journal
These are the two videos of my trip to Foz, in northern Galicia. I visited a few beautiful spots, but I had to mention of course the Playa de las Catedrales, one of the most beautiful places in the province of Lugo.
Have you ever gone out to shoot some photographs just to get home with none? Is it hard to feel inspired? You are not alone, this used to happen to me as well. I think I have a little trick to fix this little problem, if not all the time, most of it.
For the last two weeks, and for the first time in my life, I've been running a few kilometers every other morning. I never liked running, but doing it early and mere minutes after waking up makes it so much worse.
I don't just jump out of bed and start running though: I walk for at least 10-15 minutes before I speed up. It's my way to warm up and get my body (and mind!) ready for what's coming next.
I believe the same principle can help a photographer to get started.
Taking the first photo will get you started and your creativity flowing.
It's all about gaining momentum and put yourself "in the zone". This is true for many aspects of our lives: it's hard to start, but it gets easier over time. Why wouldn't it be the same for photography?
When I go on a photography trip, I usually take snapshots of the place before starting to look for compositions. I do it to document the trip, but also to help me get started and focus on what I'm about to do.
My YouTube videos are another example of something I do (among many other reasons) because it actually helps my creativity. I'm constantly thinking about the place and what's different, or beautiful about it.
Next time you go out to make some images, just take a few random photos. You could even do it at home, before hitting the street. The subject doesn't matter. It could be your keys, your shoes, yourself, on the mirror. The car parked next to your home. The clouds. Or the lack of them. It doesn't really matter.
While this little trick doesn't work all the time (there are days where we are just not in the mood to create, and that's fine), I found it has helped me quite a bit.
Working on the post Shoot the scene, and then shoot it again, and again, I found out how to create contact sheets in Photoshop CC, and I wanted to share this "discovery" with you.
Contact Sheets are a very useful way to look at and share our work. They are the best way to show the thought process behind an image, the steps the photographer took to get to that composition.
To create one, we need to have our images in one folder. Open Photoshop and select File -> Automate -> Contact Sheet II.
This is on a Mac, but it should be pretty similar if not exactly the same on Windows.
The dialog that shows up will offer us quite a few options to customize our contact sheet. Select the folder where your images are, and then play with the number of rows and columns, the spacing between them, and to show or not the name.
It might take a while to process all the photos, but at the end you should have something like this:
To make it look like a traditional contact sheet, you can paint the background black and use a red brush to indicate which photos you selected from the set.
Hope this helped!
I firmly believe that the fewer shots we go back home with, the better. That being said, there are situations where no shots should be spared.
Read MoreOne of the most important things for every photographer should be to back everything up, redundantly and safely.
Read MoreAmerica Untitled (2017-2018) was born from my love for the landscapes of the American West. An admiration that pushed me to the top of volcanos and remote deserts, to hike hundreds of miles, to walk on frozen lakes, and beyond my comfort zone in the middle of snowtorms.
No matter how difficult or challenging a situation was, I always had a camera with me. I took amazing photos and videos; I made countless mistakes and came back with terrible imagery; I ruined cameras due to sand, rain and ice.
All of this was part of a learning process: over time, I developed my own vision, stopped taking photographs and started making images.
It was the beginning of America Untitled. Months of traveling across 25 states and a lot of hard work were necessary to make a collection of 46 images, a strict selection from more than 250 rolls of medium format film.
More dates and locations to come soon.
August 3-17 America Untitled - Casa da Cultura, Quiroga, Spain.
November 15-30 America Untitled - Casa da Cultura, Monforte de Lemos, Spain.
Ilford Photo The American West
Graine de Photographe «America untitled», Une série de paysages en noir et blanc de l’Amérique de l’ouest.
These last few days, and besides launching Image of the Month, I've been busy working on a couple of new projects.
I'm trying different techniques, and even though I don't know if these projects will materialize in new work, I've been having a lot of fun.
I'll be posting some images as a preview of what's to come. The one above is the first one and belongs to Project 1, still with no name.
New episode of the American Road Trip Journal.
