The Pictage Blog

Get to know Partner Con speaker and San Diego based wedding photographer Jared Bauman of Bauman Photographers. This year at Partner Con Jared will be speaking on the topic of “An Auto Pilot Six Figure Income”. He will be speaking at 11:20 AM on Tuesday, November 3rd. For more information about Partner Con, registration, hotel, and schedule visit the Partner Con website.

Learn more about Jared’s speaker session and what he is most excited about for Partner Con below.

1.What is your session about?
Your Business – On Auto Pilot for Six Figure Income
In today’s era, nothing is more important than building a solid foundation for your business. Known as an industry leader in business education, Jared will show you how to set your business up for six figures – this year! Creating an auto pilot of profit for your business is essential in these economic times, and Jared has broken down the process into simple, practical steps that are easy to put into action. Examples will include efficiency analysis, automization techniques, and profit focuses. You will leave with the tools to make a six figure income this year!

2.Why should we attend?
Everyone stuggles with the balance between the business and the art.  This session will help center photographers around some key business practices.  They will be practical, easy to grasp, and simple to implement.  By learning how to think big picture, photographers can attain their financial goals.

3. What are you looking forward to about Partner Con in general?
I am most excited to hang out with other photographers.  Its so good to hang out with people that are so much like myself and share a common bond – shooting weddings.  Also, I love the Bed Jump tradition that has been started.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 10th round of “Admired by Beckstead,” our twice-monthly David Beckstead image contest!

Because this is the 10th round, there are special prices for our winners. Timothy Riley of RPG Keys provided an RPG mini unit. Lauren Hillary of GO BEE Bags has donated a GO|BEE Card Holster for a man or a GO|BEE Hip Clutch for a Woman.  Mitche Graf of Power Marketing 101 has provided a Boot Camp in a Box 9-CD marketing crash course. Thank you to Timothy, Lauren and Mitche for their donations.

We are so excited to announce this round’s winners… so here they are!

FIRST place goes to Gerald Pope of Seattle, Washington.  Congrats Gerald!

From Beckstead: “Gerald nailed the whole idea I had about  the ‘veils’ contest! I was looking for compositions that focused on the liquid feel of how veils fly around or become the strongest element and line structure of the frame. This is just a wonderful shot with very few elements: a simple yet very powerful composition! The veil mocks the angle of her dress and everything is isolated perfectly and ‘pops’ from the background. And just for fun I noticed if you flip the veil it looks just like Gerald’s logo!! Cool! Totally deserving of the first place winner!!”

2nd Place goes to Jolie Nicole Churchill of Southeastern Florida.

From Beckstead: “The veil feels like an extension of the background clouds! I just love this abstract composition! The dark b&w sky really highlight the clouds and the veil seems to mock the look and style of the clouds perfectly! I am glad the bride is facing away so her look does not interrupt the flow. Just great!”

3rd Place goes to Don Bryant Thompson. Congrats Don!

From Beckstead: “I love the abstract feel of Don’s image! The symmetry of the light-lines from the veil on top balance the veil-lines on the bottom…just great!!”

11th round is now open! Submit your “Black and White” images the Admired  by Beckstead Facebook page.

We’re thrilled that ParnterCon is almost here! With so many speakers, shooting workshops, photographer lounge hosts, and off-site activities, how will you chose which to attend?

San Diego photographers and PUG leaders Jeff and Erin Youngren will be leading a session, titled “Keepin’ it Real in a Rockstar World.”  Their presentation will take place on Thursday at 10am. And, now you even shoot with Jeff and Erin in New Orleans – we  JUST added their bonus Jeff and Erin workshop!

We figure who better to tell us about their presentation than the speakers themselves?

For more details check out the Pictage Partner Conference website. You can see The Youngren’s work at theyoungrens.com.

This week Sara talks with photographer and This Week in Photography (TWIP) host Frederick Van Johnson about all the latest industry and tech buzz. Frederick also shares some details about his upcoming PartnerCon session titled, “Your website sucks, let’s fix it.”  In his session he will be discussing important elements of SEO and valuable and new industry-changing ideas.

