Last summer, I did a modeling shoot for a girl named Christina. It seemed like any normal shoot with a pretty young lady. However, she is a huge nerd. I mean that in the best way possible. She’s avid World of Warcraft player, enjoys a library of video games and other similar hobbies. One hobby in particular is cosplaying. For those of you who might not understand “cosplay”, cosplay is costume play. People create a costume or outfit that replicates a popular character from a video game, anime, or whatever. Almost anyone can participate and share their affection for that particular character.
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A fellow photographer showed me a neat little tool called Pummelvision. It takes all of your photos and jams them into a rapid-fire slideshow.

Seeing them all together reminded me of where I started and where I’m at now. It makes me excited for the new year. Now that you can see all my photos together, what do you notice? Any trends or styles? I’d love to hear your feedback.

This is the second part of a two part article about the Seven Deadly Sins of Photos on Facebook. If you haven’t read the first part, click here.

5th Sin: Poor Lighting

Poor lighting comes from mainly indoor scenarios. In reality, this sin isn’t really about providing better light sources, but handling low light properly. The simplest way to handle this is to adjust your ISO. The ISO setting is how sensitive your camera’s sensor is. The higher the ISO number, the less light it needs. A setting of ISO 400 is pretty neutral, so anything less than that is appropriate for outdoor shots for people and scenery. Higher ISO settings like ISO 800 or ISO 1600 are better for low light or action shots. The disadvantage of higher ISO is that the sensor introduces more noise into the picture. However, an underexposed or blurry photo is worthless compared to a properly exposed photo that is a bit noisy. Know your ISOs and try to avoid using AUTO ISO for places with consistently dark lighting.

Along the same lines of the ISO setting is the white balance. White light looks the same to us because our eyes can naturally compensate, but different sources of white light have different amounts of red, yellow, green, and blue light. The spectrum of a tungsten light is heavy on the red and yellow side, whereas daylight is much bluer. Florescent lights have a bit more green to them. The AUTO white balance function on some cameras can be good, but it’s best to take control of this whenever you can. For most cases outdoors, use the daylight setting (usually represented by a cartoon sun). Indoors can vary, but likely you will need the tungsten or florescent setting (a cartoon light blub or a bar with lines coming off of it).
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This week’s blog post is delayed. I was going to finish Part 2 of the Seven Deadly Sins of Photos on Facebook, but some unexpected duties got in the way. Instead, I just want to wish everyone a happy and safe Thanksgiving.

Also, if you have any questions, or topics you’d like to see me cover in the future, please leave them as a comment below. I would really appreciate it!

I was lead to write this after months of frustration. My frustration came from seeing the same mistakes being made over and over again, mistakes that can be easily avoided.

1st Sin: Pointless Repetition

The sin of repetition simply involves posting too many photos of the same subject around the same time. Occasionally, people will just upload everything from their memory card to Facebook. Other times, they post all the “good photos”. This is bad for several reasons. By doing this, you disrespect your viewer’s time and attention by forcing them to go through far more photos than necessary. Most people can only give your pictures the proper attention for about 20-30 photos. By grossly exceeding their attention span, they will give up or hasten their viewing with little care. In return, this can be frustrating for the person who posted their photos, because no one likes feeling ignored.

The remedy for this is simple and powerful. It’s called DELETE. Go through all of the blatantly bad photos and just remove them. As you sift through your photos, you’ll find that there are a few your really like and a few that you are unsure about. Keep a mental note of the ‘maybe’ photos. After your first run of deletions, look at just your maybe photos and ask yourself the following.

Is this important for telling a story?

Is this photo unique compared to the rest of the album?

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A few years ago while visiting my grandmother in Florida, I was searching through some old stuff that belonged to my grandfather, Norman Hoffman. He passed away when I was young, and I didn’t get to know him very well because he suffered from Parkinson’s disease late in his life. Amongst my rummaging, I found some old photographs, particularly this interesting slide. It was old and a bit dirty, but I brought it back to Colorado with me. My intention was to make this into a little bit of a restoration project.
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Today, voting begins for Ignite Boulder 13. Ignite is a series of presentations on a broad spectrum of topics. Each presentation is 5 minutes long and the slides automatically advance every 15 seconds. Continue reading »

Welcome traveler! You’ve found my photo blog. In this space, I will talk about my recent assignments, clever musings, and possibly a few “how to” posts. While I’m well versed in Facebooking and tweeting, a regular blog will be a new experience for me so bear with me. The plan is to post roughly once a week, even if I have nothing to say. Today, I liked to tell you all about my new website that you are visiting.
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