eBook: SimpleSLR Hands-On Photography Guides by Andy Lim

SUPER PROMOTION!! 

All SimpleSLR guides are going at half price (50% off) until September 7. Use the discount code WEDDING50

Andy Lim got started in photography after leaving design college in 1992, and has given several public talks on the subject of photography. He has a gallery of travel and landscape photography, which showcases his work, some of which have been published worldwide.  Andy conducts SimpleSLR hands-on digital photography workshops, from beginners to advanced levels.

He also writes useful and practical digital photography tips on his GoodPhotography.info website. Andy Lim is an accomplished professional wedding photographer. His brand, Emotion in Pictures, attracts clients worldwide with his unique flavor of wedding and portrait photography.

He bring this quite useful collection at an affordable price in an eBook format to help you master your speedlights.

In 3 different flavors that goes from Hands on Photography to Portrait Lighting and Portrait Recipes just as easy as 1, 2, 3.

This will definitely improve your photography and the way you handle your speedlights.

Hands-On Photography Guide
Learn to Take Better Pictures in 4 Hours

This is the electronic version of Andy Lim’s SimpleSLR PhotoClass. Having this e-book is almost like being there at Andy’s class, because the exercises that he takes his class participants through have been distilled here.

Unlike a regular book, it’s designed to quickly get you up to speed with basic photography principles, and provides a platform for you to experiment and refine your techniques. This is not another e-book on photography theory. Instead, Andy provides plenty of hand-holding using easy-to-understand conversational language.
Learn to take better pictures in 4 hours with this e-book!

We start off with a section of ‘Photography Exercises’ to familiarize you with the basic techniques of photography, using a show-and-tell approach. This breakthrough approach has been proven time and again to be effective in getting beginners to start experimenting intelligently with photography. Andy’s approach emphasizes deep understanding, and strives to make photography simple.

In the accompanying section called ‘Analyzing The Shot’ Andy takes you through his thought process with the photographs that he has taken, describing how he arrived at the combination of settings used for each shot, and further advice on how you can apply these techniques to your own photographs.

Lastly, great care has been taken to design an e-book that is easy to use, elegantly crafted and most importantly effective in teaching you photography. This e-book is horizontally laid-out, which maximizes your screen area for reading (instead of the portrait orientation that many e-books use). Paragraphs are narrower for easier reading, and diagrams/photos are used throughout to illustrate each point.

Preview this e-book by checking out a few sample pages. This will give you a good idea what to expect when you purchase it.

Portrait Lighting Guide

This series of guides aims to help photographers master a key aspect of wedding and portrait photography, which is lighting using a variety of methods: speedlights, available light as well as natural light.

Available light does not always mean natural light, because available light can come from any light source, including the overhead spot light used in a wedding ballroom.
View a sample page from this guide.

SimpleSLR Portrait Lighting is the anchor guide that will help you create portraits at the speed of light. I will show you simple lighting techniques that create powerful results, which can be put together very quickly using the most basic equipment. This is the first guide you should purchase as it contains foundation skills for using speedlights effectively.

Portrait Lighting Techniques On-the-job skills of a wedding and portrait photographer, revealed using an approach that is easy to understand. Available to you at prices that are a steal!

Efficiently Organized Pages packed with useful information and how-to diagrams. Illustrated with actual portraits by professional photographer Andy Lim.

Less Is More Contrary to popular belief that more pages are better, SimpleSLR digital photography e-books get the point across with fewer pages.

Elegantly Crafted Photography Ebooks Landscape format PDF e-books designed to read well on your screen. Works on any computer or Ipad. Print them out if you like!

Portrait Recipes Vol.1
Indoor Portrait Photography

In VOLUME 1 of the 3-volume companion guides Portrait Recipes (available individually or as a bundle), various portrait scenarios in indoor portrait photography are illustrated, and 8 different detailed lighting setups are revealed.
 
Detailed diagrams showing placement of lights (be it speedlights or available light) accompany each scenario, with EXIF settings shown, and my thought process described.

Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

These are the 8 scenarios in this volume of Portrait Recipes. Each scenario comes with its own set of challenges, and I will reveal portrait photography lighting techniques that include:

• how to solve indoor portrait photography lighting challenges on a case-by-case basis
• change the look of the portrait easily without tedious post-production
• how a speedlight-lit portrait compares to one that was shot entirely with available light
• quick guerrilla-style lighting techniques that deliver results with a basic set of equipment
• portrait photography with speedlights

With these tips, you can create natural looking photography with flash, and confidently tackle any lighting situation during your next portrait or wedding shoot!

Portrait Recipes Vol.2
More Indoor Portrait Photography

In VOLUME 2 of the 3-volume companion guides Portrait Recipes (available individually or as a bundle), various portrait scenarios in indoor portrait photography are illustrated, and 8 different detailed lighting setups are revealed.
 
Detailed diagrams showing placement of lights (be it speedlights or available light) accompany each scenario, with EXIF settings shown, and my thought process described.

Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

These are the 8 scenarios in this volume of Portrait Recipes. Each scenario comes with its own set of challenges, and I will reveal lighting techniques for portrait photography that include:

• how to solve indoor portrait photography lighting challenges on a case-by-case basis
• change the look of the portrait easily without tedious post-production
• how a speedlight-lit portrait compares to one that was shot entirely with available light
• quick guerrilla-style lighting techniques that deliver results with a basic set of equipment
• portrait photography with speedlights

With these tips, you can create natural looking photography with flash, and confidently tackle any lighting situation during your next portrait or wedding shoot!

Portrait Recipes Vol.3
Outdoor Portrait Photography

In VOLUME 3 of the 3-volume companion guides Portrait Recipes (available individually or as a bundle), various portrait scenarios in outdoor portrait photography are illustrated, and 8 different detailed lighting setups are revealed.
 
Detailed diagrams showing placement of lights (be it speedlights or available light) accompany each scenario, with EXIF settings shown, and my thought process described.

Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

These are the 8 scenarios in this volume of Portrait Recipes. Each scenario comes with its own set of challenges, and I will reveal lighting techniques for portrait photography that include:

• how to solve outdoor portrait photography lighting challenges on a case-by-case basis
• change the look of the portrait easily without tedious post-production
• how a speedlight-lit portrait compares to one that was shot entirely with available light
• quick guerrilla-style lighting techniques that deliver results with a basic set of equipment
• portrait photography with speedlights

With these tips, you can create natural looking photography with flash, and confidently tackle any lighting situation during your next portrait or wedding shoot!

Hands-On Photography Guide
Learn to Take Better Pictures in 4 Hours

This is the electronic version of Andy Lim’s SimpleSLR PhotoClass. Having this e-book is almost like being there at Andy’s class, because the exercises that he takes his class participants through have been distilled here.

Unlike a regular book, it’s designed to quickly get you up to speed with basic photography principles, and provides a platform for you to experiment and refine your techniques. This is not another e-book on photography theory. Instead, Andy provides plenty of hand-holding using easy-to-understand conversational language.

Learn to take better pictures in 4 hours with this e-book!

We start off with a section of ‘Photography Exercises’ to familiarize you with the basic techniques of photography, using a show-and-tell approach. This breakthrough approach has been proven time and again to be effective in getting beginners to start experimenting intelligently with photography. Andy’s approach emphasizes deep understanding, and strives to make photography simple.

In the accompanying section called ‘Analyzing The Shot’ Andy takes you through his thought process with the photographs that he has taken, describing how he arrived at the combination of settings used for each shot, and further advice on how you can apply these techniques to your own photographs.

Lastly, great care has been taken to design an e-book that is easy to use, elegantly crafted and most importantly effective in teaching you photography. This e-book is horizontally laid-out, which maximizes your screen area for reading (instead of the portrait orientation that many e-books use). Paragraphs are narrower for easier reading, and diagrams/photos are used throughout to illustrate each point.

Preview this e-book by checking out a few sample pages. This will give you a good idea what to expect when you purchase it.

Enjoy this great set and get them all while they last...

Lenstag Aims to End Camera and Lens Theft

Nowadays with so much gear floating around and also with lot's of other eye of the beholder peaking around the corner the streets are now less safer than before and when carrying your gear you MUST HAVE an insurance to cover it at.

Your Precious!!!

