Tricia & Derek Engaged

By Paul Rohde on June 22, 2009

About a month I had the pleasure of flying down to Virginia and Patrick Henry College, meeting up with some relatives I haven’t seen in over 8 years, and had the most AMAZING time surprising my sister who didn’t know I was coming. It’s one of those things that run in the family I think, over the years there have been occasions where one family will plan out a surprise family reunion, or show up when the other person isn’t expecting. The entire trip itself had been in the works for about a month, with not-so-sneaky planning calls between my parents and long discussions about possible ways of getting the incredulous look on her face that we were looking for.

It was an amazing weekend, I had the opportunity to see my sister, her now fiance Derek (Which I also heartily approve of), and my family. What more could you ask for?

Paul Rohde

DJ Blacklight Great Salt Lake Shoot

By Paul Rohde on May 24, 2009

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Photography is one of those interesting hobbies / professions that puts you dab smack in the middle of wide slew of different people. Before I left Utah I had the pleasure of shooting DJ Blacklight out in the Salt flats near Saltair on the great Salt Lake (Note to self, stop using “Salt”). I had done a shoot for her about a year ago when I originally got started shooting people on a planned basis, and now, about a year later, she came back to shoot more. Enjoy:

Lightroom Workflow

By Paul Rohde on April 28, 2009

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I think that over the last few days I’ve finished the hardest selection job I’ve had yet on a shoot. Partly because I’ve been neglecting the photos, every time I’ve sat down to go edit my way through the set there’s been about 20-30 that stick out and could be an awesome picture each on they’re own or in a set. The biggest problem is not that they’re all awesome pictures, it’s that they are all similarly themed, roses, white backdrop, red dress, Dani Jae. So how do I go about editing / selecting / picking those final shots?

My actual work flow varies slightly between shoots and I’m always looking for ways to get it faster, better, and more consistent, but here’s the basics for anyone interested.

Import the photos with convert to DNG and a basic noise / sharpening preset applied.
Fast pass, any photo worth looking at gets a 1 star
Second pass, is a slightly more refined, its the pass that says: If it’s a picture of my sister would my mom even be interested in looking at it? It’s an “All photos are in by default, you need to opt out the photos you don’t want.”
At this point, I’ve removed around ~10-15% of the photos, the next pass is a “Would I want my client to see this or potentially buy this?” If you don’t think it would be good for who you are as a photographer or your business, it doesn’t pass. Otherwise, 3 stars. After this, I filter it down to just the 3 star images, pick out similar series of images and apply mass edits to the set. I will pick out one image that I feel like working on, play with it in develop with the white-balance, various presets, exposure, etc… until I have a great looking image, at that point I copy the develop settings and paste it onto all similarly lit images. Wash, rinse and repeat throughout sets of similar images.
This stage varies on the shoot, some shoots I’ll shoot a thousand images and only have a 30-50% left at this stage, others, like this shoot with Dani, I end up with 75% of the original images at this stage…
Stage 4 is one of those interesting stages, it’s a “Would my client be WOW’ed by it, is it one of those pictures people go ‘that’s sooo good!’”, usually there’s only 1-10 or so from a shoot with a 4 star rating like this. There’s a lot of personal preference that goes into this as well, it’s going to determine how people look at your portfolio an what kind of people you grab as clients.
At this stage I begin doing some cropping and photo specific edits. on a per photo basis.
This rating stage is purely for me, it’s a “If I had to represent this shoot with 1-5 images, which images would that be?” many times, there’s none that fit the bill, these are your portfolio images, they represent the best, final edited work. These are the ones I’ll sometimes pull into photoshop and see how they respond, the ones that pop better than any of the others. These few get a 5 stars.
After rating, editing, I go back through the 4-5 star images and use the ‘flag as pick’ to chose the preview images that I’ll show to the client, if they want more I can go and pull out 3 star images for them to look through.
Export / Watermark picked images and write some cool useful blog post to go with it.

