Ziray Studio Labs » art

Photos of the Week – Summer

Mike — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:30:59 +0000

Our photo challenge was “Summer.” Luckily I was in Jersey with a pool so I got some easy shots.

Photos of the Week – Summer is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week – Black and White

Mike — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:36:08 +0000

With the advances in digital photography and the cost of high quality cameras so low, everyone has become a photographer. However, few realize what it’s like to shoot with film and fewer still, to shoot with actual black and white film.

The development process was the best part because you didn’t get to see your photos until you hung up your role of film on the drying line. Often times, you’d forget you even took some of your shots and be pleasantly surprised. There was no looking at your LCD screen after every shot, there was no deleting bad pics so that you could shoot more on your already full memory card. Different films yielded different colors, grain and style, which can now be duplicated in a computer, but it’ll never be the same. This week’s photo challenge was an attempt to force everyone to think about shooting for a purpose rather than for an edit in Photoshop later.

Disrepair

Branches

Yoga

Photos of the Week – Black and White is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week – After Hours

Mike — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:01:58 +0000

Sam and I started a photo project. It’s pretty simple: a theme and a set of photos (3-5) taken that week. This week’s theme was “After Hours.”

I always take photos, but rarely do I have time to post them. Since I have peer pressure now, it pushes me to go out, take some more photos with some thought behind it and finally post them.

Here’s Sam’s After Hours post.

A Tree Grows Through It

Night Frame

Light Streaks on Fairfax

Fairfax at Night

A Sleeping Petunia

Photos of the Week – After Hours is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week (3/21)

Mike — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 14:59:31 +0000

Photos from our visit to Monaco and one photo from the skiing we did.

Phantom of Monte Carlo – 1/160 sec @ F/5.6

Sunny Side Down - 1/800 sec @ F/7.1

Monte Carlo Bay - 1/2 sec @ F/5.0

Photos of the Week (3/21) is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week (3/1)

Mike — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:50:19 +0000

This week was a little busy, so out of the photos that I did get processed, here are two. Enjoy:

Lake of Clouds – Taken on our ski trip to Austria. This was over 1 800 meters (~5 900 feet) above the sea.

Straight Down – The edge of the ski resort, literally.

Photos of the Week (3/1) is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week

Mike — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:40:58 +0000

Finally had time to process and select these photos from the thousands I took over the last couple of months. These are the ones I got processed this past week. Enjoy!

Photos of the Week is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Open Season on Work Related Matters

Mike — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:39:49 +0000

So, I don’t usually talk about work on the public stage (Blog, Twitter, etc). A few things have changed recently (which I won’t be talking about right away), and so I’ve decided to make my professional life a tad bit more open but in the spirit of informing and to entertain.

The idea is going to be, talk about what I do, and explain my experiences, what I’ve learned and what I’d do differently. Since I have such a wide range of things I do, hopefully some of this will be interesting to you.

Lightroom 2

I recently acquired Lightroom 2 for my photo workflow. I’ve been using Lightroom 1 for a few years and it’s been a blast using it on my PowerMac G5. However, it was a bit slow and it was slowing up my workflow. Lightroom 2 has tremendously sped up the processing of my photos (perceptually twice as fast). Before I was waiting on the computer, now I can mostly just work and not have to sit there while the computer processes the changes I just asked for.

The sharpening tool is much more improved and the adjustments seem to work more as I think they should. LR 2 also gives you the ability to manage multiple catalogs on different hard drives. Having an external hard drive, this makes it extremely convenient for me to have catalogs for various purposes.

My favorite part about the new Lightroom has to be the dual monitor support. Now I can edit my photos on my LCD monitor (that’s actually calibrated) and have a listing of the photos (grid view for example) or other parts of the application on the other monitor to give me the maximum space for the photo while I edit it. The secondary items on the second monitor disappear when the program loses focus, so it quickly gets out of your way when you want to switch applications for a bit.

The photos above are from a soccer game I shot today. White shirts are really hard to shoot since they tend to get blown out. Lightroom has a “Recovery” adjustment that allows you to get back a lot of detail from the white, blown out areas in your photo. Likewise, there’s a “Fill Light” adjustment that recovers black areas that have been clipped. Clipping happens when multiple shades of the same color get interpreted as the same shade and you lose that detail. If you shoot your photos in RAW, most of the situations where you encounter clipping (from under or over exposure) are recoverable. Some images just can’t be salvaged, but Lightroom has been able to help me out on a number of occasions.