They are never safe even if insured, and when you lost them and get stolen you rush to foruns and friends databases to try and keep track to them.

It's always a pain and in most cases you will never get them back, even after spending several hours reporting them to the police and insurance company.

I know that most of the online databases where you could mostly try to find your gear by serial number (Flickr or Google) aren't our best friends but then came Lenstag.

Well you can say puff!! it's an online free service and no one would care about this.

Well let me explain you something!!

Lenstag was created by Google engineer Trevor Sehrer and is an online equipment registry that makes it easier to report and track stolen cameras and lenses.

Let’s take a look at how the service works. It starts with a simple one step sign in/up form. Enter your email and password, and you’ll soon find yourself looking at a main registry in which you can list out all the gear you own.

 

After you sign in to your account you will your account. At this moment you will not have much there except a link to Share your gear list with your friends, that is very useful and you can customize as you please in the settings area.

Let's Start to add gear. You can register any gear you would like but some are already in there, for the most used gear anyway. As you start to type a list will show you the options, but if your gear is not in the list you can add it manually.

The same for your lenses and other accessories.

Here is a list of some gear I set and are now ready to be verified by ticking the blue icon or removed by clicking on the red trash icon.

After you have registered all your gear online, it's time to verify if it's really yours.

This may be the part where you will back away just because it will take you a little longer to have all your gear photographed.

Don't get yourself carried away by this step, this will really make a proof the gear is yours and is a great safety precaution to have it registered. Not like on Canon CPS or Nikon NPS where you can have all your old lens and cameras even the ones you have already sold so that you can have that Platinum membership.

Don't be LAZY go and take pictures of all your registered gear and make this happen ASAP!!!

If you have sold some gear or want to transfer it to someone else this is also possible, just follow the steps.

Then if you have some stolen gear that was already registered you can report it stolen, just that simple.

This is the message that will pop up after you report it stolen. Once this report is filed, your gear will be marked as stolen in the Lenstag system.

For example, a photographer buying a lens on Craigslist will now have an easy database to query for figuring out whether they’re buying stolen wares. Police departments and pawn shops can also use the Lenstag registry for easy lookups.

In addition to providing the information through a Lenstag search, the site attempts to make the stolen gear report show up in Internet searches. Each stolen piece of gear has its own public web page that lists it as a stolen item.

And you can also check the online gear that was already reported stolen. This way you can buy your 2nd hand gear on ebay or somewhere else with "some" safety. I say "some" has this will not contemplate for the moment all the stolen gear that are out there but it's a good starting point.

This page is indexed by search engines such as Google. What this means is that you won’t need to do any special searches on the Lenstag website — a simple search on Google for a serial number and a keyword (e.g. “stolen,” “lenstag”) will do.

Larger businesses have already begun partnering with Lenstag in order to keep a handle on their gear. These include two large equipment rental companies, LensRentals and BorrowLenses, who are now utilizing the system to reduce theft and speed up equipment recovery.

There is another place where you can look for stolen cameras and we talked about that in this Lighting Mods article "Stolen Camera Finder, helps you find your camera".

3 Basic Lighting Setups for Great Photos

So, you have some great photography lighting equipment but you aren’t sure how to best use it. Or, you’re still looking for photography lighting equipment, but you don’t know what you need for what you’ll be doing. Don’t sweat it! In this article, we’ll be looking 3 basic lighting setups for great photos that you can use to help you get the best pictures that you can snap.

1. Paramount lighting.  Paramount lighting is a style of lighting setup that is used with females due to the high cheekbones and good skin tones that are focused on – it makes men look hollow. The main light is high and directly in front of the subject’s face, the filler light is under the main light, and the overhead light opposite the main light should only hit the hair, not the forehead or face. This creates a very “highlighted” look and can make some amazing portraits.

2. Rembrandt Lighting. The Rembrandt Lighting setup makes a small highlight on the shadowed cheek of the person you’re photographing. The main light is down and to the side of the subject. The overhead lights are closer to the subject, and the background light should be put overhead. This creates highlights on the cheeks that make the eyes and cheekbones stand out on the subject – it’s more commonly used in males, but females are also featured.