Enjoy the rest of the shots :)

Paul Rohde

Photocamp UT ’09

By Paul Rohde on March 17, 2009

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Photocamp Utah ’09 was a huge success, the event itself sold out several weeks before with over 350 people attending down at East Bay Studios. The event was targeted at anybody with an interest in photography from the absolute beginner to the advanced users who have been shooting for several years but who still want to learn. It was divided into four main seminar time slots, each with 3 possible seminars to attend during each slot giving a nice grand total of 12 main presentation options, minus the keynotes and earlybird presentations.

For me personally, I was most interested in the printing seminar. As a student I don’t take much time or money to go out and make prints of my images, which is really something I should be doing on a more regular basis. Interestingly, this particular seminar covered more of the specifics of printing images at home, from setting up the printer, talking about the kinds of printers out there, ink, paper types, color profiles and so on. It was really cool to take a look at what can be accomplished from home, and having the ability to get excellent, semi instant results out of your printing is something that would make it a valuable and viable option for me to proof and display my work.

Of course, at a photo camp, most people bring there cameras, me being no exception. Here’s a few shots:

Catch you all later,

- Paul Rohde

What the Heck is RSS?

By Paul Rohde on March 17, 2009

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How many of you have had this experience: Someone has this cool website and they come up and ask you some variation of the question “Hey, have you subscribed to my RSS feed?” you then give them a resulting blank, ‘what are you talking about?’.

As common and prevalent as Feeds are these days on news and blog sites, I’m continually surprised at how few people know about them or use them to collect all their interweb news. Granted, it’s one of those fairly new technologies that has only emerged in the last decade or so, but it’s one of those things that is SO extremely useful to myself that I have a hard time imagining what I would do without it. So rather quickly I’m going to cover the basics of what an RSS ‘Feed’ is, how to use it, and why in a way that hopefully everyone that is fairly familiar with the internet and computers can understand.

An RSS ‘Feed’ itself is just part of a web page. Think of it as a special page that’s somewhat hidden away that you don’t see, but keeps track of everything that happens on the site. Many people simply call it a ‘feed’ because it essentially feeds information to hungry people like yourself, not sure where or when that term was coined, but its a common part of the lingo.

Now, here’s the cool part, many of the applications you already use everyday that connect to the internet have the ability to ‘subscribe’ to an RSS feed. Subscribing is a fancy way of saying that your telling the program where the RSS feed is so that it can get the latest and greatest data off of it. There are a lot of applications that do this, your mail clients such as Outlook, Apple Mail, Entourage, Thunderbird etc… all have the ability to ‘subscribe’ to an RSS feed and here’s the really cool part, every time someone adds some news to there site it appears in your inbox almost like an e-mail would appear within a few minutes of that piece of news being posted. Now you can go and look at it and read it at your own convenience. Your web browser may also have the ability to subscribe to Feeds as well, in Firefox they are called ‘Live Bookmarks’ which appear as a folder in your bookmarks and contain links to all the latest posts. Whatever program you decide to use is your own personal preference, I personally use a service called Google Reader, but there are many to choose from.

But how do I subscribe to a feed?

Usually, you will want to subscribe to a feed as you’re looking at someones site, (take mine for instance), sometimes the site will have a button with a ‘Subscribe to our site!’ button that you can click on, others may have a smaller link somewhere (I have one at the bottom of my site that says ‘Entries Feed‘). In Firefox, clicking on one of these links brings up a selection box that lets you pick what you want to use to subscribe to the feed. Some sites however, won’t even have a link even though the site may have an RSS Feed built in. In these cases you’ll have to figure out how your browser works, but usually there will be a visual que somewhere that you can subscribe. In firefox, if you can subscribe you’ll see a button that looks like this:

Depending on the site, it will bring up a little menu, just click on one of them and you can then pick what you want to subscribe with and your good to go! It will take some playing around with and experimentation, but in the end, it’s something that is VERY useful for keeping tabs on a lot of different information.

I hope this helps some people understand what RSS feeds are and how they can be used, if you have questions or need help, feel free to leave a comment!

Paul Rohde