Okay - here is my first trial with the equipment i'll have. Comments, critique? http://imgur.com/a/ot4ws I messed up the first picture a little and the house is not very sharp because of it. Also having a little trouble conveying the true colour of the rocks in picture #3 (it's the same location as #4 and #5 and looks hella different.) But overall, I'm pretty happy with the result :)
TOUGH LOVE FOLLOWS This is the last time you will ever show up a picture you "messed up" even "a little." Your job is not to take pictures, it is to make images and with cards as big and cheap as they are you have zero excuses to ever not capture exactly what you're after. Never take "a photo." Take 20 at least. Literally. Hold down the damn shutter and get five minutely identical shots each time. Set it to bracket. Shoot up or down 1EV in half-stop increments always. ALWAYS have what you intended to be in focus, in focus. Picture 3 looks like ass because it's in shade. Your psychovisual complex has better gamut than your camera. You will never make a shade photo look as good as a "in light" photo. That said, post-processing is essential with digital photography. Behold. Instagram filters for Lightroom. WORKFLOW 1) take a shitload of pictures 2) Ingest a shitload of pictures 3) go through and rate good stuff 3, 4, or 5 4) Filter off everything unrated 5) Tag everything that's left 6) Auto-adjust everything that's left 7) Tweak the shit that's good 8) rate everything that isn't good 2 9) Winnow it down to one or two good shots of every subject 10) SHOW THAT. Shot #2 shows promise. When you shot that, did you blow out the highlights? Because if not, bring the sky back in with a grad filter. And if you did, get good at fixing it.
Better? It's still a bit blown out, but it was literally the sun there. I guess I'll have to shoot a bunch because they're asking me 7-10 shots per subject so they can make their selection too. Time to watch some data lightroom management tutorials. You're right about not showing messed up pics anymore, one big reason I did was to show I was out there working on something and not just sitting at home all day. I'll have to go re-shoot that location properly tomorrow morning - at least it will show fast progress on my part. I think they expected a bit of a learning curve when they hired someone without a real background in photography (theoretical or practical), but the steeper it is the better! Thanks a bunch for all the feedback, appreciate the tough love :) I feel like a better photographer just after reading this. Do you think I should mess around with LUTs? I was thinking of keeping it as non-sylized as I could, since the point is to sell rocks and I don't want to colours to be too far off reality. And trendy faded black pics are going to look like shit in a couple of years.
Hella better. Do you know your histogram? In challenging light situations (like shooting into the sun) don't shoot what you can see, shoot what you can record. Obviously if the actual sun is in the frame you will have a little clipping but if the whole damn sky is white you need to underexpose, just not so much that you lose detail in the blacks. And yes. You need to know Lightroom better than you know Gmail. You're going to spend about 1.5x as long cranking through media as you are shooting it. The better you get at doing that the better a photographer you will become. LUTs - I had to look that up as to how it related to photography. We use them for color correction in cinematography because the big scary RAW cameras used to spit out log color and you needed to turn it into linear color before you could show it to the director and have him not freak out. But apparently when photographers talk about shit like that, they're basically saying "I wish we could cross-process film without having to shoot film!" YeahDON'T. It's artsy bullshit advertising crap that if the art director wants, they would have asked a looooooong time ago. Put it this way - it was the core of an iconic Gap ad campaign... fifteen fucking years ago. Not only that but you can do that shit whenever the fuck you want. If they wanna cross color your shit once it gets to editorial they can do it without your assistance (or permission). If I were you, I'd shoot a color card every time the light changes and then tweak it in Lightroom until it's what you need. I recommended the MacPhun stuff because there's a bunch of fucking handy shit in there:
This girls in the photo are the focal point, and their color is washed out and flat. If you'd shot this image in three frames - one over, one under exposed - then you could bring the color back into the girls and really make them pop. KB's got good advice. I've seen his photos. He knows of what he speaks!
