This week from the group # 5!

Hi folks!

It is about time we talk about great photography again here on FMPB! And by great photography of course I mean the awesome contributions we keep getting in the FMPB Flickr group!

This week, we have an “untitled” work from David Urbanke out of New Jersey!

© David Urbanke

Dave has a very unique and distinct style that conveys this magical feeling his images have. He has an incredible vision of light to which he adds an even more incredible talent. He gets the perfect look out of the unusual poses the poses of his Models in combination with the light and that warm “endless summer” color scheme. At only 15 years, Dave has already pushed his photography further than most of us… if he goes on like this, this might only be the beginning of a great career!

Of course, you can find more of Dave’s work on Flickr!

I also strongly recommend a visit to his website that has just recently gone online at: www.davidurbanke.com/

You should definitely take a look at that!

By the way, do you like this image as much as I do? Well, your image can be up there too! Here’s how it works:

1. Upload your image to flickr.

2. Enter your image into the FMPB flickr group. (find it here!)

3. Put in whatever you’d like to say about your picture as a description, or send it to fredmancosu@gmail.com with a link to the picture.

I think I can speak for all the viewers when I say that we’re thrilled to have Dave’s work up here this week and we’d love to see yours in near future!

Coming up next on FMPB, the weekly portrait and more, so stay tuned!

Let’s talk gear!

Alright, I hear you guys, we had it in the polls and you guys wanted gear, so here we go!

I’m not very good at always having the newest gear, as I’m pretty much into buying only what has an actual effect on what I do. This not being Video, we’ll not see much of the 7D talk here. So let’s talk about a piece of gear that really affects stills. One I just recently got: The Cokin 8 stop solid ND filter.

I’d been reading about the Cokin system every once in a while and always lusted about getting me one of those someday. The huge problem with the things though is the availability. At least here in Switzerland, there’s no easy way to get them. At least so I thought. The other day I went to see the new 100 Macro at my photo retailer’s and saw a Cokin catalog lying around. Two surprises there, well three actually (the third being the Macros new IS)… The first was the fact that my retailer could get the Cokin stuff at all and the second was the affordability. These things are not cheap, but compared to the B&Ws and the HOYAs they’re pretty okay. Plus, once you have the holder they’re only about 30 bucks a piece. Considering that and to distract myself from wanting a 100L Macro, I got an 8 stop solid ND to start with, as its effect is the hardest to digitally replicate in post. What it does, is basically keep the equivalent of 8 F-stops of light from getting into your camera. This allows for way slower shutter speeds. Where you’d normally have a 1/100 of a second, you get 4 seconds if my math is correct (it never really is, but you get the idea ).

Today I finally found the time to test it in the field. We went out, fought the elements and got to a little pond a few miles from the house. The weather was terrible as it has been all weekend. With intense fog and hefty rain. Once on location, the first piece of gear that turned out to be very useful was the ultraflat Velbon I brought. In nature photography to be able to stretch the legs of a tripod out sidewards is a superb feature. This way we could set it up over the water and have the camera in the perfect angle. Next up was the filter. It consists of three parts. The first one is a solid metal adaptor Ring. It’s well crafted and screws into the filter Ring and broadens the front of the lens to make it fit into the the holder. It also has the weird side effect of having your lens say “FRANCE” where it should say “JAPAN”… French lenses, seriously?

With the adaptor thingy on, the holder slides right over it and clicks in with a little pin. The holder is made out of quite flexible plastic, it doesn’t feel mega solid, but then again it doesn’t have to. It has room for three filters which on the one side is good, as you can stack filters. On the other side, it protrudes pretty far out because of that. Doing that, it shows up in the frame at angles wider than 21mm. This is the first of the two only downsides of the P series. If you’re doing very wide angle photography, you should go with the larger holders of the Z series. The other downside is that one can’t use the lenscap over the adaptor ring, so you need to purchase the special Cokin lenscap or, as I do, take the whole thing off after using it.

