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

DIY: Sensor Brush Visible Dust Motor Replacement

Not much have changed since I bought my "Never Leave Home Without it" Visible Dust Arctic Butterfly 724 and The Sensor Loupe kit and the way I clean my sensors.

In a previous 2008 post I taught you how to clean your sensor (Cleaning Dust Bunnies With a Butterfly), I know that back then we were in 2008 and cameras were not so evolved in auto cleaning sensor technology now in 2013 a lot has changed but since then the only real factor that changed was an upgraded the Arctic Butterfly new version the 724 (Super Bright) which now is equipped with 2 super bright LEDs Sensor Brush and changed it's color to a marine blue ;)

This Arctic Butterfly been traveling with me all over the place, from dusty environments to some splashy ones and well... a couple of weeks ago the brush motor just got it's last days and at a certain point it stopped rotating completely.

So I decided to make my hands dirty and find a replacement for it.

It's been a while that I did not post anything here on the blog on DIY (Do It Yourself) matter so here goes this post, to the fans of DIY, that I hope it would help you save a couple of bucks on buying a new one.

I will take you step by step on how to simply replace the motor with a much better and quite one ;)

Enjoy

Well first it took me a couple of days to really find a replacement unit for the motor itself. Just because I did not have any clue or idea what kind of motor or what type and RPM the guys at Visible Dust were using for theirs.

Luckily I found, here in Europe, RobotShop.com and these guys have almost any kind of motors for... well just take a look at their page and you will see what I'm talking about.



Well first let's start with the gear we need to make this simply replacement.

This is an easy procedure and what we need is:

- Damaged Arctic Butterfly ;)
- New motor Brushed DC Motor (RM1A) RB-Sbo-48
- Small knife to open the plastic case (nothing special here) and actually do not even need to cut.
- Welding Iron
- Some soldering



First let's start with the new motor that I happily found at RobotShop and that you can safely order has they ship very quickly to any place in Europe

Here is the direct reference for the motor

Brushed DC Motor (RM1A) RB-Sbo-48

It's not the same motor as the original Arctic Butterfly but it fits perfectly.



Here you can see the back part of the new motor RM1A with the connections. 



Here is the label order :)



Then I just attached the brush to see if it fit's the hole and it works, Excellent !!!



Next Step, you just open the battery cover of the Arctic Butterfly, remove the batteries and put the brush inside the protective cover so it won't get contaminated with oil or dust.

REMEMBER that the bush tips cannot touch anything or else it will contaminate your sensor with dust or oil particles. This is a tool that needs to always be clean, just remember that.



Now lets carefully open the Arctic Butterfly by starting near the button switch. This would be a much easier place to start open it up as soon has you lift it it will pop open. Not too much pressure needed.



Here it is... this is what looks inside.



Now let's remove the button switch and put it aside so you don't loose it.



This is the switch button and you can see the hole where it connects to the switch inside the cover and this is, when you assemble it later on, the part that goes down inside the hole.



Next you carefully lift the motor. You can see here that my motor had already a couple of visible damage and time corrosion and also some kind of oil inside??? (go figure...)



Closer look at the motor.



At this point you can clearly see that it has 2 soldering connection one by the red cable and the other on the yellow cables that goes also connects to the 2 front led's. Also notice that at the yellow junction is an iron part connected that comes from the battery connector and also needs to be soldered with the yellow cables.



Let's Start by unsoldering the red cable has this would be much easier to start from.



Now to the other side we unsolder the yellow connection cables.



Here is the connected silver iron that I talked earlier and that also needs to be soldered with the yellow cables so the motor can have it's power.

(This iron piece can be easily removed and later on put it to place with no problem).



Let's take a look at a side-by-side on the motors. On the right you have the new one and at left the older model.

You can see now that they are different and also the connections are on a different position but the new one fits almost perfectly in the cover.



This is what looks like when you remove the old motor. You see that the box it's full of some kind of oil that later on I've cleaned before putting the new motor. Maybe this happens because the motor is opened... well who knows...



To make it easier to solder I just put some solder on the tips before I started the procedure this way it will ensure me a quick solder of the parts. I've solder the + side to the red wire.



You can see that I've also removed the battery connect iron part so I can solder it better with the yellow connections.



Here in detail after putting the iron part to place. I also had to bend it a little bit has the connections were a little apart from the old motor one's.



Side by Side of the motors.



Another side by side view of the motors.



Let close this thing up by first putting the button switch into place.



Put some batteries and pray...



Insert the brush...



Ups... I noticed that something wasn't right has I tested the motor before closing and everything was working good but when I put the brush it did not worked :(

Fear not... quick and closer look revealed that at some point when closing the shaft the mother been pressed to one side and now the brush is touching one of the parts of the case.

Let's open this again and check out what is going on...



GOT IT!!!

Since the motor has a closer connections to the body part it touches this plastic mount at far back.



I just use an x-act to cut the tips of the plastic so that the motor connections would not touch it.

I did not unsolder the motor I simply and carefully moved it aside so I can cut this.



And after this last step I have my working and trusty Visible Dust Artic Butterfly working again.

What I noticed from the older model is that this one is a much more quite one and does not zuuummmbbb that much.

Hope this could help you save a couple of bucks when yours stop working.

If you want to know how to use it please also read my 2008 article Cleaning Dust Bunnies with a Butterfly

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!!