3. Profile Lighting. Profile lighting provides a very stunning look that focuses on the features of the subject’s face. As suggested by the name, the subject’s face will be turned 90 degrees from the camera. It makes the features on the subject’s face look more elegant. The main light is placed behind the subject so that it makes the face “pop” out in the image. The hair and neck will also stand out, which means you need to be careful how the main light is positioned. The background light is positioned to the side of the subject, depending on how they are sitting and what way their head is tilted.

So what sort of setup will you use? What are you looking for in your studio that will make it different than other photography studios? How will you setup your room so that you can get the best portraits and pictures with your lighting setup? Most setups call for anywhere from 3 to 5 lights, so consider that when you’re setting up your studio. 

Setups are quite simple to do without a lot of hassle and strain on what you are already doing. They can be placed in different areas of the room and not take up any space if you do it correctly. There are a variety of photography lights out there to choose from, and each of them have their own pros and cons when it comes to whether you should use them or not. Do your research and determine which lights you want to purchase and what sorts of setups you are going to use.

If you’re looking for a great place to buy photography lighting equipment, consider TheLAShop. They have all of the photography lighting equipment that you will ever need, and they will help you choose exactly what you need for your studio or other purposes. Check out The LA Shop today.

eBook: The Art of Baby Belly Photography

Michael Zelbel brings another great exciting eBook to his collection. This time combining beauty, pregnancy and awesome simple lighting setups for everyone.

 
With this eBook will provide you with everything you need know in order to become excellent at

portraying female beauty during pregnancy

• Posing her for charming pictures with belly
• Lighting setups which work for bump and beauty
• Our best photo ideas from cliché to creative

What you will find inside the great PDF book

Tips, tricks and 5 actionable steps

We like our readers to follow us through 5 steps of baby belly photography in order to master it on all levels:

1. Essentials like the choice of gear and the timing of baby belly photo shoots
2. Lighting the way which brings the best out of her
3. Do’s and don’ts of posing a pregnant model
4. Clothing and why pregnancy trousers are out
5. Shooting ideas for the perfect picture

 
This is just a simple and easy 65 page ebook that you can always have with you during your sessions on you iPhone or iPad and that will help you improve your sessions.

You also get a lot of Lightning Diagrams to help you out on each of the presented situations.

 The entire course is nicely packed into a handy eBook in PDF format. You are free to keep a copy of it on all of your devices. It's working great on PC, Mac, Linux, iPad, Android, Nook, Kindle and any device which can display a simple PDF.

100% recommended, go get it NOW!!!


About Michael Zelbel

Michael is a fantastic German fellow photographer with studio in Dusseldorf that started is passion for Boudoir with his Chinese wife (the one you can contemplate in this eBook).

He started in 2005 and since then he been growing as a photographer and a passionate into Boudoir and Fashion photography. He is also a share and writer photographer about it's experiences with small portable flashes in his great blog SMOKING STROBES where you can learn some great tips and how to videos about his lighting and compositions.

Take a look at his work and follow him over the links below:

Personal Webpage (Michael Zelbel)
Smoking Strobes
Facebook
Twitter
How to Videos 
YouTube Channel

PictureDefense Helps when Dealing With Photo Theft

I'm pretty sure it has happen to you before so today's post goes directly to you who has been robbed or have been dealing with photo theft recently.

PictureDefense.com website is a page that you will want to keep track of and have it always at hand. Had it to your favorites, blog about it, share all over the place...

This is something that you eventually will need right now or in a near future and if you are dealing with your photos all over the place posted by another person.

READ IT RIGHT NOW !!!

What PictureDefense.com has to offer you?

On their free website they will address what to do if you found your photo on...

- Someone's Facebook profile, fan page, or group
- Any website hosted and owned by Google. Like Blogger, Blogspot, YouTube, and Google+ - Any website owned by Yahoo like Flickr.com
- Another photographer's free standing website
- Used in a web advertisement on a business website Hope this could give you a starting point to track and remove down your photos from those posers out there.

To have an idea on how this could help you out, here is a great video explaining it and posted by James Beltz from PhotoTips.

Tip: Color Label Matching between Photo Mechanic and Adobe Lightroom & Bridge

Happy New 2013 everyone!!

