I enrolled in a watercolor class at The Art League last winter precisely because I know nothing about watercolor.  I have found that studying art in unfamiliar mediums helps me to see the familiar more clearly — that is to say, studying watercolor helps me to solve problems that I come across in, say, photography.  It’s kind of like this: take a favorite picture and turn it upside down.  You’ll see things you didn’t see before.

I chose Steve Fleming based on his portfolio — I figured, wow, if I could paint, I’d want to paint like he paints.

Originally, my intention for this post was to focus on the watercolors and the fun I’ve had learning to paint with them, showing a progression toward better in my paintings as the class went on. One of my first efforts a year ago was based on a photo of two men standing on a cliff, overlooking salty Pacific air in the late afternoon sun. My rendition was painted so poorly that the class interpreted it as a comical cowboy in a desert scene.  !  The cowboy from that painting lives on three semesters later as a metaphor in class for solving problems:

“Values are far more important than the lone cowboy in the desert.” — Steve Fleming, Winter, 2011

I wish I had a more complete written list of the wonderful one-liners from Steve Fleming’s watercolor class to share with you. In hindsight, it might’ve made a Twitter feed to rival Justin Halpern’s.  But I digress.

At some point, I stopped writing notes in class and instead picked up my best camera — the one that’s with me, and in this case, my iPhone — and I started videotaping Steve Fleming as he presented his class demonstrations.  The videos exploded my learning curve and everything changed.  I began sharing the videos with my classmates, and the positive response got me to thinking larger about a project based on his work. Last week, we started the shooting and hopefully the final project will be posted later this spring.

Enjoy the teaser!

“We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

Every session, I shoot a frame out-of-focus. It’s fun! It’s become something of a personal project for me over the last couple of years, this collection of blurs.

Tiffany and Ronnie are an exceptionally striking couple, married in a candlelight ceremony last weekend. I was 2nd shooting for the very fun and talented NYC photographer Josh Dwain, and I’m excited to see what he does with the “real” images from such a beautiful wedding party, especially his offbeat bridal party poses. Thank you, Josh, for the opportunity to shoot alongside you!

Is my picture too bright/dark?  This is where checking the back of the camera can get beginners into trouble.

It’s important to understand how to read a histogram. Looking at the LCD screen on the back of the camera might not render an accurate picture (your camera’s LCD screen might be set to maximum brightness, for example, which can give you the impression that your pictures are washed out or overexposed) and the LCD screen is also a very small representation of the big picture (pardon all puns.)

A histogram is a graph that displays brightness values. It’s divided into five equal sections moving from left to right: very dark | dark | 30 percent gray | light | very light. The center of the histogram, 30 percent gray, is the value most camera manufacturers use as the default tone for metering and calculating exposure.

Let’s say the building blocks of a histogram begin with a rectangle drawn on a piece of paper. Only instead of looking at it straight-on, you’re going to view it eye-level to the table so that the graph becomes a vertical axis (and shows nothing at this point.) Then you’re going to use a box of tiny little square tiles from Home Depot. Each individual tile represents one value of brightness in your image. You start placing tiles representing pixels into the graph, stacking them according to lightness or darkness. As you get more than one of the same value, you begin stacking them.  You will find that images have a LOT of one value, less of others, so some of those little tile stacks will rise pretty high, maybe even to the top of your graph, others will be short. After all the tiles are stacked from the image, you’re looking at a histogram (vertical axis graphic representation of light and dark values.)

Generally speaking, the goal in a properly exposed image is to find most of your tiles stacked heavily in the middle and tapering off into very dark (left) or very light (right) edges. (Of course, this rule was made to be broken; first learn the rules, then learn to break them.)

Take for example this image of David and Shelley’s thank-you cards.  I’ll consider this image “properly exposed” because it’s a straightforward exposure using the exact settings my camera’s light meter told me to use (I had it set to use center-weighted metering; more on that later.):

Nikon D700, 135mm lens, f4 @ 1/250 second, ISO 200

Here’s how all of the individual tiles stack up to represent this image in my histogram:

Notice that there’s a good representation of tiles stacked across the histogram, heaviest in the center and stretching out to either side? This particular image is slightly heavier toward the right as there are a lot of lighter tones in it. (I also blew out the front of the cream colored table the cards were resting on. I did this intentionally, I was metering for the cards, my main subject, not so much the table or wall behind them.)

Here’s an example of this same scene, image intentionally underexposed:

Nikon D700, 135mm lens, f4 @ 1/3200 second, ISO 200

Look at the histogram now and how all my little tiles are stacked heavily to the left; there’s no mistaking that no matter how the image appears on my LCD, it’s in fact very dark; also look at the cream table, which is closer to properly exposed then it was above (the !!! warning sign is still there, just disregard it for now. If you are working in Photoshop and come across it, it’s warning you that the histogram you’re seeing is cached from memory and you’ve since made adjustments to the image that might change its appearance. Just click it and Photoshop will generate a new histogram and the warning will go away.):

histogram of underexposed image

And the same scene intentionally overexposed:

Nikon D700, 135mm lens, f4 @ 1/30 second, ISO 200

And its resulting histogram:

overexposed histogram

Something interesting that I didn’t intend to find when shooting this example: I avoided most of these exposure issues in post processing by shooting in RAW. As I imported the underexposed and overexposed images into Lightroom, they appeared pretty similar to the correctly exposed image. I had to go back and manually un-do all of my regular workflow develop settings to get them to look like they did on my LCD as I was shooting.

[return to the PHOTO 101 Table of Contents]

To test, I took a recent SOOC (straight out of the camera) original image:

I used CS5 to enhance the digital file as part of my usual workflow. Then I added a layer of texture to make the grunge wall behind my subject even more interesting:

Then I called my kids over to watch what they call “Stupid Photoshop Tricks.” I do this for two reasons: 1.) because it’s fun and 2.) because I think it’s important for kids to see how much manipulation goes into the images that bombard them. It’s just a healthy dose of realism.

I selected my subject:

And to my daughter’s horror (and her brother’s delight,) I hit the “delete” key:

The dialog box that came up had “content-aware” selected as default. I hit okay. And whereas my previous version of CS3 would have left the area inside the selection a blank, erased field of white for me to painstakingly recreate, CS5 took less than a minute to process a suggested fill for me:

Granted, it isn’t perfect; the lines in the brick walkway don’t exactly add up, for example. But as I selected the clone tool to fix them, I was surprised and thrilled to find in CS5, the clone tool shows me a mirror image of what I’m about to stamp — invaluable hours saved trying to blindly line-up matching pixels!

I did a little bit more to clean up the content aware, but very quickly and without spending too much thought:

And then, of course, I hit open apple-Z to step backward and reinsert my beautiful sunshine, this time within an altered, content-aware filled format:

A trained eye could easily spot the hurried indifference, but all told the whole process took us a little over three minutes. Amazing!