To help with blowing out white shirts in a soccer game (or where ever you happen to be), set your exposure compensation down a step or two. This will under expose your photos slightly but it’ll keep your whites from getting blown out and you can raise the levels on the other areas to lighten those up without affecting the brighter areas that are prone to clipping. This also gives you the bonus of gaining a faster shutter speed as the camera doesn’t need as much light to take the shot–a great thing when shooting sports! You can also raise the ISO up to 200 or 400 (if you have a digital camera that will let you do that), but then it starts becoming noisy and grainy. Just take a few shots before the event and see if you’re getting an appropriate shutter speed with the available lighting conditions at various f-stops.

Revisions

So a few things are getting revised all across the board, such as the blog, website and life, but won’t be obvious until much much later on. I’ll keep you all posted on changes being made here, in life and out “there.” I hope you like change!

Open Season on Work Related Matters is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

New Song I Wrote: Undeserved

Mike — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:36:39 +0000

I started this song over a year ago (March 2007?). I worked on it a bit since then but completely lost the direction I was going with it and gave up trying to make anything from it. Thus, I think it’s probably one of my worst songs. However, in the interest of finishing what I started and the fact I hate to leave things without closure, I decided just to cut it short and finish it up.

This one doesn’t contain any stock loops and is created entirely note by note in Apple’s Garage Band.

I present:

Michael Ziray – Undeserved

I hope you enjoy!

New Song I Wrote: Undeserved is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Music Store/Guitar Work

Mike — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:53 +0000

Some of you know that I work for the coolest music store in Blacksburg, but maybe you don’t know exactly what I do (I’m not exactly sure myself sometimes), so I figured I would share some of the photography work I’ve done for them:

I also work on the website, trying to make it more user friendly (I’m a huge fan of Human Computer Interaction/Interface design) and attempting to sell guitars with a better user experience (easier navigation, more photos, etc).

I am also working on a teaching tool for the guitar instructors to help their students better visualize, practice and memorize the concepts taught in the classroom.

So now you know. Do let me know what you think of the photos, I always appreciate critique even if it’s negative.

Music Store/Guitar Work is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

My Photography Workflow

Mike — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:19:59 +0000

Every photographer (from your National Geographic professional to your point and shoot tourist) has some kind work flow for post production of photos. For most, it’s dump the photos onto a computer and upload to a photo sharing website. Each person has their own way of doing it, but not too many people think about it and so I wanted to give people the opportunity to think a little more about how they process their photos. Here’s my workflow model and why I do things the way I do.

Concepts

Shoot on the highest detail setting your camera will allow.
When unloading photos onto your computer, use an application to automagically organize the photos
Have a backup solution. Photos stored on a hard drive of any kind is not a backup solution.
Keep your favorites within a few clicks

Start Strong, Finish Strong

Shooting in the highest quality your camera provides, allows you to be extremely flexible later on in life. If you shoot in a lower quality setting to save room on your camera’s memory card, you’ll be sorry when you want to blow that photo up to a 8×12 image (or 8×10 if you don’t mind the crop). It’ll look grainy, blurry and most importantly you’ll always have that feeling of “what if?” Buy a larger memory card, there’s absolutely no excuse when you can get a 2GB memory card for $25 or less.

The Power of RAW

If your camera supports it, shoot in RAW format. This feature is limited to higher end cameras usually in the dSLR category, but more and more point and shoots are allowing people to revel in the power that is RAW. One contra to shooting in RAW is that your photo workflow will require a bit more TLC (tender loving care). This is because RAW format is straight off the boat; no polish, no flare, barely resembling a photograph at all, except a whole lot of ambition to be something greater than a machine made JPEG with no sense of art or love.

The RAW format contains magic. Its magic includes the ability to recover photos that are severely under/over exposed. For example, an area that is completely black (perhaps you shot your mother with the sun directly behind her so that she looked more like a ghastly wraith than the lovely woman she is) can be recovered to some degree (it’s magic, not divine benevolence). JPEG on the other hand will throw out all that magical information and just make those pixels black, making recovery impossible. That magic does incur a file size cost, but we’ll deal with that a little later.

Make the Computer Your Photo Slave

I know some people (professional photographers, mind you) that still organize their photos into folders on their computer’s hard drive. They have their own system for dating, categorizing and storing those photos. That solution may be fine if you only use your camera 2 or 3 times a year. The problem stems from the fact that it doesn’t scale very well. Unless you have a photographic memory (in which case, why do you have a camera?), try remembering which folder contains that photo of your adorable puppy with his favorite toy you took 4 years ago (or was it 5 years ago). You need a better solution.

Big Brother, Little Brother

I upload my photos, first thing, into Adode’s Lightroom. It’s the professional photographer’s Photoshop without all the brushes and magic wands. A more than comparable alternative is Apple’s Aperture. This vital piece of software allows me to easily scan through the photos from that day’s shoot and see how things came out. I then go through and immediately delete any photos that I know I will never want. These are strictly limited to blurry, out of focus or other photos that are hopeless. Keep everything else, no matter what. Then before I start any actual processing, I take the remaining photos (in RAW format) and drag them out of Lightroom and into a folder labeled as such:

YYYY-MM-DD – Event Name – Location

Example: 2006-12-01 Hősök tere – Budapest

Then I begin my work making the photos look their best. I usually don’t bother editing the photos that I don’t like, but I still keep them anyway (you never know).

