Orchids, experiments, and a few thoughts on Adobe
Hey there, photo friends. If you’re new here (or just haven’t been in your e-mail in a minute), you’re reading Photo Newsletter, a weekly newsletter about photos. I’m Nat Bennett: Obsessive photo-maker and incredible nerd.
This week, two things: I dragged out the tripod and a speed light and started taking more pictures of orchids under different lighting conditions, and I got a tip to trying layering photos in Procreate.
🌸 Stupid pictures of stupid flowers
I’m always self-conscious about pictures like these because at best they’re just pictures of flowers, and then on top of that the flowers have the temerity to be really technically challenging for both lighting and composition. So it’s not just a dumb picture of a flower that any idiot with a camera could make. It’s a dumb picture of a flower that a not-particularly-good idiot with a camera made– they show off all my technical weaknesses.
Which, of course, is why I keep making them. They’re hard and I can tell when I’m getting better because people go, “Oh~ that’s pretty!”
The last of these is the best but the light’s still too hard. Need to find my reflector next time. In very bright light the orchid petals kind of glitter.
🎨 I like how you’ve trapped these people and they all seem somewhat confused but also tripping balls and not scared
Still getting a handle on what this technique can do but, yeah, Procreate, layers, blend mode, they’re great. Might end up being the core of the next photobook? We’ll see, I expect my ideas to change about that a lot once it’s June/July and that’s actually my full time project.
The thing that’s extremely wild about this is that I can make this on my phone with Procreate pocket. It’s satisfying as a software person to see a way where software has really unambiguously made the world better. Teens just trivially have these capabilities now!
💻 A note on software
Since I know I have at least one former Adobe employee reading this:
I use Lightroom (the new cloud subscription one) pretty regularly. My workflow for writing this newsletter is actually to pull the photos I want to use from Monument, import them to Lightroom, edit them, and export the jpegs.
Now that I’m primarily managing my photographs in Monument, though, that may change. I started using Lightroom and have stuck with it for its photo management capabilities. Its tagging, starring, and culling features are just miles better than anything else I’ve played with. In general I prefer editing on the iPad with tools like Darkroom and Snapseed. If the version of Lightroom I was using had the ability to let me include different edits of the same photo in different albums I would basically never leave but that feature is Classic only and I just… can’t learn Classic. It seems at this point smarter to invest in learning a good non-Adobe tool and do project management in other tools.
I don’t really use any other Adobe software and I… kind of don’t know why I would, actually? I did use Photoshop to create the cover of my zine but that was pre-iPad. I would use Procreate for that job today. And I tried to use InDesign but it was just too much software for me. I ended up laying out the zine in Pages instead and that worked great.
Still paying some-dollars-a-month for the creative cloud photography subscription though, so, as far as Adobe knows what they’re doing is working.
Stats, goals
Last week
- Ask someone for their portrait
Just… did not get this one this week
Find my “small” tripod
Found it, used it
Get my big tripod out of the car
So I don’t actually have it because it turns out it wasn’t in my car but I did take the action so I’m going to call this one done.
This week
- Ask someone for their portrait
- Spend ten minutes look for my reflector and/or big tripod
- Take another flash photograph of a flower