March 18
I updated the march madness tournament bracket with the results from round 2. I then finished my organization of the pictures I took at Spring Training.
March 19
I processed all the pictures I planned to release in gallery post on the site, then wrote the post. I process pictures by opening them in Adobe Bridge and adjust the different settings of the pictures.
I shoot all my pictures in RAW so that I can go into Bridge and adjust levels for different elements of a picture. RAW is exactly what it sounds like, a starting point for an image with tons of information. For example, one of my RAW files is 22 MB. After I converted it to a JPG, after adjusting different elements to make the image look better, it is now 3 MB. JPGs get rid of a lot of information to make the image more size efficient. I can adjust levels in the JPG format, but due to the lost information, it doesn’t work as well.
I start at the top and work my way down. Exposure is adjusted first, then recovery, fill light, blacks, and finally brightness. As I’m adjusting I’m looking between the image and the histogram. Ideally, the histogram should have a hill shape, but that’s rarely the case. I end up trying to get the histogram as close to looking like a hill as possible and watching the image to see what I like. I’ll also crop the image to get rid of polls, garbage cans and other things in the shot that tend to draw the eye away from the main focus of the image. If I like the image as is I’ll save it directly from Bridge.
Other times I’ll open the image in photoshop to remove stuff from the shot or add a filter. I typically add filters if a shot is blurry, but I like the shot anyway. Other times I’ll experiment with shots, like this:
The idea here was to get the words and the number on the back of the jersey to show along with the shadow. Again, I was experimenting. Next I uploaded the pictures to the website and created a gallery post for them, which will release Friday. I’ll be uploading all the pictures to the gallery on this site as well.