Maternity shoot

A bit different maternity photo session - for the first time it is of my girlfriend Dalia! We are expecting a very unusual Christmas present this year!

After all the talks about photography at home (nagging out new gear) I could not afford not taking pictures of her, so here are some shots from the latest session we had.

The idea was to have 'white and light' maternity pictures and I think it worked out pretty well!

We could not miss the 'belly holding' shot too, with yours trully in there as well :)

Realy excited about our first addition to the family! I don't think I fully understand what's coming my way, but I am definitely getting a lot of practice with baby photography quite soon!

If you are interested in details on lighting setup and diagram, click the Read More link.

How to crop in Bibble?

It might sound like a funny question, but in all brutal honesty- it took a while to figure out the trick behind crop tool in Bibble 5. And so how do you crop in Bibble?

All you need to do is just press 'c' (or click the crop button ), select the area you want to keep in the photo and ... that's it. I had to take a break and come back to the crop issue before it struck me that there is no need to double-click or 'apply' or 'ok' my crop. The cropping was finalized right after the selection... And as soon as you switch to another tool (i.e. click the 'Pan & Zoom' button), Bibble will display the properly coropped photo.  And even if you don't switch, your crop settings are already saved and active.

Today I've been working with Bibble for 4 months or so now and sometimes I still catch myself double-clicking in the crop area to apply my settings... Bibblelabs have surely eliminated a completely needless step, but it seems to be stuck in my head for good :D

Simple lighting setup with Elinchrom Bx 500 Ri

Some weeks ago a good friend came visiting and one of the evenings we spent making a couple of portraits of her. She is a happy camper as you might notice :)

Half way into the photo session Terra felt she needed to investigate things

Terra is one curious dog. Nothing goes unnoticed at home...

For those curious how the pictures were taken- a chart of lighting setup and some more details on how the pictures happened inside the post.

My default RAW settings for Bibble 5

You can create a custom defined set of 'Default RAW settings' in Bibble 5. These default RAW settings are the ones that are automatically applied to every RAW file you open in Bibble for the first time.

If you are using Nikons software (similar goes for Canons, I guess...), your in-camera settings for sharpening, color saturation and the like will be reflected on screen immediately. Now what Bibble does is completely different. Seems that all you get from camera by default here is the pixel values and white balance, which in many cases looks nothing like the picture on your cameras LCD.  It just turns out quite dull and boring actually.

The good thing is that a much better looking photo is just around the corner! Two things that I have been doing 99% of times after opening a new picture for editing was to first adjust curves to a slight 'S' and then increase saturation. So both of these adjustments were added to the Default RAW settings. The S curve as you see it down in the screenshot below, and saturation set to 15. When you adjust these settings, right-click on the picture thumbnail, choose Settings and then 'Save as RAW Default Settings...'.

Here are two versions of a photo of crayfish - original straight out of camera and after applying my default settings:

Obviously the exact settings need to be custom tailored for every photo. Usually saturation value goes down to 10 if it is a portrait I am working on or it could go up to 20 if it is a nature shot of some kind.

You might have noticed that in the above screenshot the Working Space is set to Adobe RGB. That is also included in my default kit, but this one is up for everyones own taste... Just like any other setting too. If you are doing any other adjustment to almost all of your pictures, might as well save it into your own defaults.

So once you are done with this, every picture you open up with Bibble will have the S curve and saturation applied. You can also revert to your defaults at any point by pressing Ctrl+R, in case you get carried away postprocessing and need to go back to square one :)

//M.