After all the photos are ready to go, I export them out as JPEGs at 1280×853 (large enough to use as a desktop background) and 80-85% quality, which will drastically reduce the file size but still preserve the look of the image. These are meant as a final product that will cover most uses for the photos.

Those exported photos then go into Apple’s iPhoto since, with iPhoto, you can preview thousands of photos as smooth as butter. Usually I’ll then create an album in iPhoto with those photos. iPhoto is a great compliment to Lightroom and it also gives me the ability to upload to photo sharing websites such as Picasaweb and Flickr using iPhoto’s export feature and a plugin for the respective site.

Then, I do the unimaginable. I delete all the photos in Lightroom. I do this for several reasons. First, I have all the edited photos exported in a form that is the most useful (reduced file size and a more flexible image size). Second, all the RAW files are already saved somewhere else. I lied. I don’t delete ALL the files. I will keep the photos that I absolutely LOVE, with the criteria of possible submissions to photo contests or printing the photo out to a large format (8×12, 20×30, etc). That way I keep all my favorites (which is about 1 photo in 1000 taken) within a few clicks.

Lightroom has the same viewing capabilities as iPhoto, maybe even better, but why keep those massive RAW images around and mucking up your workflow? I keep the photos in Lightroom until I’m done processing them. So that only leaves two kinds of photos in Lightroom: ones I need to process and export and the absolute best of the best. It keeps things separate and organized.

Lost your life? Restore it from disc.

We all know we should back up our precious data, our work that’s taken years to acquire and our photos. The problem is that we’re not sure of a good way to back up our data. We can use Leopard’s new Time Machine or another automatic backup solution but it’s not really a solution. 1s and 0s are never safe, but putting them on a “backup” hard drive is bound to fail, even if the hard drives are redundant (I’ve seen it where two mirrored hard drives failed at the same time).

My solution is DVD backup. Specifically high quality DVD+R. The +R variety has parity and other error checking that will resolve errors in the data in the event of a few corrupt bytes. The -R DVDs do not and any corruption of the 1s and 0s on that disc means that you just lost that photo of your late grandmother, never to be seen again (maybe a hyperbole but I don’t take risks with this kind of thing).

When I have enough folders to burn a full DVD with, I burn that DVD with a name in the format of:

YYYY-MM_-_YYYY-MM

Ex. 2005-05_2005-06

Then of course, I label the DVD with the applicable date ranges and maybe a description if I feel like it. Then the DVD goes into a case, because what’s the point of putting it on proper media if you’re just going to scratch it up.

Here’s a great post from someone who knows more on the subject of DVD archival than I do (that’s not saying much!). Having said all that, even DVDs are not immune to spontaneous byte flipping but it’s less volatile than hard drives.

When You’re Old and Grey: Stories to Tell Your Grandkids

The files in iPhoto are the same exact name as the photos on the backup DVD. Plus iPhoto knows the date the photo was taken. So, if for some reason you need the original image you can easily find it in iPhoto, note the date and image number and search no more than two DVDs to find it ( 2006-03_2006-05 and 2006-05_2006-07). You can add a day field to the naming structure if you want, but I found this to complicate things more than it helps.

When in Rome, Do as the Germans

This is of course the way I do things, but I only mean it as a guide for people who are still figuring out the best workflow for them. Some people prefer Adobe’s Bridge + Photoshop as opposed to Lightroom, for example, so their workflow will be affected by that.

Finally, don’t be intimidated by all the professional software and technical aspects of this. Things change and workflows will evolve, but hopefully this gave you a good idea of how to construct your own workflow no matter if you’re a professional photographer or someone who only takes a few photos a month.

My Photography Workflow is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

How to Take Better Photographs with your Point and Shoot

Mike — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:03:29 +0000

I originally wrote this for the ISP school newspaper at Corvinus University in Budapest, Hungary, hence all the references to Budapest! It’s written for the non-photographer and tourist. I added a few things to make the article clearer for people not fortunate enough to have visited Hungary. Let me know if this was helpful or something was unclear! Thanks!