Aside from that, the whole thing is quite cool. As mentioned, one can slide up to three filters into the holder. So far, I only have one filter so I can’t really tell how stacking will affect image quality. What I can tell though is that using one doesn’t really reflect negatively on iq. I had the fear that, given the distance between the filter and the front element, reflections could be an issue. But even with a strong light coming from behind the camera, I found no decernable flaws on that front.

Beyond that, the filter does exactly what it is designed for, it keeps a lot of light out of your camera. This makes composing and focussing your image quite difficult. Here’s where the two part solution regarding the adaptor ring and the holder really shines. You can do whatever you have to do to take your picture and then just slide on the holder with whatever filter you have stacked on there. Quite an awesome feature compared to a screw-on filter.

So… this is pretty much as far as I can go with this review so far. I still have to test it a bit more and I’ll update as I do. Yet, the first impression is very positive.

All images © Frederic Mancosu

Ghosts anyone?

Hey folks!

Its really rather sparse this week on FMPB, cauz’ Im drowning in work over here… which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but leaves the blog a little unattended.

Yet, I still managed to get outside the other night in order to have a little something to post for you guys.

So nice and ghosty, here it goes:

© Frederic Mancosu

Hope you like it for now, we’ll try to get back to the old rythm a little over the next days!

So stay tuned, there’s more TK!

Last week’s weekly portrait #6!

Hi folks!

A lot’s going on over here these days, so the weekly portrait hasn’t been all that weekly lately… sorry for that.

And what if I told you that on top of that, it’s not even really a portrait this time? Well let’s see how you like it anyway

There’s a bunch of guys in this country who (apart from being a bit crazy) are so much into rugby that even nighttime, ice and snow can’t keep them from playing. One cold and foggy winter night, I saw the floodlights on again in the distance and decided to go have a closer look. Within seconds, I was deep frozen, walking into the dark woods of the park surrounding the field. I could hear yelling as I got closer… this had to be it… and there they were…

Hope you like it!

Coming up next, another superb contribution from the group!

All images © Frederic Mancosu

The magic of LAB

Hi folks!

In post processing, every time you play with color, you automatically edit the channels and therefore modify the lightness as well. This absolutely limits the scope of what you can do, since a thing you might want to do color-wise will give a completely freakish effect lightness-wise. This can sometimes prevent you from finding color in your image where there is an awful lot of it hidden.

The whole secret to solving this problem is in outsourcing your color information… in separating it from the contrast/lightness.

The way to achieve that is to move over into the LAB color mode. There, the color channels are separated from the lightness channel. Using the curves, you can now push the colors and do crazy stuff with them… all without influencing the lightness channel, and therefore the contrast, too much.

As a result you can transform the image below into the image above with little to no effort.

© Frederic Mancosu

This week from the group # 4!

Hi folks!

Once again we’ve had some of the greatest photography contributed to the FMPB Flickr group!

This week the image in the segment is from one of my favorite fields of photography: sports portraiture!

All the way from Eugene, Oregon, this is “Kevin” by photographer Zach Ancell!

© Zach Ancell

As you can see Zach is an absolute magician with small strobes. In this image, he achieved an admirable balance, not blowing out the rim lights while not dropping the shadows either. From a technical standpoint alone, this is already a masterpiece, but that would be omitting the graphical elements which add another huge load of impact. I for one love the very minimalistic color scheme as well as the very strong and straightforward composition. It shows strength and defiance which is the key to great sports photography! Thanks so much for sharing this Zach!

By the way, Zach is quite a busy sports snapper and this is by far not his only image of that caliber. I therefore strongly recommend anyone should take a look at his website and check out his portfolio and follow his adventures on his blog, all of which you can find at : www.zachancell.com

Zach also shares a lot of his work on Flickr at: flickr.com/photos/zachancell

You should definitely take a look at that!

Do you like this image as much as I do? Well, your image can be up there too! Here’s how it works:

1. Upload your image to flickr.

2. Enter your image into the FMPB flickr group. (find it here!)

3. Put in whatever you’d like to say about your picture as a description, or send it to fredmancosu@gmail.com with a link to the picture.

