Color correction

Gelling the strobe seemed to go OK and I got the results I was after.

The ambient meter reading was f2.8 @ 1/30 (ISO 200). I wanted the subject to stand out just brighter than the background so I exposed at f4 @ 1/60. This two-stop difference made the subject stand out and darkened a distracting background without eliminating it entirely. I gelled orange (1/2 CTO I think) for the existing fluorescent (for some reason they looked orangish – not green! New fangled fluorescents!).

The color matching in the images from the flash, either directly pointed at her or from the fill card behind the flash and the flash bouncing up, look pretty dead on to my eye.

She is slightly more orange in the select I chose because I bounced the flash off a slightly orange, tiled wall. This added more orange to her. I don’t mind it so much because she is working with an open flame and the orange cast can be attributed to the flame. Visually and cognitively I think it makes intuitive sense. Everyone knows what people lit by the light of flames look like – a little orangish. I think if this were a neutral color tone that may be more off putting.

(Forgive the poor drawing skills – there is a reason I'm a photographer)

I bounced the flash because I wanted to change the quality of the light – make it softer and coming from a different direction.

I didn’t dial the flash power up or down. Just used it straight.

I also custom white balanced with the strobe and shot my take on the custom white balance setting.

It seems to be pretty damn tough to find green-cast true fluorescents anymore or to find any businesses or public places that are lighting with tungsten.

My select:

Lauren Hibler, a senior in biochemistry at the University of Missouri, Columbia, makes glass beads Wednesday in the university's Craft Studio. Hibler mentioned a stressful week after having had three exams in the previous days. "I needed to do this," said Hibler.

Critique: News Organization Multimedia Project

The “Childhood Poverty in Colorado” project by The Denver Post has a lot of things going for it but, in my opinion, could also improve in several areas.

The good: The aesthetic design was nice and simple. The subdued color palette reinforces the serious nature of the subject with only the word “poverty” highlighted in red. The black and white photos & video also reinforce the serious nature of the topic. The paper built out a separate interface for the project rather than making it look like the rest of the Post’s website. Everything functions well, I couldn’t break the site. Since it is flash embedded in html pages it is a little cumbersome even on my broadband connection – very minor for me, but I wonder how users on dial up would be able to view the site. There is the argument that users view more websites and traffic goes up when they are at work where most businesses have faster connections. Although I can’t imagine a user going through the mountain of content that is on this site (one hour plus, if one wants to read/watch everything) during their workday.

The interactive map is nice and illustrates the areas within Colorado where poverty has increased and also illustrates Colorado’s distinction as the state with the largest increase in childhood poverty. However:

Things I would improve: On the map I would like to see major cities listed/highlighted to get a sense of where things are in the state. This may be because I’m not a native (therefore, not in the target audience) and I don’t intuitively know where the stories that they reported are taking place. I have a vague idea of Denver being just about dead center in the state, with Boulder being a bit north of Denver – that is the extent of my geographic knowledge of Colorado.

Also, with the navigation:

User is brought to this "chapter" page to select from one of eight stories that the Post covered.

Once inside the chosen chapter the user can choose from a stills gallery or the video.

Here we are at the “three-click rule” and we haven’t even seen the content. Supposing we choose “Photo Essay” we are brought to the slide show. The user can click through the slideshow manually (good), turn captions on/off (good), but the scrolling flash transitions between each photo I find a little jarring (bad). I didn’t mind the scrolling in the chapter selection but would like smoother transitions in the individual story.

The user can also see thumbnails of all the photos by hovering the mouse over the center of the picture (good), however if the user never hovers over the photo and just uses the arrows to advance – like I did initially – they may not realize they can go anywhere in the presentation (not so good).

Another navigation challenge is when the user comes to the end of a photo essay slide show they are brought back to the main chapter navigation (clicking “Stories”) or have the option to go to the video for that chapter.

