Desert Photoshoot

In October we'll be in America. Specifically; Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.  Mid-way through Jules is flying over to Albuquerque (from Nottingham, via Texas).  We have a plan to drive out into the part of the desert used in the programme "Breaking Bad" and do an early morning photoshoot.

The concept is a Jack Kerouac type character living his their wits, riding the rails with nothing but a few dollars in loose change and their typewriter.

The location we're shooting at is only forty-five minutes from the hotel.  It's part of the Tohajiilee Indian Reservation.  It's pretty off the beaten track, but the co-ordinates should be 35.102449, -107.137169.  It's saved into the GPS so fingers crossed.

Sunrise for Albuquerque is 7:15am for the day of the shoot so if we leave by 6am (and don't get lost) then we should get there on time.

This is the typewriter we'll be bringing with us as a prop.  I've sawn the case apart and used epoxy resin to attach attach the case handle so it can be held like a briefcase. It weighs about 4.5Kg so it won't use too much of the luggage allowance.

Mormons

A couple of Mormons popped over for a chat and consented to having their portraits taken.

Colour Balance

A couple of weeks back I bought a Spyder from DataColor to calibrate my monitor.  I'm not sure - to me, it looks as though it gives it a red hue.  Is this because (a) it's wrong, (b) that's how it should look but I've had it wrong for so long it's just different?

So, I figured having calibrated my monitor I'd see what difference shooting with an over-priced piece of paper makes (though I know you're also paying for the software).

I downloaded the software, propped up the card (colour side up) and imported it into Lightroom.

This is the image straight from the camera.  Shot in my office with just ambient light coming from a couple o sky lights.

I set the software up in Lightroom (really I'd prefer to trigger it from Photoshop) and chose to edit the image via the tool.  Which leads to this.

I then have to align the squares with the one from the image.  Now the grid isn't perfectly square, so we'll see if that makes any difference but I aligned them as much as possible.  Having done that the calibration gets saved as a preset.  Restarting Lightroom I expected to see the preset, but nope - so where is it?

Turns it out it unhelpfully saved it to;

C:\Users\mattw\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets\User Presets

So to get it to appear I have to move the files (on my machine) to D:\Data\CoreCatalog\Lightroom Settings\Develop Presets\Spyder Presets.

and for all this work how different does the image look?

Is there a difference?  Yes, though you'd need to stack them in Photoshop and flip between them to notice.  Would I go through this process again?  Perhaps if I was a product shot where colours really mattered, but generally?  Nope.

And if I don't use the calibration software and merely use the card in conjunction with an adjustment, and also trying using black/white points naturally in the image?

Really not that disimimlar to my eye, so my question is this.  If you have black/white points naturally in the photo then why would you bother to use this product?

Chris, Father-in-law Portrait

Southend