In the ever increasing need to find cutting edge Photographic Technologies, Methodologies, Techniques that we would love to use to benefit you our client, we have had to define what we want to use that gets the client the most amazing photographs in the least amount of time.

This has led us to examine many different aspects of the photographic arena.

We have had to try and understand many different photographer’s workflows by going for various training courses, studying many different photographers work on the internet, as well as being in photographic clubs and photographic competitions.

We have looked at many different lovely methodologies, used more and more cutting-edge software, chomped at the bit for cheaper alternatives to various technologies, figured out what is feasible and practical in a live and fluid on location photographic shoot.

First of all, the last three to four years has really been exciting in the photographic arena, due to a great deal of major technologies and techniques making a way into the main picture. These technologies and techniques and opened up possibilities that were essentially impossible in the past.

The Guiding Force for Defining our Photographic Technologies, Methodologies, Techniques

We are in an ever-changing instant everything world today. In this world cell-phone photography has become everyday to a great deal of people, and the sharing of their photos are instantaneous. But these devices have some areas of concern in respect to ultimate quality (some cell phones are amazing) and lack of lenses / lighting control etc.

Therefore, we have aimed ourselves to bring the lack side of photography to our clients at a closer sharing speed that they have become used to. This has meant a refining of our workflow as far as humanly possible, working out what people really want, what attracts people’s attention, in a way that does not tie us up for days on end doing editing work that does not allow for the meeting of modern time constraints.

Workflow Tools for Defining our Photographic Technologies, Methodologies, Techniques

Some of the systems that we have introduced in our workflow and often have perfected into our offerings / structure are: –

Lightroom

Lightroom is the first quick editing software that we used and it has been used extensively by us, and has been the go to for more than 90% of our editing needs. This software allows us to quickly do mass basic edits, sort out the best photos and then quickly do more amazing edits on the choice photos.

ON1 Photo Raw

ON1 Photo Raw is the software package is usually what we use when Lightroom cannot help our editing needs. It has an amazing quick mask facility as well as a very quick portrait editing tool. If application cannot do it we then switch to Photoshop.

HDR (High Dynamic Range)

This is the first major technique that we started with many years ago, giving us the ability to bring out detail that is absolutely amazing. In this we were always looking for better and better software to make the process quicker and more natural looking and recently we have purchase an amazing piece of software (Aurora HDR) that knocks the socks off of anything we used before. Before this we used Merge to 32bit.

This technique has not been used by many photographers and a great percentage of photographers using the technique went overboard with it creating really horrible looking photos giving the technique a seriously bad name. We have heavily adopted the technique in some of our photographic areas and are finding ways to make it even more mainstream without the horrible aspect of it.

HSS (High Speed Sync)

Up to very recent years flash technology had heavy restrictions to it, mainly in what sync speed we could use limiting our creativity, this was mainly the domain of major photographic houses with huge budgets using Medium Format Cameras and Leaf lenses.

Thank goodness, a way around the sync speed limit has been discovered and brought to the general professional photographer masses. Now we too can have this great capability in our grasp.

It does take some expenditure, learning and practice, but it is all worth it. Also, currently most photographers do not use it leaving us to have an awesome offering to our clients.

Quick Effective Posing techniques

I have attended a number of courses with DPC on posing, from single person posing to group posing, from weddings to glamour poses, therefore I can quickly pose persons for good basic positions that don’t take time and brings out the best in the person/s I am dealing with.

Quick Effective Editing techniques

We have come to really love the latest software applications like Adobe Lightroom that gives us great tools like presets that allow us to do general bulk editing in a matter of minutes and then allow us to do additional per photo edit quickly and effectively. In respect to sport photography most of our time is then spent on sorting and cropping the photos.

Better Quality Equipment

We have done extensive research to find the most cost-effective method of equipment acquisition, this has made us concentrate more on things like strobe lights, better lenses, excellent gadgets, putting our money where it counts for our clients. We have also made sure of issues like backup equipment in case of equipment failure as you our client is reliant on us producing the product you have hired us for even during equipment failure.

Active Learning

Photography is one area that you got to continuously improve your skills in. This means going on regular training courses, regularly researching on the internet, continuously practicing, trying to do styled shoots etc. We have actively been pursuing all of these and will continue as we believe you can never totally perfect the art.

Studying many other Photographers Work

We have a few top-quality photographers as our ‘Hero’s’ whose work we regularly study to improve our capabilities. We are also actively involved on a photographic competition website and regularly vote on other people’s photos giving us a unique view of what makes a good photo, allowing us to improve ourselves to at least match what we see. Currently both Myself and Mauritius are Expert level, and almost through Champion level.

Getting it right in camera (Forget the adage of fix it in post)

This motto has become an extreme personal issue to all of us at Edward Ruthven Photography Krugersdorp, as fixing it in post usually takes a great deal of time trying to get it right to the detriment of our preferred turn around. Also fixing it in post does not always produce the best results.

Combining It All

 A major drive for us is to combine a number of Technologies, Methodologies and Techniques together to produce even better images thrusting us to the leading edge of photography. We have been doing this on smaller scales, but have been increasingly due to excellent practice in each area making it much easier to cross grade.