Today I wanted to call your attention to Star Ratings and Color Labels crossing information between Photo Mechanic and Adobe Lightroom & Bridge that I hope you will find interesting.

One thing that has been bugging me around for quite some time has been the Color Label synchronize settings between Photo Mechanic, Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom.

By now most of you been laughing at this but I find it quite a bit disturbing and annoying why the same company would keep Adobe Lightroom and Bridge with different settings on these matter. It took me quite a while to figure it out how they could simply match and sync the Star ratings but not the Color Schemes.

Simply frustrating for people who want to have the Star Ratings for one thing and then Color label them to do another thing, maybe have the Star Ratings for the client and Color labels for internal purposes or something that one could find it useful.

I contact Photo Mechanic team has they have been so great on support and also on beta testing that Bob Russel promptly sent me an answer saying that Photo Mechanic has its IPTC/XMP to match Adobe and some other software both in Star Ratings and Color Label schemes.

WOW, the answer came fast... but after trying out their solution to the problem I still could not find a away to get them to sync. I changed Colors, I moved to Bridge and nothing, Lightroom on the other hand indicated that something has been changed in the xmp file and needed to import the new files but when I did so the Star rating would appear but not the color :( it just simply gave me a white square on the right corner, in Library module, of the photos I did change the Color labels. Damn!!!

So I decided to investigate since the square had changed, there must be something to configure or something was not playing right between these applications.

And here are my findings: In fact they work pretty well altogether and they go nicely you just need to configure them properly and here is what you will need to do to each one of them.

Go to Photo Mechanic preferences and on the General tab you will get the Color Classes (has they called them) by default you should get something like this:

So, with this settings I went to Photo Mechanic and set Star Rating and Color Label to Red for one of my testing photos (see that I have already checked the Synchronize tag for Color Class with IPTC/XMP).

 Then opened Adobe Lightroom and went into the folder that I previously have imported and got the sign message on the top right of the photo that something has changed.

 Click on the icon on top right and you will get the Import dialog showing you that something has been changed in that xmp file.

After import this is what the photo looks like in Adobe Lightroom.

You can see that the Star Rating is correct but the color should be red around the photo and not represented by a white dot on the right corner...

Did the same thing on Adobe Bridge and this is what happened.

Exactly the same thing :(

So how do you configure this to work between them and correctly?

Simple and here is how...

First you need to configure Photo Mechanic to use the same Color Labeling system has Adobe Bridge.

And why Adobe Bridge you may ask??

- Well to tell you the truth I match them all to Bridge because I did not seem to find a way to relate Adobe Bridge with the other two so I decided that Adobe Bridge would be the main sync for the others.

So go into Photo Mechanic preferences and into General tab and set your Color Classes as follow:

You can save it (on that thunder icon above the To Do on the right) has Adobe Bridge Default for a later reference.

Afterwards you move into Adobe Lightroom and you can find the Color Label settings in the menu. Look at image below:

Set it to Bridge Default or you can edit it with your own settings. Take a look at the editing menu below:

When you go through all the Presets you can see that they already have one for Adobe Bridge Default, Lightroom Default and a Review Status that have some other Color Labeling. At this point you can create whatever Color Labels you want for your work but have to remember if you want to have them all 3 in sync you have to choose the Bridge Default.

 And that's it!! Well it took me a while to figure this out so I decided to share it so that if anyone would encounter this would not take time and loose their patience over this simple thing.

I've also created 3 presets for Photo Mechanic that I've saved and gave them the names to each program so you can always reference and change them later has you please.
This would make your life much easier.

Download them here.


I do not understand why Apple did not sync Adobe Lightroom with Bridge and created instead a different way to sync them. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you can create different Color Labels in Lightroom for different situations of your work.

I'm also hoping that Adobe would fix the re-import of the xmp files after been altered in Photo Mechanic as this would cause the lost of all the editing.

Did you noticed that in Adobe Lightroom Develop module the only slider that does not have scale is the Exposure slider, did they forgot or is this done on purpose and all the sliders get the darken part on left except for the contrast?? LOL   

Hope you enjoy this tip, and see you for the next round.

Cheers 2013!!