Andriy Zolotoiy Photography Blog

There is an option in D700 (and many other Nikon cameras) to set flash sync speed to 1/320 sec. While originally intended to be used with built-in flash it works for me with Alien Bees / Einstein and Cybersync triggers. Getting to 1/320 sec. allows to cut significant portion of bright daylight without closing aperture too much. While I was shooting outside under midday sun I could still see a little bit of darkening beside one edge of the frame but nothing too serious to even crop it. I’ll try this next time with D300 and see if APS-C size sensor makes any difference.

I’ve updated main website and this blog color scheme and made some small changes in the layout. Up until now I’ve had black and dark gray color schemes which seemed good at the time but eventually I got tired of them therefore goes white. Photographers’ portfolios are usually restricted to only neutral backgrounds that do not interfere with image viewing. Some say that black is the best background as it helps image to stand out, some say it’s white since everything looks cleaner. Anyways, change is always good.

And to wrap it up, the shot of beautiful Mina. Used SB600 with umbrella to balance daylight from the window.

… Just arrived from Juke Box Print. Design and color palette matching the website. Cards are made of 24pt stock, they are thicker than what you would normally find at most of printers; and I can stick only 5 of them into my wallet without ripping it apart. Overall quality is good, colors are matching those in original design files.

My current target clientelle is small to mid size businesses; and that’s where I receive the most photography quote requests. I don’t know where most of these people get their expectations from but fairly common trend is to get beautiful creative high resolution image with full copyright transfer for $10-$15. Common, people, for that price you can get passport photo at Costco. And you won’t get digital negatives.
This expectancy that photographers love their job and willing to work for free driving certain portion of photography market down. Not all of it, high end market is fairly secure for now but it’s interesting to see developments over next few years.

In this tutorial I’ll explain my workflow how to create shimmering skin on example from my recent bikini photoshoot.

Here is the image how it came out of camera. In my workflow I bring raw files into Lightroom first to do picks/rejects selections and adjust exposure and white balance as needed.

If you would carefully reverse engineer this image you might notice 3 light sources. I used standard three point lighting setup as outlined in following diagram:

I tried to work by the numbers before with light meter but it’s not my thing so I adjust levels by the eye.
When I bring image into Photoshop I analyze how much work skin needs. In this case I needed to smooth it out for which I used Nik Efex Dynamic Skin Softener plug-in with detail values not exceeding 5-5-5 to keep texture intact while smoothing overall appearance.

Next step is to add brown gradient map in Color mode at about 30% to give skin nice olive tone and remove redness.

Next, I add skin shimmer by using Select Color Range and selecting brightest skin area with fuzziness around 30-40. I copy selected areas to a new layer, switch it to Screen mode and Gaussian blur it slightly (20-40px) to create even highlights. At this point I might use eraser if some blurring went into unwanted areas like eyes or lips, or leaked onto background.

Next couple of layers would be additional dodging and burning in Soft Light mode, maybe additional clong that I didn’t do (though I should have) in the beginning.
At the end I would do final toning; here I applied some Cross-Processing , as well as Lighten/Darken Center from Nik Efex.

This is where I stopped. I might come back at a later date and try some other things with this photo; that’s why I keep layered TIFFs just in that case.

Another year is gone and now it’s time to make the plans for 2011. I am very informal person, and all kinds of schedules and long term goals don’t work well for me but I realize that I will not grow in photography business unless I will set goals for the year and will try to achieve or exceed them. Let’s see, how about finally putting proper business plan together? There are few things I need to define for myself:

• What do I really want to photograph. I like to shoot many different things but there has to be a borderline between commercial and personal work.
• I need to start active marketing. Passive marketing worked decently me last year but that isn’t sufficient in order to get bigger and better clients.
• There is still a lot to learn about technical aspects of photography. I need to focus on advancing in lighting areas without investing anymore in hardware.
• As usual content and creativity is the key in photography. I realize that sometimes I don’t open up completely to the concepts I have in my mind. I need to streamline workflow from the first electrical impulse in the brain to the final delivered print.

Even putting the questions for myself on the paper is hard, not talking about executing them. Let’s see what new year brings.

And to finish off with some imagery let me present model and dancer Anastasia:

If you are looking for complete digital workflow for your photography business that will cost you something close to $0 and you’re using Lightroom to manage photos then you’re in luck. Complete image turnaround consists of sending a set of images from LR to website where client can pick the best ones, then client’s selection is emailed to you. This selection is then marked in LR so you can work on selected images.

This is two part process.
First part is to generate web gallery where client can rate photos, and TTG Client Response Gallery does exactly that. You export images straight from LR to the website and then receive email with the list of selects.
Second part is to bring that selection back into LR. For this purpose you can use my Client Selects plug-in which will load that list you received in email and mark images by star rating and/or color label.
Simple, cheap and will save you lots of time.

Update: ClientSelects v. 1.4.1.0 is now available.

A lot of cool photography this year, check it out here. Truthfully yours scored two honorable mentions in fashion and music pro categories. Thank you everybody who helped to create that imagery! We always have mixed feelings about any sorts of contests but I guess those feelings get warmer when your work gets mentioned in good light.

I tested last night native tethering support in LR3 against Nikon Camera Control Pro. What can I say, good folks at Adobe done pretty amazing job. LR tethering works about twice faster than Nikon’s own software, and although you cannot control camera settings via Lightroom itself, you can see current aperture, shutter and ISO. File management could have been better to allow date folder selection but it will do as it is. The most important factor is stability and here LR performed really well with my Nikon D700. I used 2 meter USB cable with gold plated connectors (my old audio equipment hobby taught me to always use good cables) and took about 200 frames in short bursts. Didn,’t encounter any dropped or corrupted images. Two meter cable would be sufficient for product or food photography but I intend to test next the limits of USB connectivity. Will report on that later.

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ClientSelects v 1.1 is available now, it addresses multiple search fixes and adds support for searching in collections and collection sets.
Download latest version of plug-in here.