Kajo Photography - Fineart Landscapes and Panoramas

Painting with light at its best

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:24:18 +0000

It was about time I got around to processing the following shot. It’s been in my database for several months and on my mind for just as long, so one quiet evening I got to work. Layer-blending 13 different exposures takes time. Esp. when you only use little details from every image.

The whole shoot took about 2 hours, just to take one single image. If you don’t like the composition, that’s too bad because there is only one chance. Once you have decided on a location, angle, lens,… there is no changing. No going back. It’s what it is.

Every lighting technique you see in this image has been captured in a separate exposure with the help of either Brent or Gavin.

The image is called ghost. The ghost (being me) to the right of the image – trapped in some psychedelic prison made of light.
Hope you like it!

Model Shooting with off-camera flash

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:04:23 +0000

It has been a while, but I just never got around to processing the actual shot of the model shooting in the old train shed. I posted the video about it here while back. Here it is again in case you missed it:

Thanks to Brent Pearson who put this video together.

A bit of background information about this shoot. We were almost a dozen photographers crammed camera to camera (with tripods intermingled) in a small side room of a large derelict train shed here in Sydney. It is quite interesting to walk around and admire all the graffiti. Here is a shot I took about a year ago at the same place:

Anyway our makeup artist-turned-model Mandy was showing a lot of talent for modelling and she was happy to pose for us.

Brent came up with the idea of a girl wandering home after a horrible party just to find herself not being able to walk anymore and taking a rest at this very place, high heels off, clothes and hair messed up, smeared make-up…you get the picture.

The lighting was simple, yet tricky. We had a large softbox at the top and right of the frame. Triggered with two hot-shoe flahes via pocket wizards (we had 10 of them thanks to Oat from hangingpixels.com). Btw. be sure to check out his lighting workshops, they are fantastic.

The walls were light-painted with torches after Mandy had packed up. My resulting image is a combination of 9 exposures, pretty much one for every part of the image as well as a base image with Mandy in it.

The floor has been lit with very low, horizontal torch light, which gives it the grunchy feel and makes the dust look more prominent.
It’s been lots of fun to shoot with so many skilled and experienced portrait and fashion photographers… even though my passion remains landscapes

Sync your Photos with ChronoSync

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:17:15 +0000

I am using a lot of hard drives. Lots of Terra Bytes. Usually when I upload my images from my camera to the Macbook, I back them up at the same time to two additional hard drives. Those drives are two 500 GB Mercury on-the-go drives 500 GB Mercury on-the-go drives with FireWire 800 connections. They are lightning fast and can be daisy-chained so you really only need one FW 800 plug at your computer. It is really amazing and the transfer speed of FW800 makes USB 2.0 look very bad. I am really looking forward to the new USB 3.0 to be released. It is supposed to be 10x as fast as USB 2.0 (in theory).

But I digress… what I wanted to tell you about is how I keep track of all those files on several hard drives. It sometimes happens that I forget to backup my photos automatically when I upload them, or I only have one of the two additional hard drives handy. Also due to disk space issues, I only temporarily upload those photos to my main hard drive inside the Macbook Pro. Shooting RAW, you will notice sooner or later that your drive is full of photos, so that’s when I sync all my hard drives to make sure I do not miss any photo, then delete them from my main hard drive as well as from the two Mercury’s. I do this every time those 500 GB have filled up. I then sync them with my two 1 TB drives for permanent storage.
When I go on holidays I also take one of those 1TB drives containing all my photos off site and give it to a person I trust.

Ok this was the short story of my backup plan. Without syncing, you can quickly lose control over all your photos on all those drives. This is where Chronosync comes in. It simply checks two folders against each other and copies left to right, right to left, or both ways.
After several days of research and testing multiple syncing software products, this is the most sophisticated one that I found. After all it is an important task and you would not want to lose any photos, which may happen all too quickly without a good piece of software. It also allows you to analyze the folders and files before giving the go.

Make sure you have a sound system figured out for yourself. This is the one I use and I am very happy with it. Simply using the finder and keeping on top of all those files and folders on multiple hard drives is an almost impossible feat and prone to errors which may result in accidentally deleting photos, you had not yet archived.

Don’t let disaster hit you – use software like ChronoSync and always have at least 2 copies of every photo that you take.

Finally a nice sunrise

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:41:06 +0000

I was overdue for a cracker sunrise, and although I would have hoped for some more clouds, the colour in the sky was simply amazing. When we arrived at 5.30am, and the sun was still one hour away from rising, there was some pretty pink colour in the sky already.

Processing:

None of the colour in the sky got enhanced. I simply darkened down the sky with the grad tool in Lightroom.

At the time of shooting I used a 2 stop ND grad. The lighting actually required a 3-stop ND which I had in my bag but forgot to clean the day before. With a sunrise like that you cannot afford to lose any time cleaning your gear. I made sure I would not blow out the sky (by checking the histogram on my screen), so I would have no problem later on in LR to bring down the exposure another stop.

I added more detail in the water with some local sharpening and contrast adjustments.

The splashing wave in the frame was pure luck. I had a few shots with splashing waves, but this was the only shot which had most of the elements the way I wanted them to be.
Sometimes I am too lazy to spend one hour in photoshop, to enhance a shot by 5% when I am very close to the result I wanted to achieve in the first place.
I prefer spending less time processing and more time shooting lol

New tool: Fluidr

admin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:33:44 +0000

If you are anything like me and you can not fall asleep occasionally, what I do is turn on the laptop and browse the flickr galleries of my friends, always looking to push my photography and get some inspiration.
However everyone who uses flickr knows, that it can be quite a bright expierence – the white background is not particularly contributing to viewing images well. Especially at night when you are half asleep.

Here is the solution: www.fluidr.com turns flickr’s lights off.
It is a lot of fun to browse flickr via fluidr. It’s free and easy to use. Just let it allow to access your flickr account by loggin in and you’re set.

Give it a try, you may just like it even more than the original flickr

If you click on the link below you will jump straight to my photostream on fluidr.