Undeniable Truths of Life (including jpgs)

Written by: Phoenix Wedding Photographer and Pictage Member Jared Platt

There are certain things I hold as undeniable truths in life, among these are:

1.  God exists.
2.  All humans are endowed by God with certain unalienable rights and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
3.  Hot liquid magma is not a toy.
4.  JPGs are a very bad filetype!

I know that most of you reading this entry will say, “well I shoot RAW, so I’m cool!”  But you may only be half right about that.  So let me fill you in and then you take stock of your image pipeline and decide weather or not what you feel good about what you are doing.  I am not passing any judgement on you, I will leave that between you and God.  (See truth #1).

It is a foregone conclusion that shooting a JPG as a filetype is a bad idea.  For those of you who are not up to speed on this issue, it is as simple as this: when shooting a JPG, you are asking a camera that contains a very small and not very powerful computer with no user intervention to make critical decisions about the colors, contrast, dynamic range, etc of your file, then compress that file down to a fraction of the size by throwing away what it sees as non-essential pixel data, and save it to a disk.  You certainly save space on your CF Card, but what do you do when the camera makes the wrong decisions?  What do you do when the compression does not allow for the subtle gradients in the sky and creates ugly banding?  There is no going back to the original data, the RAW image, because you threw it away as you shot the photograph.  So now you are left running noise filters, grain actions and gaussian blurs to try and soften the offending tonal stair-steps in the sky.

You see a JPG can only have 8 bits worth of information even when it is not severely compressed, so a JPG has a very difficult time describing very subtle gradients, like the sky, or a white backdrop, or a smooth skin tone and it transitions from light to shadow.  The problem of the JPG’s 8 bit depth is only compounded by the fact that an onboard camera computer is making the compression, rather than a super computer Mac Pro with the most advance photo editing software in the world (Photoshop) making the calculation.  A camera computer is good at recording data, not interpreting it.  Your camera’s computer should also not be used as a heart monitor or a dialysis machine.  Your camera’s computer is very good however, at recording the RAW data on its chip, logging the shooting decisions and saving it to a disk.  By shooting in a RAW format, you are giving yourself access to the full capabilities of the file your camera is able to produce.  And that 16 bit file makes all the difference in the world.

So, most of you read through that, still saying to yourselves, “I already shoot RAW, so let’s move on.”  Thanks for sticking with me, I just had to get the others over to our side on that concept.  Now for those of you who are shooting RAW.  Check yourselves on the next issue.

The advantage of shooting a RAW image in the first place is that you have a full 16 bit file available to you to edit in Lightroom, Aperture, Capture One, Photoshop RAW or some other RAW editor.  This means that you have the ability to recover blown highlights, adjust the original shooting decisions, like the color balance, etc.  All of this is very clear to all of us who shoot RAW.   And further more, I think everyone can understand why it is best to make as many adjustments as you can in the original RAW before exporting the image as a new file for printing or further Photoshop work.  So the question is this: why, do so many people shoot RAW for the 16 bit advantage, adjust it in a RAW editor for the same advantage, but then when they go to do their Photoshop work, they make an 8 bit JPG file and start editing the images, burning and dodging, and making curves, etc?

The common excuse is that the JPG is smaller, so it takes up less space.  When people are making an album, they don’t want to make 60 to 100 16 bit PSD files, that takes up a lot of space on their disk drive.  Funny, that is the same argument they were using for shooting JPGs in the camera.  Disk space is plentiful and cheep.  I was in the computer store yesterday and saw a Western Digital Green Drive 2 TB for $160.  With that kind of space at that price, space is not an issue.  Some people excuse this JPG fetish with computer speeds.  Yes, a larger file requires a bit more processor and RAM, but that too is easy to come by, especially if you live in the PC world.

