PhotographyBanzai.com

After making a recent video, it seemed like a good opportunity to detail the process I do when making YouTube thumbnail images. People tend to judge a book by its cover, so it’s a good idea to put your best effort into making that video “cover” look nice.  Links are potentially affiliated in this article, I earn from qualifying purchases!  My video on the subject. When I’m out recording for a video I try to take photos that might work as a thumbnail image. If it’s a gear related video, I’ll do a self portrait with the piece of equipment. They don’t always work out, but it’s good to have potential source material.  It’s good to try different poses in the hope that one will work out later. This works because I usually have two cameras and a tripod or two with me to produce the video itself. Usually the video camera will have a wide angle lens. That’s the one I use for the photos. Besides simply pressing the shutter button, there are a few other methods depending on the look...

In this video I go over using a PS4 DualShock controller when reviewing and culling photos. It’s an ergonomic and quick way to go over large numbers of photos in your initial review process.  Using a game controller in Adobe Bridge! In my case I use Adobe Bridge CS5, which has limited support for keyboard shortcuts. The related video about using a controller to cull photos in Adobe Bridge. Get a Sony DualShock 4 Wireless PS4 Controller through my links: B&H Photo Video , Amazon , Best Buy , and eBay . As an affiliate of these shops, I earn from qualifying purchases!  You can use whatever controller you want as long as you have the ability to mimic keyboard inputs. The DS4Windows program I use has full macro support, which is great.  Configuring DS4 Windows to work with Bridge. The PS4 controller drivers: ds4windows ( github source ) Adobe Bridge shortcut list Here is how I have mine set up: – D-pad = The arrow keys on the keyboard so you can navigate through the...

Though I’ve used Photoshop in some fashion since the early 2000s, I’m always learning or re-learning things about it. To improve the speed of editing, there are a few things that make a big difference. I’ve been trying to incorporate the keyboard more into the editing process because it does speed up editing a lot. I use Photoshop CS5, so if something doesn’t work for you then there might be a difference in how things are done for your version. Holding the space bar down will allow you to drag around the photo while keeping your current tool. There is an application level setting that you can change to have the scroll-wheel perform zoom and it doesn’t change your current tool selected. I always enable that whenever I need to (re)install Photoshop. The clone stamp tool is my go-to tool for editing cosplay photos. It’s easy to clone out harder to manage spots and areas with this tool compared to the others I’ve used. It takes more effort to use than the other related tools, so I try to u...

I’m always looking for ways to improve my work. That goes for pretty much anything I do, but lately it is convention videos that needed more improvement. At Kollision Con I took 57 clips that I plan on making a Youtube video out of as seen in my previous post. Keep in mind that I use Ubuntu (Kubuntu variant) and Pentax cameras, so any directions have that angle to them. Step 1: Use techniques in the field to improve video quality over my previous efforts. I went over the method I tried here. I didn’t use the main camera strap like I had in the linked article because it would interfere with using the camera for photos. I ended up trying to just get the camera straps on each camera stretched out away from me. I think it helped a bit. A lot more can be done, but I’d like to avoid expensive awkward stabilizer setups. How the camera is used is just as important. My DSLRs have somewhat limited camera control in video, but I’ll give you are rundown on how I used them. Manual focus, or...

I received another question from a Facebook friend about photography. First question: How again do you set up a batch process? I know how to automate them, but I can’t remember how to set them up. Will it work for both camera raw settings and then additional Photoshop edits? I’m going through a shoot with someone, and with similar pictures I’d love to be able to do that. Answer: The process that I use is good for camera raw modifications and whatever happens in the Photoshop action. 1. Open and tweak all of the images in a directory. In Photoshop I just select all of the files at once and camera raw opens all of them in a list to the left of the raw editing tools and preview. 2. Press the “Done” button when finished to save all of the tweaks. 3. Create a Photoshop action to do whatever you want. Keep in mind that it will happen uniformly to every image. For example, I made an action to just save a full-quality JPEG image. Other times I’ve run auto-contrast with a de-noise plugin call...

Have you been interested in trying out action photography? I have too! Just recently two friends and I tried out some basic action photography on a whim as were were taking photos at a local park. I thought that writing about what we did and adding a bit extra on how to do animated sequences (GIF files) in Adobe Photoshop would be a fun supplement to the main article. We switched cameras, so a friend took that image above with my camera (cropped). Camera setting suggestions: Set the camera to continuous shooting mode (high-speed). I was using a K-7 camera that has around 5 FPS maximum, which is alright. The faster your camera can take frames, the better your sequences will be. Set your camera to continuous auto-focus (AF-C) to start. Chances are that using AF-C mode it will slow your camera down, so you might want to experiment with manual focus. When in AF-C mode, try using just a single point like the center one. That way you can be sure to focus on your subject and not somet...

This embedded video below is a clipped together “music video” from full 1080p HD clips I recorded with the new Pentax K-5 camera. As I was saying, I used a Pentax K-5 (1080p @ 25 FPS), at the highest quality setting. All clips were set to 40% speed and patched together in kdenlive ( kdenlive.org ) for Linux with a creative commons licensed song (see the end of video for credits). The project was rendered in H264 @ 1280×720 and uploaded to Youtube. It looks to me that my K-5 has a few troubled pixels that are stuck to a shade of red when the ISO gain is high enough. You probably won’t be able to notice them, but I’ll have to look into software solutions to see if I can easily correct those pixels.  I was using a firmware that was one upgrade back from current, so I’ll be eventually testing the new firmware and consecutive ones that are released to see if they correct those stuck pixels in video mode. The camera has a “pixel mapping” functionality that finds dead pixels and compensates f...

I’ve been spending a lot of time setting up a new website where I will host a good deal of images. It will use Zenfolio as a back-end and have the ability to allow for buying downloads and ordering prints. Before that while going through my 1300 or so cruise images I setup a few standard processes for processing images so that they look how I feel they should. When processing images the way I do, it takes a good deal of time. I always am trying to find ways to speed up the process, but on the other hand I always want to have each image tweaked to my eye. Here are a few points to my (post) processing process: I shoot images in RAW (DNG) format with flat colors. I use my old license of Photoshop CS2 on Linux through Wine. I recently bought a copy of “Noise Ninja” plugin/standalone software.  Steps for post processing that result in finished full resolution pictures (meaning I don’t shrink these as they will be for my Zenfolio gallery): Open a block of images in Photoshop (say 50 a...