It’s that time of year again. It’s time to head out to one of my favorite shows – Adobe Photoshop World. As usual I have a slew of classes that I’m teaching on a variety of topics. Everything from using the iPad in your Digital Photography Workflow, to InDesign classes for Photographers and Designers, to Importing and Managing your Images in Lightroom 4. Also while I’ve got your attention, the class that I’m doing on creating Interactive Portfolios is based on using InDesign to create Interactive Portfolios for Tablets, not websites.
Adobe Revel is Adobe’s Photography Cloud Service. There’s currently a desktop Mac version and an iOS Version. With the Revel Service you can add photos from any device, do non-destructive enhancements and see those photos on any device. While Revel isn’t new, the 1.5 update adds the one feature that I’ve been waiting for – ALBUMS! Now that I can organize my photos in Albums (I know, simple concept right?) It just became much more useful to me.
The Lightroom Integration is the Key
Adobe Revel as a stand alone product/service isn’t that interesting for my workflow. However, with the updated Lightroom 4.2 (RC) Publish Collection plug-in I can now create Smart Published Collections that mirror my Portfolios (Collections) in Lightroom.
This means that when I update any of my portfolios (collections), all I have to do is press the Publish button in the Revel area and those portfolios are sync’d to the cloud and therefore my iPad, iPhone and other Macs.
The Syncing is the Key
There are some really great Portfolio apps for the iPad out there that do all kinds of cool things. Many let you customize them with your own brand, they have nice transitions and they allow for music to play during the show. GREAT! However, where most of them fall down is the difficulty in updating or keeping the portfolios current. For example, one of my Portfolios called “Recent Work” It has 24 images in it and after each shoot I put 1-3 images in and remove the oldest ones keeping it at 24. This takes two seconds in Lightroom. Now getting most Portfolio apps to reflect that update is often a very manual process. With Revel, I hit the Publish button on my “Recent Work” smart collection and my iPad is updated!
Is it perfect?
Well no! Most things aren’t perfect. Revel on iOS was not designed to be a portfolio app! It doesn’t have branding, music, transitions, etc. However, those kinds of things are much easier to add over time than getting the workflow right and getting the workflow right is the most important thing for me. Lightroom 4.2 with Revel 1.5 Album support is just about there.
Seems to be a day of sweet deals. Amazon has dropped the price of the Nikon D7000 (my current travel body) signficantly. Check out this recent Nikon D7000 Price Drop here.
I recently got a chance to shoot with the Westcott IceLight. The IceLight is a portable continuous “daylight balanced” LED light source. It can run on its built-in rechargeable battery or AC power.
Think of it as a portable Spiderlite TDx
The fact that it’s continuous light, like the Spiderlite TD6 means that what you see is what you get. If it’s not lighting your subject properly you’ll see it right in the shot before you take it. It’s fully dimmable, 1,160 lumen LED rated at 50,000 hours. The built-in battery will last about 60 minutes before needing another charge.
The IceLight creates a nice soft natural light.
I was skeptical at first until I took my 1st couple of shots with it. The IceLight can be hand held by the subject or an assistant or you can mount it on a light stand. When you turn it on you won’t be able to help yourself. You will wave it around like a lightsaber. It’s OK. Go for it. Have fun. Just make sure no one is video recording you or that you right don’t get into a real battle and damage it. After your Jedi workout is over, you can then concentrate on using it for your shoot.
When the model/your subject holds the IceLight they may have a natural tendency to turn the light away from their eyes. After all it is bright! So you may have to instruct them to turn it towards themselves more or do it yourself. This is why it may be better in some cases to put it on a light stand. However, you will then lose the creativity that some subjects may have in how they hold. In fact I encourage you to let your subject hold it the way they want at least for part of the shoot. You’ll get some really interesting looks that way.
The Bottom Line
The IceLight is a great addition to my on-the-go photography gear. I can quickly and easily create different dramatic looks without having to rely on a bunch of different modifiers for my speedlight. It also comes with clips to attach gels. The one suggestion I would have to the engineers at Westcott is to make the “power” button both an on and off button. Right now it only turns it OFF and you use the up/down dim buttons to turn it on. Most people will try to press the power button to turn it on and wonder why it’s not working?
