated in my frog and reptile workshop this past weekend got amazing pictures. I've attached a few samples of the photo opportunities that everyone had, and you can see how exciting it was. I maintain that after you understand the basic fundamentals of photography, the first step in taking dramatic pictures is to pursue dramatic subjects. That's why I created this opportunity for my students. Poison dart frogs (which are not poisonous in captivity) and exotic reptiles -- as well as some other creatures we have -- certainly quality as dramatic subjects.

The frogs are surprisingly small, and if you want frame-filling pictures with good detail, the depth of field issue becomes paramount. I recommend that students shoot at f/22 or f/32, and that means that the only type of lighting that works is flash (to compensate for the reduction in light caused by the small lens aperture). I recommend that students set the flash on ETTL and the camera on manual exposure mode, and that gives perfect exposures most of the time. Sometimes the flash output has to be tweaked a bit, though, to account for subjects that are darker or lighter than normal.



A ring flash and a macro flash setup with two small flash units on either side of the lens are ideal. I have both Nikon and Canon flash units to loan out if someone wants to attend and they don't want to buy another flash.



A ring flash has many uses beyond this workshop, though. I have used mine for insects, flowers, peeling paint, and many other macro subjects as well as closeup portraits. In shooting the frogs, when they nestle down inside a plant, the ring flash allows you to follow the subject into the tiny crevices and still be able to illuminate the top and the bottom of the frog. The twin flash system isn't as adept as the ring flash in following the tiny creatures down into a plant, but the twin flash setup gives a very nice quality of light that emphasizes the texture of the subjects.



One of the pictures I've included in this blog is an emperor scorpion that we photographed under black light. The cyan color you see here is not a Photoshop effect. This picture is exactly as I saw it. The black light makes the exoskeleton of the scorpion glow this remarkable color. I used a daylight white balance for this, and this was without flash. I used a tripod and a 3 second exposure with a small aperture for maximum depth of field.





A real 'crowd pleaser' is the red eye tree frog. Everyone loves this guy because of the outrageous red eyes, yellow feet, and blue belly. What an unlikely creature! We photographed this frog on many different types of tropical plants, and the pictures turned out fantastic.



The next frog/reptile workshop will be at the end of the summer. The dates will be announced in my free monthly newsletter (which you can sign up for on the home page of my website: jimzuckerman.com) and on this site: jimzuckermanworkshops.com.