Still in Sedona, Arizona, Luna and I go on a hike to Baby Bell Rock. It is an easy, short and beautiful hike to great views of the amazing rocks and colors of the area.
I try to shoot some photos with my Bronica SQ-Ai and Ilford HP5+, but once again, I struggle to get good compositions in black and white. Color is just too hard to get out of your mind when shooting here.
"Crosses", Spain, July 2018. Image created with AOWS B&W Red Filter preset.
This is the preset I usually apply to my snapshots from documenting my life and the places I go to, images that are meant to be for me and don't require much farther editing.
This preset transforms your RAW files into a gritty and contrasty black and white image. It uses the Red Filter profile from Lightroom to further increase that look.
Read MoreWhat's the meaning of life? Who am I? Could we be living in Matrix? These are really important questions, but they all pale compared to a more important and crucial one. What's better: prime or zoom lenses for landscape photography?
Read More"Gate" is one of my latest images, born just a few days ago.
I want to show you how I made it, from beginning to the end, explaining the whole process.
Read MoreAfter uploading a video about my workflow in the new Lightroom CC, I thought it'd be more useful for many to have those steps written down and well organized.
That's why I wrote a new eBook that I offer for free: "Lightroom CC Workflow".
Lightroom CC Workflow
How to keep your photo library under control and safe
You shoot a lot of pictures every day, you have a few projects going on at any given time, you upload your images to multiple social networks, to your website, you sell stock photos, you print your photos... among many other things.
Making a big photo library efficient for several projects is hard. Keeping it clean, tidy and, most importantly, safe, can be overwhelming. But I believe it doesn’t have to be.
Over the years, I’ve developed and refined a workflow that I use every time I make new images.
The goal of this workflow is to have a small catalog, easy to manage and browse, and unload everything that we don’t use elsewhere (but still accessible).
I sent a copy of the book to the subscribers of my newsletter a few days ago. If you haven't joined us yet, please consider subscribing to stay up to date and get books and other educational material like this one for free.
The book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) license, so feel free to share with everyone you think might find it useful!
Last day of my trip to Cedeira!
As usual, the forecast completely missed it: I was expecting "mostly cloudy" and I got "rain and wind". Even though I got rained on, I still made some images (one of them was one of my favorites from the trip).
In these conditions, make sure you protect your gear appropiately. I've already ruined cameras in the past, and believe me, it isn't fun. Use a plastic bag to cover your camera, and if it's raining a lot, just don't shoot at all or use your phone (if it's weatherproof).
For the last two days I've been shooting with a Fuji X100T I borrowed from Rachel. I'd tried that camera a few times before but never for too long.
I have to say I've been having a lot of fun. It's not a camera for the kind of images I make for my main body of work, but for casual, handheld shooting, is almost perfect.
These are some of the shots I got.
Read MoreMy second day of landscape photography in Cedeira was an intense one. I found dense fog, which made impossible to photograph the big vistas. But I found something much better: intimate and mysterious compositions.
Change is very, very hard. Breaking bad habits isn't, but the way we see ourselves and what others think about us is. That's why in order to change yourself you need to change everything around you.
I know it very well. I used to be lazy and not motivated to do any creative work, and that’s the image that people had (and still have, those who hadn’t seen me in a while) of me.
If I’ve changed, anyone can. This is how I did it.
Read MoreFirst day of my landscape photography trip to Cedeira and the Costa Artabra, in NW Galicia.
Last year, I achieved something I never thought I’d be able to do: I climbed a 3,000m+ volcano. And then I did even harder things. But the last few months have been hard on my body, and now I’m 25 pounds fatter and out of shape. This has affected many aspects of my life, including photography.
Read MoreEpisode 25 of the American Road Trip Journal.
Still in Arizona, I drive in the dark to Sedona, where I go on a very popular hike to Devil's Bridge. It was a nice, warm day at a beautiful location.
Afterwards, I visit a chapel in town and then Montezuma Castle National Monument, a cliff dwelling that is hundreds of years old.