I don't know that I agree. The shot is actually a very well composed line-out - the cobbles recede to infinity and the tower and tree line recede to the same point, which happens to be the sun. I might be tempted to rule-of-thirds it a little better but cropping is going to happen at the editorial stage anyway. When you consider that the shot largely exists to sell the beauty of the cobblestones it works really well; if you were to use this shot in editorial the bottom half of the image is available for copy. If the goal wasn't the cobblestones I'd fuckin' silhouette every human and tree in it. They're too muddy and disorganized to feature. Rather than making them pop I'd try to will them into oblivion. elizabeth - this would be a great use for an ND filter because if you had like an 80% or 90% gray on there, and shot into the sun, you could get a sky in one shot, get a long exposure on the tiles in another, and in that long exposure you'd have motion blur on the humans such that they suggested movement without being more than stand-ins for traffic. If she did want to tweak the saturation on the girls you'd do it with the brush tool. That rock wasn't nearly that red in the captured file, nor was the grass that green. But it sure as fuck was to my eye, so it sure as fuck got tweaked.This girls in the photo are the focal point, and their color is washed out and flat.
Yup rule of thirds has been a struggle. Submitted pictures with 1/3 cobblestones = not enough cobble stones was the feedback 2/3 cobblestones pictures are harder to pull off so they don't look too boring. And then i start running into depth of field problems where i got to do multiple shots to later blend everything in focus. (Which i still need to pull off successfully - tried a couple times today but turns out i need to take more pictures than i anticipated for everything to be sharp) Taking pretty pictures is significantly easier than taking pretty pictures of x. But with all the tutorials I've been watching and all you guy's help, I'm improving fast imo :) I feel like todays work is a lot better: https://imgur.com/a/RrH7F Still working at turtle pace in lightroom. Doesn't help my usual shortcuts don't work and sometimes mess up something when they correspond to some other action.
Ctrl-Z is your friend in Lightroom. Slap it like you're playing Space Invaders. If you need more depth-of-field you need to shoot at a higher stop. f/22, f/28 will solve all DOF problems. It will also suck away all light. Tripod. Shutter release cable. You need to get closer to the ground. If you're looking to make those cobblestones pop, get fuckn' on 'em. I've got a Bogen 3221 (that, I realize, is maybe a little older than you are) and one of the coolest things is it's got tripod threads on the bottom of the riser, too... which means you can mount your quick release down there, drop the camera upside down, and literally have it on a tripod half an inch above the ground. 
Yeah, thank god Ctl-Z works everywhere! I was shooting at the highest stop for most the shots - but the really close stones are still not in focus perfectly. Maybe i'm just being picky... Got that tripod and shutter release so all should be good. Scored the good manfrotto stuff, it doesn't do any fancy flips but is pretty solid :)
True on the exposure, the camera has a setting where it automatically takes 3 or 5 shots at different stop increments. I think you should try to reshoot that shot but shoot it about 2-5 min later, to help mitigate blown hilights a bit more. KB probably knows the rules better than I on people in photos, would you need a signed release from the gal and couple in the center if you were to actually use the photo commercially?
This is called "bracketing" as mentioned above. In a universe with a lot of time, you sit there for an hour. COOL TRICK - hold your hand all the way out between you and the sun. Put your pinky on the horizon. Every finger between your pinky and the sun is fifteen minutes and in general, you've got three or four fingers worth of rippin' good light (depending on the atmospheric conditions, shit might end as soon as the sun sinks or you might get an extra "finger" when the sun is over the horizon but cooking the shit out of overhead clouds. It's not so much about dealing with blowouts as it is capturing the varying light conditions as the sun gets more and more oblique on the scene. "Need" is the tricky part. In a full-fury film shoot for broad commercial release, you get a signed release allowing you to shoot in the location and hang up signs that say effectively "your presence in this location serves as consent for filming eat a dick." If you feature any of these people in a recording you get a release from them. If they're just bystanders nobody gives a fuck. If they're unidentifiable nobody gives a fuck. If you have no audio recording of them saying words nobody gives a fuck. In a Canadian photo shoot in a public place for commercial use outside the general public no one is ever going to care unless there's an ad agency with its panties in a twist that decides they want to avoid any appearance of missed licensing because they're pussies or because they want to beat you up on price (PROTIP: most "licensing" issues are "we want to beat you up on the price"). They'll skunk the photo because of the old couple staring at the photographer, not the girls walking across the frame. They're identifiable, they're jarring in the frame and they can poison the editorial. Pragmatically speaking it comes down to whether the customer cares. If the customer is stock, the people are unidentifiable. If the customer is bespoke, best ask first.True on the exposure, the camera has a setting where it automatically takes 3 or 5 shots at different stop increments.
I think you should try to reshoot that shot but shoot it about 2-5 min later, to help mitigate blown hilights a bit more.
KB probably knows the rules better than I on people in photos, would you need a signed release from the gal and couple in the center if you were to actually use the photo commercially?