I think I can speak for all the viewers when I say that we’re thrilled to have Zach’s work up here this week and we’d love to see yours in near future!

Coming up next on FMPB, the weekly portrait and more, so stay tuned!

Another little something from Iceland!

Hi folks!

Here’s another lill’ addition to the “up north” series from Iceland for you guys and gals, enjoy!

© Frederic Mancosu

Coming up next: this week’s “from the group”. Again, we got an awesome work to present here on FMPB, so stay tuned for more!

Portrait of the week # 5 and fall colors!

Hi folks,

Today I’m happy to share this image with you guys! I like it a lot, because these ladies were the most charming you can imagine. I was out shooting the fall colors when I met them. They were apparently Bosnian and didn’t speak a word of any language I’m able to communicate in and were accompanied by a quite hostile younger women who sent me off right away when I approached them. I was already backing off and must have looked quite disappointed when the two older ladies understood what was going on and signified that they’d be equally disappointed if I didn’t take their picture. This way we overrode the younger woman, talking with hands and feet and ended up with this… Enjoy!

By the way, here’re some of the fall colors from that day:

All images © Frederic Mancosu

Allyou need is gray! A little PP making of.

Hi folks!
Ever wondered why good monochrome images have so much impact? Sure, there’s a lot of “message” and composition in there, but what plays a huge role is contrast levels. Deep blacks and blatant white highlights, all without altering and jagging the grayscales make those images pop. And it’s the same with color. Putting those very graphical images aside, which only live through color, it’s quite safe to access that a great color image probably also is a great monochrome image. Invertedly, that means that in order to process a color image well, a good way is to start by converting it to grayscale. That way, you can work on the contrast levels without being distracted by the color. Once you get it right in B&W, you add the color back in again and the contrast levels will be just perfect. Verifying the statement that a great color image starts off with a great B&W image. Generally speaking anyway.
Now, lets look at an image to elaborate this:

Here’s an image I took in Iceland, at the Geysir. It’s arguably a nice composition and scene, but it’s far from having a lot of visual impact.

The first step, as described, is to convert it to grayscale (in a non destructive fashion that is, because otherwise you’re in trouble afterwards). I do that in Lightroom where it’s pretty simple, just switch to grayscale in the top right corner of the basic adjustments panel of the develop module. But it works in photoshop as well. All you have to do there is duplicate the Background layer (Cmd+J) and turn the resulting new layer into a grayscale image by using (Image>adjustments>black and white). You can also do it with adjustment layers, which probably is the better way. It’s less straightforward though, so I won’t go into this for the matter of this post.
At this point, the image should looks like this:

As you can see, it’s a bit too dark (such as to preserve the detail in the clouds, a technique that I’ll present some other time) and quite flat.
The next step is to make this as compelling a BW image as possible. In that, curves (Lightroom: curve panel) (Photoshop: image>adjustments>curves) and levels (Lightroom: curve panel>shadow and highlight sliders) (Photoshop: image>adjustments>levels) have what you need.

Add a little vignette, if you like (Filters>distort>lens correction>peripheral illumination).

Resulting in an image that looks more like this:

Way nicer, isn’t it?

Now all that’s left to do is add the color back in. Again, in Lightroom this is super easy (upper right corner in the basic adjustments panel, or the HSL panel if you prefer, does the same thing). In Photoshop, it requires duplicating the background layer one more time, putting it on top and setting it to the Color blend mode (Dropdown menu on top of the layers panel or Shift+Option+C with the layer selected). Done.

Rolling out is the image on top!

All images © Frederic Mancosu

The next step of BCL

Hi folks!

Remember this image? Right, it’s the one I didn’t really know what to do with… well Adobe solved that for me. Now, all I’ve left to do is find two people who’re good at blurry dancing and actually shoot this. In the meantime, here’s the concept shot, hope you like it:

© Frederic Mancosu