The IceLight is nice but this convenience does come a price though. The IceLight is not cheap. You can get the IceLight here.
My buddy and fellow photographer Rynelle Walker posed against a Mist X-Drop
If you’re traveling to do an on location portrait shoot you can either utilize the surrounding area as your backdrop or bring your own. Using a nice location is great, but what if you don’t have one? I’ve done family portraits in hotel hallways and hospitality suites during family reunions and let’s just say that the wallpaper in these venues usually isn’t good enough. However, traveling with a full blown backdrop and support system can be a pain too.
Westcott X-Drop Backdrops
Westcott just introduced a series of 5’x7′ backdrops and a kit to hold them up. When I first saw them I was really only interested in the backdrops themselves. I wasn’t really thinking about a support to hang them since I already have a couple. However, I got a kit and I gotta say that I’m glad I did. First off I couldn’t believe how light weight this thing was compared to traditional pole type support systems. Secondly it goes up in about 5 minutes or less.
Linda standing against the Saffron X-Drop
You have your choice of 6 different colors: Mist, Quarry, Saffron, Serenity, Eminence and Slate. Plus Black, White and Green Screen for a total of 9. The X-drops can either be ordered separately or as a kit with the stand. I highly recommend at least one kit with the color you want and then if you want additional X-drops you can just order them separately and use the same stand from the kit.
Like most cloth backdrops it will ship folded and therefore you will have to deal with the creases either by ironing/steaming them out or with Photoshop in post. I used a steamer with great fast results. The good news also is that they are machine washable. The kits come complete with a travel bag that would fit easily in the overhead bin or even in a suitcase.
Most people that use Adobe Creative Suite Applications tend to use the same tools all the time. However, the built-in tool panel is set in a certain configuration that you can’t really change. Or can you? Well no you can’t alter the built-in Tool Panel, but you can make your own! Adobe Configurator 3.1 allows you to create your own custom panels for Adobe Photoshop or Adobe InDesign.
Here’s one that I put together for Retouching in Photoshop
It has the tools and commands I use almost every single time I retouch an image. As a bonus I’m giving it away as a free download here (you’ll need to install Adobe Configurator 3.1 first to install the panel). You can start with my Retouching Panel and customize it to your liking.
Over the weekend I was working with a model and during our casual conversation she expressed to me how disappointed she was that in one of her recent shoots with another photographer that she lost all but a couple of her images. She described the tale of receiving a CD of the images that he took of her. She was importing the images into her computer and it stopped after about the 3rd image. It seems that the disc was corrupted. At that point she contacted the photographer to perhaps get another disc and he informed her that he had lost the images too. I’m not really sure what that means, but I take it as either he had the same problem with disc corruption (relying on CDs as his method of archival) or some other form of data loss?
Data Loss Happens!
No matter what system you use, hardware you use, services that you use there is the potential for data loss. Physical media is susceptible to all kinds of failure. So the idea is to never ever ever ever ever trust your images (or any other important data) to one single device or thing. To date I’ve been quite lucky. I’ve never lost a shoot. Nothing would be more frustrating than to spend hours or all day on location doing a shoot only to not have any images to show for it. I’ve been backup paranoid since my 1st hard drive crash in the early 90’s.
Let’s start with the shoot itself
Memory cards these days come in nice large capacities and while I love being able to shoot 1,000 RAW images to a single card, it’s not a good idea! You’re much better off breaking your shoot up onto multiple cards. At least if one card goes bad you haven’t lost ALL of your images. Keep in mind this is when you’re the most venerable. At this point your images only exist in one spot.
Immediately Backup The Shoot – If I’m out in the field and I’m shooting to a memory card then I’m going to backup immediately afterwards (usually while on location) to another device. I’m either going to backup to my iPad, my MacBook Pro or a portable media backup hard drive such as the HyperDrive Colorspace.
