Aperture | Rudy Lopez Photography

Weekend Wedding

By Rudy Lopez, on December 28th, 2008%

This weekend I shot a beautiful wedding in the Colorado foothills. I’ve always enjoyed photographing weddings because happy people make for better photos.

Gear

Nikon D300 and Nikon D200. Sigma 12-24mm, and Nikkor 18-70mm. Twin Speedlight SB-800 flash units. 32″ Gold reflector. Edited in Aperture 2 with Tiffen Filtering.

Contact me if you need . . . → Read More: Weekend Wedding

How to get good exterior photos while shooting towards the sun

By Rudy Lopez, on September 18th, 2008%

North facing structures are notoriously hard to photograph. A beautiful home can look like a mash of very dark shadows and harsh angles if it faces north. This home in Westminster, Colorado has fantastic curb appeal, but it’s north facing front door and large garage doors make it a challenge to convey the drama . . . → Read More: How to get good exterior photos while shooting towards the sun

Manual Mode – Understanding the basics of the Digital SLR

By Rudy Lopez, on September 10th, 2008%

Most of the time the automatic exposure setting on your Digital SLR will produce fine images. The camera’s brain along with the lens’ impressive array of sensors can usually figure out the best balance between shadow and highlight and provide a decent image. A perfect record of a moment in time. To me, photographers are the ultimate historians, but that is for another time. Historical photography theories aside, there are times when you want to convey more than just a moment in time. Perhaps you want to add more light to a sunny country garden scene to give it a misty impression. Or maybe you want a portrait to have a dark, brooding feeling. Automatic settings will capture the moment in time, but to express yourself you need to be able to twist and bend the light like a sculptor does with clay. As with any tool, the quality of work it produces depends entirely on the competence of the user. The tool itself is merely the apparatus your mind uses to create a physical object from the neural info stored in your brain. A Digital SLR (or any manual camera) is designed to be intuitive. The basics are simple, and the learning curve is short, if you practice. Take your camera everywhere, shoot everything on manual mode. Erase nothing. Keep track of your settings, figure out what works best. I will show you how to use the manual mode on your camera, my bet is that you will never use automatic settings again after a little training. . . . → Read More: Manual Mode – Understanding the basics of the Digital SLR

Aperture 2 Tutorials #2 – Selecting, Editing, Cropping, and Exporting Photos

By Rudy Lopez, on August 16th, 2008%

Now that your new images have been cataloged in the Aperture 2 library, it’s time to select, edit, and export the shots. You will need files that are versatile, good for print and web. Excerpt from the video: This tutorial will lead you through the selection, editing, cropping and rename-export process.

Open Aperture 2 and select the project you want to work on.
Click the Quick Preview icon to keep RAW images from loading while making selections.
Make your selections by clicking the green checkmark. This will assign 5 stars to the image. You can isolate your favorite images by filtering the five star rated images.
You will need to disable Quick Preview in order to edit the images.
Watch the following video for the rest of the tutorial.

DSLR Basics – Understanding the Digital Camera

By Rudy Lopez, on August 6th, 2008%

D300

With image sensors getting cheaper and more powerful, most serious amateur and semi-pro shooters are opting for the versatile Digital SLR, merrily leaving their film cameras behind. This guide is geared toward people that are already familiar with an SLR photography, but are unfamiliar with the digital process. Shooting with a DSLR is just like shooting with a film camera. All of the common mechanical functions are there, right where you would expect them to be. And, while there aren’t any chemicals to deal with, each image still has to be processed before it can be shared with the universe.

THE SENSOR

In film photography, a chemically treated segment of plastic is exposed to light for a predetermined period of time, permanently embedding an image onto the film. The film is then processed to create negatives, which in turn are processed into photographs or slides. The concept is the same for digital photography, except instead of a segment of film being exposed to light, a CCD (charged coupling device) is exposed and the light is converted into electrical signals that are recognized by the camera’s processor, the files are then stored on a solid state memory device such as a CF card. Each pixel on the sensor captures red, blue, and green information. . . . → Read More: DSLR Basics – Understanding the Digital Camera

Rudy Lopez Photography