Tourist Photography How To

Cameras are wonderful light capturing devices that aren’t always used properly. Often times, when I’m out on one of my many photo shoots in Budapest, I see other photographers out as well trying to capture a few priceless memories from their visits to this great capital. However, I see over and over again the same mistakes being made by these hapless tourists. I feel compelled to offer my assistance to them in hopes of helping them take home a picture of beautiful Budapest that they can be proud of and show their family and friends upon their return. Hopefully, as a result, others will see how wonderful Budapest is and want to come themselves. Here are some tricks to getting your own postcard-like photos and some pitfalls to avoid while shooting with your camera:

Equipment
We’ve all seen the professional photographers with their expensive cameras, huge lenses, and other who-knows-what-it-does gadgets. Believe it or not, your simple point-and-click camera can do mostly everything those 500,000 Forint ($2,500) cameras can, you just have to know how to use it. A little knowledge of photography basics goes a long way to get crisp, clean photos of your favorite tourist destinations. I often see even expensive equipment being used improperly. Trust me, it’s not the camera, it’s you!

Read the Owners Manual
Know your camera. The better you know it, the better you can understand its capabilities and limitations. Some cameras are just not capable of everything you want them to do. Reading the owner’s manual, as boring as it may be, will uncover neat and otherwise hidden features of your camera. Did you know your camera had a nighttime setting, a scenery setting, or a fully manual setting? You may have seen them on that dial with all those other icons, but maybe you didn’t fully understand them, or just didn’t care to use them.

Camera Settings
Most newer digital cameras and mid-range film cameras have a dial on it. That dial can mean the difference between a gorgeous shot you can show your family and friends, to a shot that you will end up trashing. There are three main settings that you will most likely need during an adventure to a picturesque city like Budapest: Scenery, Portrait and Nighttime. There are a few more, but you should read your owners manual to find out more about what they do.

Scenery
Scenery is meant for just that; pictures of scenery! This may include a range of things such as a skyline of the city, Parliament from across the Danube River, or beautiful Corvinus University as seen from that other university across the way. Anything that is distant from the camera will work. Why is this important? This setting gives you the largest area that is in focus, meaning that both the building you’re taking a photo of, and the area in front of it will all be in focus. This setting requires a little more light and so the shutter will stay open slightly longer. Make sure you hold the camera as steady as possible or place the camera on something sturdy to avoid trembling hands.

Portrait
This is for taking a photo of your traveling companions. It has a small area of focus so the background will be out of focus leaving your friend in perfect focus. This allows the background to fade and make your friend the main subject of your photo, which greatly improves the composition of the photo. Often times, a busy, distracting background can make a good picture into a not so good one. This setting is not meant for taking a picture of your friend in front of the Buda Palace. For that, you will want to use the Scenery setting.

Nighttime
Night shots are probably the most breathtaking photos, but also the most difficult to get right. There is a setting on most cameras for pictures taken in low lighting. It sets the shutter speed at the fastest possible speed and does some other settings to adjust for the lack of light. It will also fire the flash in order to provide more light. This setting is only meant to take photos in dark settings, such as a dance club, nighttime garden party or of friends on the streets of Budapest. For a nighttime shot of Parliament or the Chain Bridge, put the setting on Scenery.

It’s imperative that a tripod be used for nighttime scenery shots. You can improvise a tripod by placing the camera on something flat and sturdy, but simply holding the camera, no matter how steady your hands are, just will not do! The most common mistake I see with this shot is people using flash to shoot across the Danube River. The flash tricks the camera into thinking there is more light than there really is, and under exposes the image. I often wonder how many poor tourist go home with blurry and under exposed pictures. Use the Scenery setting and a tripod and you will be getting beautiful, breathtaking shots in no time!

Manual
If you have a basic understanding of the basics of photography and want more creative control over your images, then a manual setting is right for you. Not all cameras have these features so look for this if you’re buying a new camera and you want more control. Manual settings allow you to set the aperture (the opening in the lens) and the shutter speed. Ever wonder how photographers get those wonderful shots of a waterfall that is smooth like ice? A long shutter speed. Ever wonder how they get pictures of a bumblebee on a flower and only the bumblebee is in focus? A low aperture setting. Go look at some community photography websites to see what’s possible and pick up some techniques of your own. Most of what you see from the professionals can be done on most point-and-click cameras so don’t think you need to spend a lot of money to get great photos.

Photography can be a fun and rewarding hobby and lets you keep priceless memories forever. Take a little time and search for photography tutorials online to find out more and you will almost certainly see an instant improvement in your photos. The automatic setting that’s on most cameras can’t know what type of photos you’re trying to take, so learn a little bit about your camera and photography and you will be grateful you took the time to perfect images you can enjoy for years to come.

How to Take Better Photographs with your Point and Shoot is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Games!!

Mike — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:49:28 +0000

We are still working on Operation Rescue Kit and Pictureka. Monopoly and Sorry Express versions are finally complete.

My favorite is Monopoly. Let me know which one you like the best!

All of these games have been announced and are available to buy so if you like them, go buy them!

Check out the rest of the online demos at Hasbro.com and see some other demos we’ve done.

Games!! is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs