Joop Snijder Photography

Living Parks: 100 Years of National Parks in Europe

2009-11-10T02:09:00.001-08:00

I'm very pleased to announce that my work is published in a wonderful book "Living Parks: 100 Years of National Parks in Europe". It includes my images of Veluwezoom National Park, The Netherlands. Order your copy here at Amazon Germany.

To all visitors of Holland, I recommend this wonderful National Park with lots of forest and heath and lots of photographic opportunities.

Lightroom Short Cuts: Set Flow With Local Adjustment

2009-09-06T03:58:00.000-07:00

The local adjustment brush in Lightroom is a wonderful tool. To speed up your post processing work you can use the keys 0-9 to set the value for the flow (and therefor the amount of effect the brush will have). So by hitting 1 during brushing the flow with be set to 10, hitting 2 will set to 20, etc. Hitting 0 the flow will be set to 100.

But there's more. You can also set the flow value to a very specific value, like 75.

Hope you like this tip.

Lightroom Presets: Two Brushes

2009-09-05T04:14:00.001-07:00

I created two brushes to clean up a backgrounds with an isolated black background or an isolated white background. When black are not pure black and whites are not pure white or just remove some cluthering in the background, use these handy brushes instead of going to Photoshop.

Download the Brushes here.

8 Tips for Long Exposure Photography

2009-06-12T04:09:00.001-07:00

Tree in water
Originally uploaded by Joop Snijder

I love long exposures. The motion blur and sometimes unpredictable results are fascinating. I want to share some tips in order to shoot great long exposure shots.

1. Clean your sensor
Make sure you clean your sensor before going out. With the use of small apertures (see further), you'll all sensor spots. Without cleaning there will be a lot of Photoshop post-processing to clean up the photo.

2. Check your batteries
We're talking about long exposures, that can take seconds, minutes of even an hour. I shot photos with 30 minutes exposure. So charged batteries are a must and spare batteries as well.

3. Carry your tripod
With the long exposures, you can't do without a tripod. In windy conditions you need a firm and sturdy one. Make sure the tripod stands still and use your camera bag for extra weight.

4. Grab your filters
Everything that holds back the light will do. Circular polarizers reduce two stops of light. There are all kinds of Neutral Density filters. But for this particular photo, I used a Hoya ND 400, which holds back 10 stops of light.

5. Get the longest exposure
Set the camera ISO to the lowest value possible (e.g. 50 or 100) and set the aperture to the smallest setting (e.g. f/22). With these settings we'll get the maximum exposure possible.

6. Use the Bulb Mode
Set your camera to bulb mode. Most cameras have a maximum exposure of 30 seconds in other modes. With the bulb mode you can go beyond 30 seconds and choose your own exposure length.

7. Use a Remote Control
To get pin sharp results, you need a remote control, so you don't have to touch your camera during the exposure.

8. Enjoy the view
During the exposure you have all the time to enjoy the view and explore the surroundings for next exposures.

Splash of water

2009-06-01T14:31:00.001-07:00

Gavin Hoey demonstrates on his site how to photograph a splash and demonstrates the strobist set up required to capture the beauty hidden in a drop of water.

Here's my result. Instead of using a printed background, I used a colored plastic bag of a local shoe store. It gave my drop a warm red color with a blue/gray touch. There's plenty to experiment.

Check Gavins blog right here or watch his tutorial below:

10 Tips for Great Forest Photos

2009-05-10T01:47:00.001-07:00

It can be hard and frustrating to take photos into a forest. Harsh shadows, burned out highlights in the end result. Here are 10 tips and one bonus to improve your landscape forest photos:

1. Use a tripod
Because light levels drop quickly when you're going deeper into the forest, shutter speeds will rise fastly. Use a tripod for pin sharp results.

2. Bring your cirulair polarizer
With a lots of greens and in during autumn reds and yellow, you can saturate them more by using a circulair polarizer. Don't forget to reposition the polarizer each time. Be aware light levels will drop even more with the use of the polarizer and it can add up to 2 stops of shutter speed (=it makes your shutter speed 4x slower).

3. Explore vertical compositions
Make use of vertical compositions as well. It creates a sense of depth and it can make look trees taller and more dramatic. Try to reframe each horizontal landscape shot with a vertical portrait composition to explore the possibilities.

4. Embrace overcast days
Especially on bright overcast days, you can get great forest shots. Due to the lack of direct sunlight, you don't get harsh shadows and burned out highlights. The clouds are working like a huge softbox to diffuse the light.

5. Enjoy some rain
Even with some slight rain, you can get great vibrant forest photos. The rain will saturate the colors naturally. If you're lucky and you'll stay dry under the trees.

6. Find natural lines
Forests can be very chaotic, so find natural lins or ordering to get a clear composition. E.g. use a dirt road or a creek as a lead in line. Move around carefully to order trees up into a row, etc. One small step can make a big difference.

7. Change perspective
Use a long lens to tighten trees together. I will look like the trees are more together and this creates a sense of depth. With a wide angle lens, get down to the ground to emphasize the the foreground.

8. Get the most out of sunrise and sunset
During sunrise or sunset, stay close to the edge of the forest to get the most out of the beautiful light at this time of the day. Deeper into the forest, there's less sunlight and it's harder to find places where you get the right light.

9. Use side lighting
When using side lighting, trees getting a nice 3D look and look round in the end result. With front lighting the trunk will be evenly lit and look flat. With side light the trunk goes from light to dark and will look round. On an overcast day use a compass to determine where the light is coming from.

10. Bring in a human element
A person in the frame, even very small, can create a focal point. You can also use a self timer and position yourself into the frame to emphasize the size of trees or wideness of an area.

Bonus Tip
And last but not least: leave enough bread crumbs behind to find your way back ;-)

Tip: Canon Documentation

2009-04-28T05:26:00.000-07:00

I must admit that I don't have all my manuals in one place and sometimes it's hard to find them. And today I bought an older Canon speedlight 430EZ without a manual. So searching for a good manual online, I found this neat website with a lot of Canon EOS documentation here: http://eosdoc.com/

Lightroom Tip: Speed up import with Favourite Develop Preset

2009-04-26T02:58:00.000-07:00

I gathered a lot of Adobe Lightroom presets on the internet and developed quite a few myself. The Develop Presets are very good starting points to take a photo to where I wanted it. So, altough I use them a lot, there are just a few I want to apply initially on the whole imported set.

In the Information to Apply section in the import dialog, you can select a Develop setting. Lightroom will apply the selected Develop Preset to all photos being imported.

When having a long list of Develop Presets, (like me 700+), it takes ages to scroll down and find the Develop Preset I want to be used to process my photos. A lot of my 700+ Develop Presets are not suited to use as an initial preset for the whole set. I use them on individual photos. Actually, I'm only using 3 Develop Presets at the time at the import stage.

So to access them easily, I used a little trick. In de Develop Presets folder of Lightroom, you can find it in Lightroom by choosing Edit->Preferences->Presets->Show Lightroom Presets Folder ..., I created a new folder called 00 - Favourites and I copied my favourite Develop Presets into this folder (Auto Enhance - Landscape, Autumn Level 3, Matt's Auto Adjustment).

After restarting Lightroom and importing new photos you still got this huge and long list of Develop Presets, but just after the default Lightroom Presets, I find my favourite ones. Now it's easy to find my Develop Presets and this speeds up my workflow.

Hope you like this trick.

Free Lightroom Keyword Hierarchy: Dog Breeds

2009-04-21T09:31:00.001-07:00

After the flowers, here's a extesive list of dog breeds to download for free.

You can download the keywords here at the download section. Help about importing keywords can be found at the Adobe Lightroom Help.

Lightroom Preset - Spot Light

2009-04-20T15:43:00.000-07:00

Here's a Lightroom 2.x preset which turns on a spot light in the Bottom Right corner of the photo. You can download the preset here.

If you like the preset, please let me know and I will post the whole set.

Free Lightroom Keyword Hierarchy Flowers

2009-04-16T06:01:00.001-07:00

I created a hierarchy of flower keywords for Adobe Lightroom 2.x and it's free to use.

You can download the keywords here at the download section. Help about importing keywords can be found at the Adobe Lightroom Help.

Tell me if you find this set useful, because I'm considering to provide more keyword hierarchies.

Nik's Silver Efex Pro

2009-04-14T12:12:00.001-07:00

Nik's Silver Efex is now available for Lightroom as a plugin and I thought I give it a try. I think it's a great addition.

Canon 580 EX Custom Funtions

2009-04-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

I always forget the settings of the custom functions of my Canon 580 EX Speedlight. Putting them helps me to find again, I maybe you like this list as well.

Functions of Speedlite 580EX

Tutorial: Using Filter Keywords in Lightroom

2009-04-07T06:03:00.001-07:00

The functionality of Filtering keywords in Adobe Lightroom is not new, and constantly right under my nose, but today I discovered a great use for it:

Search for keywords and duplicates
Remove duplicates

Search for keywords
I have a pretty huge keyword list (2300+ and still growing) and lots of keywords are kind of hidden in the keyword hierarchy and hard to find. So for instance if I want to add a synonym to a specific keyword, I sometimes get lost and can not find the keyword I'm looking for.

Fortunatly, this is very simple: type in the keyword in the search box called Filter Keywords. Lightroom searches the tree and shows all root levels containing keywords that matches or contains the filter words. When you open up all the levels you see something like this:

Now I can add my synonym, or do ever I want to change my keyword. Duplicates are now easy to recognize (in this example Monument).

Remove Duplicates
I don't like duplicate keywords in my Keyword list and I always struggled to find duplicates and remove them. As we saw in the description of searching keywords I get easy access to my duplicate keywords. Let's take a look how to remove the keyword 'monument' with the small caps. I can select all images with the keyword monument assigned to it, by clicking the small arrow next to the keyword. (see image below)

Now make sure you are in grid view mode (CTRL+G for PC, or Cmd+G for Mac) and select all the images (CTRL+A for PC, or Cmd+A for Mac). Check the box next to the right keyword, in this example 'Monument' and all images will have the new keyword assigned.

Last step is to remove the duplicate keyword by right clicking the monument keyword and delete it from the keyword list.

Now we removed the duplicate and are able to assign keywords more specific and better.

Photo: Barcelona

2009-03-12T13:20:00.001-07:00

Last week I spend a week in Barcelona, Spain. Great opportunities for great urban photos. The first days there was a lot af sun and I could use if for back lit images.

News: Sony World Photography Awards 2009

2009-03-10T03:25:00.001-07:00

I'm very pleased to announce my work will be published in the official 2009 Sony World Photography Awards Winner’s Book. My work got a recommendation out of over 25,000(!) photos. Here's one of the photos that will feature the book:

Photo: Garden

2009-02-24T11:47:00.001-08:00

Here's a favourite image of me of my last shoot. It's simple, but has a special mood. The garden in winter time isn't that spectacular but I thought this still life was worth the effort. The photo is taken in a public garden in Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Tutorial: Selective Color Cast Correction

2009-02-23T03:11:00.000-08:00

I found a nice and not too hard method to correct a color cast on just a part of a photo. In the examples I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS4, but it also applies for CS3, CS2 and Photoshop CS.

Let's take a look at the start image and a close zoom of the head:

The white pole and the shadow around her head have a distinct green color cast. Here's how we can correct this part of the image:

Create a new adjustment layer Photo Filter and pick a color with the colorpicker which has to be corrected. In this case I took a sample of the white pole.

Select Hue and add 180 to the current sampled value. In this case the value is 59. So 59 + 180 = 239. Enter this value as Hue.
Change the density of the filter to 50% (or what works the best). Now we corrected the color cast of the pole, but also for the complete image. It's a bit too cold.

Add a layer mask and paint everything black where you don't want to correct the color cast and paint everything white where you do want the correction.

We can repeat these steps on different parts of the photo. I corrected the shadows a bit more and here's the final result and a close up of the part we corrected:

Before & After:

Hope you like the tutorial.

Lightroom plugin Export to Blog

2009-02-17T03:45:00.001-08:00

Timothy Armes wrote a very useful plugin to export photos directly from Lightroom to a blogpost. Even the blog content can be written directly from lightroom. As a matter of fact, this post is written with his plugin. Take a visit at his website for more information about this export plugin.

Lightroom Preset - Soften Highlights for portraits also

2009-02-16T15:27:00.001-08:00

In a previous post I showed you the effect of the Lightroom Preset called Soften Highlights on a landscape picture, but it can also perfectly applied to portraits.

Before & After Soften Highlight lightroom preset:

Please let me know what you think of this preset. Download the preset here.

Cheers,

Joop

Tip: Lightroom Short Cuts - Brush adjustments

2009-02-05T04:34:00.000-08:00

I already described a way to see the brush strokes in Lightroom here, but there's an even easier way to do this.

In brush mode type O and the Overlay mode kicks in, just like in photoshop.Some other short cuts I use are: brackets to adjust the brush size and the alt key to erase adjustments.

Road covered with snow

2009-01-27T08:47:00.001-08:00

Road covered with snow
Originally uploaded by Joop Snijder

New photos of a beautiful dutch winter is now viewable at my gallery.

Lightroom Preset - Soft Highlights

2009-01-20T03:56:00.000-08:00

Here is a preset to soften en smoothen highlights. I gives your images a dreamy look. I included two presets. A Soften Highlights - Auto, with auto balance settings and a Soften Highlights which will lighten the overall image.

Download the preset here.

Lightroom Preset - Dramatic Less Vibrant

2008-11-13T08:34:00.000-08:00

Here's a preset which dramatically changes the mood of your image. It works best for bright images.

Download the preset here

Tip: Lightroom Short Cuts

2008-11-06T04:42:00.000-08:00

I'm a hugh fan of keyboard short cuts. And I just found out that you bring up a cheat sheet in every module by using the selection Ctr+/ (PC) of Command+/ (MAC).