I choose not to compromise the quality of my work and take full advantage of the 16 bit advantage of RAW image capture even when I am retouching in Photoshop.  All of my files leave Lightroom as 16 bit PSD files in a Pro Photo RGB Color Space.  The combination 16 bit and the Pro Photo color space allow me the ability to adjust and edit my images to a much greater degree without introducing banding in the gradients and noise in the shadows.  If you are one who shoots in RAW, then you obviously agree that the 16 bit advantage is worth the extra effort, but you loose that advantage when in Photoshop if you are editing a JPG.  Exporting your images as a 16 bit PSD or TIF will maintain that data bit depth advantage you enjoyed in RAW.

Some of you are now on board with the bit depth, but what about this color space?  Let me briefly explain color space.  There are three basic color spaces that you use while editing and working with digital images.  Pro Photo RGB, Adobe RGB (1998) and sRGB.    Everything you are printing at Pictage or any other photo lab are being printed in sRGB because that is the color space that the printer understand and use to make the prints.  It is basically their total range of color recognition.  sRGB is a very limited color space, like using an 8 crayon box.  There are less total colors available, but enough colors for the human eye to see much as it does in nature.  This is also the color space used on the world wide web and on digital display units of all kinds.  Adobe RGB (1998) is a much more broad and deep color pallet that contains arguably more colors that the human eye is capable of seeing.  This has been the standard for many years for profession image editing.  The latest and greatest color space then is the Pro Photo RGB which contains even more color depth than the RGB (1998) and contains more colors than either your eye or your monitor can even detect.  So why then would someone not want to work on their photo in sRGB which is where it will end up if it is going to be printed or displayed on a monitor?  Simple, for editing purposes, you want to have the most information possible in your image file.  Each time you make an adjustment, a burn, a dodge are curve, a level, a hue adjustment, etc, you are drawing on the additional information in the file that you are not able to see.  That bit depth and color depth become extremely important as you make destructive edits inside of Photoshop.  Remember, you have left the RAW arena where non-destructive is the rule.  Now, everything you do is destructive to your image.  But the more bit and color depth you have, the more you can edit your image without seeing the image pixels break down.

Only after you have done everything you intend to do with a given image should it be converted into an 8bit sRGB JPG.  At that point, your JPG is a “print only” document.  Your computer can take your 16 bit Pro Photo RGB image and convert it into an 8 bit sRGB JPG that will look, to your eyes and to the printer, exactly like it’s more perfect parent file, but, like a shallow sand drawing, it will only contain the needed color and depth to show itself as you have exported it.  Start trying to change that shallow sand drawing and you will quickly reveal the gaps between the sand crystals and the table below the patterns.

If you are anything like me, you will not use Photoshop all that often because I can do most of what I want to do inside of Adobe’s Lightroom.  If I have no editing to do to an image, I will send it directly out as a JPG and post it to web sites, to my printing service (Pictage) and use it in my album designs.  But when I have something additional to be done to an image in Photoshop, I will always export that image as a 16 bit Pro Photo RGB PSD.  My greatest concern as a photographer is to maintain the brilliance of the message in my photos with an unsurpassed quality at all stages of production.  A JPG is a necessary part of that production pipeline, but it is always and only at the very end.

We just wanted to take a second a let you know about this amazing story. Don Thompson is a Pictage photographer that donated his time to shoot this wedding. We love stories like these. Keep the inspiration coming!

For the article visit Hometown Annapolis.

What will you be doing Tuesday, Nov. 3rd at 3:10pm?

Written by: Pictage Member and Partner Conference Speaker Melissa Jill

Pictage Partner Conference is only a few short weeks away!  I’m so excited to see New Orleans for the first time, reconnect with friends from around the nation, make new friends and learn how to take my business and photography to the next level.

How is everyone doing with deciding which sessions to attend?  With so many amazing speakers to choose from it can be a tough call.  I wanted to share with you a little about my session entitled “Top 3 Keys to Long-Term Success” that will take place on Tuesday at 3:10.

You should come.
It’s going to be a jam-packed hour of learning goodness.  Don’t plan on a lot of fluff – we’re going to get down to the practical and tangible.  You are guaranteed to go home with concrete goals and the motivation to implement them.  My session will answer the question, “What are the most important things I should focus on now in order to make my business a long-term success?”  I’ve been shooting weddings in Arizona for six years and I know first hand how many things vie for our time and attention as business owners.  It’s overwhelming!  In this hour you will learn how to take control and focus on the keys to long-term success.  Learn practical tips that will help you develop a recognizable brand, network like crazy and systematize your workflow for maximum efficiency and profit.  Phew!  That’s a ton to accomplish in one hour.  But we’re going to do it.  I hope to see you there!

Melissa Jill 
Website:  http://www.melissajill.com
Blog:  http://www.melissajill.net

For more information such as speaker session schedules and registration visit the Partner Con website.

Some of Melissa’s Work:

Written by: Elizabeth Villa (Pictage Blog Team)

What would it be like to be a photographer in the White House? The following is the first post in a blog series that will answer that question through the efforts of former White House photographers Paul Morse and Ralph Alswang. They will attempt to recap their experiences through the following topics- The Buildup, The Job, and The Aftermath.

The first of these posts features Paul Morse, a Washington, DC based corporate photographer who served as White House Deputy Director of Photography from 2001 to 2007. Paul has been published in magazines and newspapers around the world including Sports Illustrated, Time, US News and World Report, Mens Journal and the New York Times Magazine. His photographs have illustrated the covers of many books on subjects such as the Los Angeles Lakers, Air Force One, and the Oval Office. His images are on display in the Smithsonian Institution.

Thank you to Paul for taking the time to answer these questions and giving us a glimpse into the process of becoming the White House Deputy of Photography.

The Buildup

What did you do before you were a White House photographer?

Before working at the White House I was working at the Los Angeles Times as a staff photographer. It was a fantastic job! My beat was sports and I was able to photograph major and minor sporting events such at the Super Bowl, NBA Championships and the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia and Sydney, Australia. Portraits were also my strong point and I lead the way in the newspaper’s transition to digital photography.

Before the LA Times I worked at the Pasadena Star-News after graduation with a degree in journalism.

When did you decide you wanted to pursue that job?

The job at the White House was never one that I pursued rather it came about by helping friend. Each President chooses his personal photographer and that person is the Director of the White House photo office. President Bush chose my close friend from college Eric Draper.

I got a call from Eric while looking for feature photos on the beach in Santa Monica on a warm January day asking if I could help him document the start of the administration. After a few days in Washington he made me Deputy Director of the photo office.

It was a tough decision to leave the newspaper.  I had a great job and friends in Los Angeles but I knew this opportunity would not come along again. I left LA on a beautiful 80-degree February day and landed the next morning after taking the red-eye to drizzling rain and 40 degree temperatures. What was I thinking!

Honestly I didn’t take the job because of politics. The job was an opportunity to document history from the other side of the ropes and have those images preserved so they I can share them with future generations. No one asked me my opinion and I didn’t write policy yet editors discount my images from the White House because of the President I worked for.

What was the interview process like and how did you get the job?

I really didn’t have a sit down interview rather Eric wanted me to work a few days to see how I would get along with the President and the White House staff.

I remember the first day clearly. My first job was to take a portrait of the whole Bush family in the Blue Room of the White House the day of the inauguration. Everything was set up and the President walked in on time and came right to me and introduced himself! I was laughing inside thinking “ I KNOW who you are!” He also thanked me for coming all the way from California to take photos of his family. Later I asked Eric when he told the President about me. He said two or three days prior which really impressed me because he had just been sworn in as President and he still remembered who I was.

The toughest part of being a White House employee is the background check. The form was 15 pages long and the FBI personally interviewed all my references and those not on my form. And I passed!

The photographs: (Courtesy of Paul Morse)

(Paul is in the bottom right corner of the above photograph, firing the remote camera!)

An opportunity for YOU to help serve the needs of Katrina survivors by creating lasting photographic memories - 

Just four years ago thousands of families from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast states were left homeless, with many of their personal belongings destroyed by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. A large majority of these families lost what could arguably be their most valued treasures – family photographs.

In response to the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina we’ll be providing hundreds of families with charitable mini portrait sessions as part of PartnerCon New Orleans! With YOUR help, all families will be provided a CD of their images the day of the shoot, along with a package of assorted prints delivered to them a few weeks later. This is your opportunity to play a direct role in making a big difference in the lives of others, while simultaneously enriching your PartnerCon experience.

We’re seeking 100 attendee volunteers to make this charitable shoot a success. Reserve your spot now!

To sign-up, visit the Partner Con website.

Written by Pictage Member: Jared Platt (Phoenix Wedding Photographer)

So your computer is slowing down to the point of a near crawl, your Adobe Lightroom database is slowing down too, but you have lots of RAM (critical to image editing speed) and a fast new processor.  Nothing has changed on your computer.  So why is everything so slow?  There are a few of things that can be effecting the general speed of your computer and your Lightroom database and they are easy to fix.

The speed of your computer may be directly proportional to your organizational skills.  If your desktop looks like a landfill with hundreds of documents and folders on it, you are probably not very organized and a slow computer is the least of your problems, but you should know that your procrastination of organizing your files is also causing your computer to slow down.  When you park larger movie files or folders with gigabytes of images on your desktop, your computer assumes you mean to use these files in the near future, so it at best continues to check the files on your desktop and at worst has them loaded at startup into ram.  Either way, you are causing a minor to a major draw on your computer’s resources.  So clean the desktop off and if you need something accessible from your desktop, put an alias folder on the desktop that references a folder in your pictures, movies or documents folder inside of your user profile on your computer.  As a bonus, you may finally get organized, that would be a novel idea.

If you have a messy desktop, you probably also have a Lightroom catalog with fifty jobs in it.  You may be done with many of them and others you are holding off, waiting for client selections, or you haven’t even started.  But there are 60,000 images in the catalog and you can’t figure out why it is slowing down?  That is a lot of images to maintain in a database that is also building and keeping previews, referencing keywords and meta data for each image as well as the adjustments, crops, and burns and dodges made to each image.  Is it too many for Lightroom to handle?  No.  But it will cost you in performance.  With all of those images, all of those changes, the catalog can get a bit slow.

There are two basic ways to speed performance of your Lightroom catalog.  The first and most obvious way is to remove old files from the catalog.  AS you complete a job, export that folder of images as its own Lightroom Catalog.  You can do this by right clicking the folder of completed images and choosing “export folder as catalog.”  Once you have exported the folder as a catalog, you can right click it again and click on the “remove” option.  This will not delete the images from your computer, but simply remove the references from your main Lightroom catalog, thus cleaning up your catalog (helping you stay organized and sane) and speeding up the operation in your catalog.

The second way to speed up your catalog is in the Lightroom preferences.  In the General Catalog Setting Preferences, you will find a button labeled “Relaunch and Optimize.”  Whenever you feel lightroom is slowing down a bit too much, click this button.  It will take a few minutes, so don’t do it unless you have a few minutes to spare.  This tool cleans up the database and optimizes it for operation speed.  I think you’ll like this little button.  And finally, in the file handling panel of the Preferences menu, you will find a section called “Camera RAW Cache Settings.”  This is placed at 1 GB as a default.  If you have some extra room on your hard drive, choose the hard drive and increase this number. I have mine at 50GB.  That is the maximum setting, but you can choose somewhere between 1 and 50.  This allows Lightroom to maintain control over a 50 GB section of the hard drive for cache purposes if it runs out of RAM.  A small cache setting means slower operation.

So clean up your desktop and your Lightroom catalog and try adjusting those settings in Lightroom and you will find your image editing experience to be a little more enjoyable.  And then you might want to clean up those piles on your floor and get through that fifteen page to do list.

So, what’s on YOUR desktop?