Video prompt is good, in fact that option is throughout the slide show. However clicking back to stories puts the user at the opening chapter. Better would be to return the user to the chapter menu at the story they just saw or at the next story in the lineup. This would save a lot of user clicking and prompt the user to other portions of the project.

My solution to all of these problems would be to keep the home page but open then to an interactive map, with major cities, and the cities where the stories took place that they reported. Rolling over the major city would do nothing unless there was a story reported there. Rolling over the story cities would bring up a pop up window with a brief description and the choice to go directly into the video or audio. When either of those portions were done the user would be brought back to the map navigation. Additional map overlays could be done that the user could turn on or off on the main navigation to show the information that is currently on the separate page.

On a content critique, in both the video and the stills the subjects seem to have high camera awareness, lots of looking right into the lens. The photo essays would benefit a lot from a tighter edit (just because the web offers unlimited space doesn’t mean there needs to be 30-40 pictures for each essay – it dilutes the impact). A lot of redundancy in the captions too. If the same caption information is repeated that is a sign that there only needs to be one photo. Each visual should tell me something new and so should the captions. The video interviews seem very stilted and uncomfortable, they are not “Hello, my name is … ” interviews but they aren’t individually insightful. Everyone seems to be saying “We’re poor, we struggle, but we love each other and we will survive.” Also I really don’t like the vignetting on the video – very distracting and gimmicky.

The project is very ambitious and kudos to The Denver Post for attempting it. I don’t know the specifics of why it fell short, not enough time/resource investment or perhaps better subjects could be found. Regardless, I think it could have been executed with more impact and therefore potentially do more good for the poor of Colorado.

The Greening of the Water Bottle

I had the metal portion of the assignment. I based my concept on the editorial idea that stainless steel water bottles are becoming increasingly popular because they have less environmental impact than disposable plastic water bottles. They also have the added benefit of not containing bisphenol-a (BPA) a chemical added to some plastics that may have long-term health consequences. This has been a real trend story in the past couple years. New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time magazine have all done stories on the issue, among countless other publications.

I decided to play up the environmental aspect in the photo.

I wanted to challenge myself with a round object but was lenient in that it was not a mirror polished surface on the metal. The bottle is brushed stainless steel for the finish so it would only reflect values instead of pure reflections.

Since it was round I immediately thought I would need a tent to light it properly. Here is my set.

My set with a sheet tent built all around it and the lighting set to illuminate the tent.

This however blew out the green gelled backlight I had. I was trying to create a vibrant green background/field and light the clear plastic bottles at the same time behind the stainless steel water bottle. The results:

After an hour and a half of adjusting power ratios and tweaking the light modifiers I couldn’t get the right combination of what I wanted in the image. I would either get good looking metal (left), muddy metal and a poor background (center) or a decent mix of both good metal and a weak green background (right). The image on the right was the best I could create from that set up.

Then with about 15 minutes left in my time slot I figured I’d take Rita’s suggestion and just try to “light it to make it come alive.” I decided to chuck the whole set and cross light it instead.

This kept the light off the gelled “background” field and gave me the green I wanted. The bottles and gel defined the shape of the stainless steel bottle and the cross lighting made enough of a highlight for the material to read as metal. I added a reflector card to give it some more white reflection and more of a three-dimensional look.

I had about a 20 degree spot grid to the left of the overhead camera position. A snoot to the right with my partner Jon Steffens holding a gobo on the bottom half to keep the light off the plastic bottles and a 30 degree spot grid gelled with blue/yellow (makes green, remember) on the bottom. Lindsay was gracious enough to hold the reflector card. Much thanks to Lindsay and Erin Schwartz for letting me overlap into their timeslot by about 15 minutes.

Here is the set:

And the final image:

Consumers are increasingly turning to stainless steel water bottles as a means to lessen the environmental impact of disposable plastic water bottles. The stainless steel bottles also have the added benefit of being free of bisphenol-a (BPA) plastics which have been linked in studies to long-term changes in animals who were exposed to the chemical.