A successful day.

Hi all,

yesterday I had my first proper "job" with the DL. A ninth birthday party for a friends grand-daughter. I took along Mrs Liam as my assistant. I'm not gettig paid, except for a few beer tokens, but I treated it as a paid job, to get some practice in. It highlighted a few shortcomings with getting kids to pose, and also with using backgrounds, so I was on a learning curve from the off. I took around 40 pictures in RAW, which was plenty, as the girls were starting to get bored by then. I was shooting 10, maybe 15 minutes tops.

I haven't really used RAW properly before, but got the folder into Rawshoter Essentials, and checked my work. Technically, they were all pretty much spot on, with only minor colour temp, and exposure changes. I then converted to 16 bit TIF and exported.. and saw that the file size for each image was in the 35mb range. I really need a bigger hard drive.

I stopped that and exported as jpeg instead. A little sharpening up in GIMP, and job done. I think the post-processing took around 2 hours, start to finish, and that included learning the basics of Rawshooter.

The Mum is going to get the pictures printed off the CD I'm giving her, at the local print shop, when she has the money, hence deciding to export in jpeg. If she wants a 16x20 later on (well you never know) , then I can always go back to the rws file and get a TIF image out.

All in all a good day. Things I need to remember and work on.. it might help some one else;

Watch for shadows on the background.

Get a decent background to begin with.. I had the instruction that the girl loved pink, so we got a piece of pink material to use. It was big enough for the one and two person shots, but no good for group shots. I reckon on an absolute minimum of 4m² for a group of 7 nine year olds.

I shot against the biggest wall, with a window behind me. When I set up the flashes (bounce straight up onto the ceiling with a Sunpak 3600, and a little fill in from one of those little pentax slaves, the Sunpak being operated by a chinese radio remote, and the popup flash giving general lighting and exposure) it was cloudy, but then the sun came through for a minute. This gave me a couple of slightly over exposed shots.. shooting RAW, it was well within the scope of RS to correct, but might have meant a bit more work with a jpeg in GIMP.

When shooting a group of kids, remember that their attention span is about that of a goldfish, so be quick, and keep making them smile. They were at the birthday party for their benefit not mine.. If you can, learn their names as well. They appreciate it more than "you, with the blue jumper, just move in a bit". I got there in plenty of time to watch a couple of party games and got their names from that.

All in all, a successful day, because as you all know you don't learn anything much if it all goes well, but learn plenty if it goes a bit wrong.

I even had a bit of time to design a CD cover for the finished article.




That was my day anyway.. also went to the seaside for an hour.

Cheers

Liam

Sounds like a great day.

It might be a bit easier to shoot things like this as JPEGs from the start - less processing and less drive space, also perhaps to stick to 8 bit. Add Photoshop for its greater flexibility and you'd be pretty well set up.

A good way to practice though - not much can be more challenging than photographing a grand-daughter's party!

Hi John,

it was fun. I actually found it quicker using RAW, even with trying to work out how to use RS. It works out at around 3 minutes an image, start to finish.

I've been using computers for years, and I'm on the staff of a few tech forums, so it's not that big a deal. I'll be adding a bigger hard drive pretty soon anyway; I've seen some 300gb externals going for change out of £100.

As far as Photoshop goes, I actually like GIMP, and as far as I can tell, does everything that PS can. There's a brand new version coming out in June as well, that has a few more bits and pieces. The added bonus is of course that GIMP is open source software and free. If it doesn't do something, then someone writes it into an update.

As an example, the latest version couldn't handle the jpeg exif data from certain cameras (mine being one of them), so a guy called Tor Lillqvist wrote libexif_12.dll it so that it did. There's also UFRaw, which is the RAW plugin for GIMP (it can also be used as a standalone app), that looks and works in a similar way to RS.

I'll have a play with yesterday's PEFs later in it. One of the advantages is that once the RAW work is done, you just click OK and it launches the jpeg into a new GIMP window, GIMP being open by default. UFRaw was able to open the DL's PEF file before RS 2006 came out, hence me getting it first. I'm not sure if it covers batches yet, so that'll be a little fun time for me.

Oh, I'll just add that I run this on a Windows machine.

The actual shoot.. ie. who should be in what pictures was decided by the birthday girl, so that put paid to my carefully choreographed plan of action, which was probably better for all concerned.

Cheers

Liam

I guess you ignore the Birthday Girl at your peril....