That way I still have the original images on the card AND on at least one other device. If I’m shooting in studio then I’m automatically backing up with each shutter release. I’ve been shooting either wirelessly with my Nikon D4 or via Ethernet. That means an image is being captured to the card AND then transferred to my MacBook Pro. That’s not enough for me! I still copy the folder of images to a backup folder on my server before I start working on the local copy that’s on my hard drive.
Yes, even on vacation! Not only do I backup the card via one of the methods above, but I will probably even upload the images to the cloud so that if my gear is stolen or damaged while I’m on vacation I would at least have the images to pull back down when I get home. Before cloud storage was so common I would mail myself a backup DVD.
Image compliments of iStockphoto.com
After it’s all over – even after the shoot is over, images have been retouched and delivered. I still backup EVERYTHING to CrashPlan.com. My computers are backed up locally to other drives via Time Machine, but at the end of the day I still prefer having at least TWO backups and at least one of them being offsite. CrashPlan has served me well thus far. An often overlooked feature of CrashPlan is that it allows you to also choose another location for backups such as a friend’s house or perhaps backing up your studio computer to your home computer or vise versa.
How to start thinking about your own backup strategy – The 1st time I ever backed up my hard drive was due to a total hard drive crash. I learned my lesson the hard way. However, even after that crash and learning the importance of backing up, I wasn’t doing it regularly back then. One day I looked at my computer and said to myself “what if your hard drive crashed RIGHT NOW? What would you lose? I started thinking about all the things that weren’t currently backed up and of course I did an immediate backup. Luckily times have gotten better and our backups are more automated with things like Time Machine and Crash Plan. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use the same method to determine what to backup. Just modify it a bit. Ask yourself if your computer crashed right now, what would you lose? Now ask yourself if your building burned to the ground overnight (no one was there, no one was hurt), what would you lose? If someone stole your camera bag, what would you lose? If someone stole your computer bag, what would you lose? For me, in each of those scenarios I’d lose gear and I’d be pissed off, but my data in each of those scenarios would be recoverable.
The Bottom Line
I’ve never lost a shoot! Sure it could happen some day, but I try to reduce my risk as much as possible using the methods above. I had worked with another model for a couple of years before she moved out of state. One day she sends me an email telling me that she had a small fire and lost all of her CDs (she put them on CD, not me) and was wondering if by chance that I had any of the images we had created together. I had ALL of them! I was able to send her all of our “finished” images that we had ever taken.
“You’ve either lost data, or you’re about to lose data!” BACKUP
If your important data is only in one place then you’re doing it wrong!
When I was on my Nikon African Safari in Sabi Sabi South Africa, not only did Nikon loan me some nice long glass, but they also supplied me with some Lexar 1000x CF cards for my Nikon D4. To say that these cards performed well is an understatement. When I got home I checked the price of the cards and of course I had slight sticker shock. However, these cards are now on sale with some deep discounts here.
When it comes to photography my primary focus is Beauty/Fashion, in other words people. However, because I travel for a living I also get to do a fair amount of landscape and travel photography too. While I did have a Landscapes Portfolio on my site, my travel shots were starting to blend in even if they weren’t technically landscapes. A couple of nights ago I decided to break them out and create a dedicated Travel Portfolio.
While I was at it I also was curious to see how many shots I had taken with my iPhone. I was toying with the idea of perhaps having an “iPhone Photography” Portfolio just for fun but I could only think about 3-4 worthy shots off the top of my head that I remember shooting with my iPhone.
I figured that I shouldn’t trust my memory and I decided to let Lightroom show me my iPhone shots by creating a Smart Collection. I was right to take that approach because there were many more shots than I remembered taking with my iPhone and as a result I was easily able to put together an iPhone Photography Portfolio just for kicks.
While I don’t see any smartphone camera replacing my DSLR any time soon, I pretty much do use the iPhone 4s 99% of the time as my point and shoot camera. I’m usually amazed by some of the shots I get considering the small sensor on that thing.
I updated my site using the Turning Gate Plug-ins and Adobe Lightroom 4.1. Also since I’m a Geotagging Freak! Most of the shots in the new galleries will show you the location where they were taken.
