The other day I was surfing the net and I ran into this video on Fstoppers.com. A lot of the time they have behind the scene videos of high-end shoots with hot models and sexy expensive gear, but the guy in this video… didn’t even have an SLR! Still, he shot great street portraits that I didn’t expect from a point & shoot camera. It gave me a wakeup call that photography isn’t about gear and that there is beauty all over the place; it’s just that we haven’t found it (yet).
Intro
In the age of DSLRs and Photoshop, some people walk in the opposite direction of advancing technology and whip out their film cameras such as the Holga to be relieved from the overwhelmingly large number of options and seek for simplicity. It’s like the whole “going back to nature” thing and that humans are having too much control of their lives.
Summer was half-way over, and I REALLY wanted to take photos of people other than my family, or random strangers on the street coming home from work. I was looking to experiment with fashion photography just on the streets of Tokyo, so I gave my friend Aily a message asking her to model for me, and she was totally cool with it. I hadn’t met her in years since I graduated from my international school, but according to facebook photos my other friends, she was pretty and had unique clothes so she was perfect for the job.
Your workflow is very important because it can save you from irritation and shorten the amount of the time you spend in front of your computer. Efficiency is key here.
Since I shoot for my school paper, I take quite a few photos – sometimes I end up taking close to 3,000 in one afternoon if there are several sports games, events, or performances going on. But because I’m also a full-time student with loads of work, I need to be able to quickly sort the RAW files, adjust them if necessary, and output them as jpeg.
In this article I will take you through my basic workflow in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I am a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, so I will be teaching you those along the way as well. I use a Mac, but if you use a PC, just replace the Cmd (command) key with the Ctrl (control) key and everything should work in the same way.
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RAW. It’s often a mysterious thing for beginners, and the jump from jpeg to RAW is not easy either because it requires putting in more effort and learning new software.
What is Raw?
RAW is just another format similar to jpeg that your camera uses to save the images.
Think of jpeg as cooked steak and RAW as raw beef. With the steak, you just have to pour some sauce on it and it’s good and easy right? But you can’t really make anything else out of it. On the other hand, you can do all sorts of stuff with the raw beef by “cooking” it creatively and make a delicious meal that’s perfect for you! (Continued)
What would you do if all of your data on your computer disappeared right now? All of those memorable photos, funny videos, class papers, internet bookmarks – everything. It could happen – and it did to me. It’ll probably happen to you too someday.
The device that stores all of the information in your computer, the hard drive, is a mechanical device that has a very sensitive disk inside that spins 5,000 rotations per minute. It also has a little metal arm called the “head” that hovers right over the disks to read the information.
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