How To

How To Automatically Open JPG Files in Adobe Photoshop Camera RAW

Admit it – the Camera RAW interface is much more pleasant for editing photos than using a bunch of layers in Photoshop. This is why Lightroom is so popular among event photographers. But sometimes you just need Photoshop, and sometimes you shot everything as JPG for whatever reason. In this instance, you’re better off using Adobe Camera RAW for editing your JPG images.

How to do Event Photography

Event photography isn’t easy. Successfully photographing an event will usually involve hours of work. You’ll be standing on your feet for a long time, and carrying heavy camera gear, all while surrounded by a sea of people. You’ll have to compose shots quickly, and if a special or unique moment happens, you will never get a second chance to capture it, so you must be alert at all times.

But event photography can be a lot of fun, and a challenge to your skills and creativity. It’s also extremely rewarding when your photos become beloved and cherished mementos of the client and their guests that they share with everyone.

Here are my personal tips and observations from photographing events for many years. In this article we will be focusing on indoor events.

Use Spot Metering for Challenging Scenes

Inside every camera is a light meter that determines the correct exposure for any given scene. Your camera’s meter evaluates what it sees and comes up with the proper exposure based on the light levels of the entire scene. This is usually referred to as matrix metering or pattern metering, and it’s how your camera is setup by default.

The One Thing to Remember For New York City Night Photography

Shooting at night in the city isn’t easy, which is why many photographers don’t bother with night photos. You need to be precise with your technique, and having specialized gear such as fast, wide-aperture prime lenses and a camera with a good sensor is a big help. But no matter what gear you’re using, there’s one very important tip for taking good night photos.

Always Strive to Deliver High-Quality Images

Your goal as a photographer should be to show your clients, your audience and your fans images of the highest possible quality. I’m not saying you always have to “wow” people with dramatic shots of exotic locations. What I mean is that you should produce images of high technical quality. Here are some guidelines for evaluating your own images to see if they meet the standards of high-quality photography.

Using an Action Camera For Photography

GoPro pioneered the concept of an “action camera” – a tiny, rugged, easy-to-operate camera that is intended to be used to record action sports. In the years since the first GoPro was launched, many competitors such as Akaso and DJI have produced action cameras as well. Regardless of the brand, these cameras are primarily video-focused, and the newest ones are capable of recording crisp and detailed 4K and even 5K video. Though it’s not their primary function, most of these cameras are capable of doing still photography as well.

While they aren’t the best choice for general still photography, action cameras can be very useful as a photographic tool, particularly to capture very wide landscape shots. Here are some things to consider when using an action camera for photography.

Note: In this article, I used an Akaso Brave 6 Plus for all of the photographs.

How to fix the “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress” Error on HostGator

This is an off-topic post, but many photographers use WordPress as the basis of their photography portfolios and photo blogs, so I am writing it anyway.

If you’re using HostGator and you tried to update your PHP version to the most recent one (like I did) and you thereby broke your entire WordPress blog (like I did), here’s a quick fix I found that will hopefully get everything working for you again.

Even though this is specifically for those of us using HostGator, it may work with other hosting platforms that use cPanel. Or you may be able to extrapolate a solution that works for you based on this information if you’re using different control panel software or a Linux distribution on your own server. Give it a shot if nothing else is working – but remember, you are doing this at your own risk and I am not responsible if you mess up your site even more.

Advanced Quick Tip – Set Your RAW files to “Lossless compressed”

Your professional camera probably has multiple settings for RAW compression. Changing how your camera compresses RAW files can be useful for saving space while shooting, but it may have some unfortunate effects, particular if you are using an older camera with an older sensor. You may not notice it in every image, but there may come a time when an important image suffers due to how your camera handles RAW compression.

RAW Compression Settings

Whatever you do, don’t bother with Compressed RAW images, as they will sometimes give you an unfortunate dithering or gradient in your sky shots (or any shots that contain large areas of solid color) that you can’t easily remove in post processing.

Quick Tip For Photographing Stunning Sunset or Sunrise Skies

Many beginner photographers struggle with the issue of capturing detail in the sky. Whether it’s a sunrise, a sunset, or just an interesting cloud pattern that you want to capture, many times you will point your camera at the heavens and just end up with a bland, white sky.

The reason this is happening is because your camera is exposing the shot for the whole scene and not just the sky. Your camera wants to give you an evenly exposed photograph where everything is balanced. Usually this means that the camera will try to overexpose your shot to capture detail in the darker parts of your photo such as any ground, trees or buildings that may be included in the frame. Because of this, the sky in your shot will often be overexposed or “blown out”.

To fix this problem, what you need to do is force your camera to expose for the sky and only the sky. You can do that with exposure compensation.

Quick Tip for Sharpening RAW Files Accurately

There’s a simple but little-known trick in Photoshop and Lightroom that will help you sharpen your RAW photos more accurately. This trick works with any version of Photoshop or Lightroom.

To perform this trick, you’ll need to be in the Detail section of the menu, which looks like two little triangles. You’ll see all of the Sharpening sliders there. Set the Amount to 100 as a starting point.