San Diego Children's and Newborn Baby Photographer | Little Sprout Photography

So, you just purchased beautiful prints from your favorite photographer. To ensure your photographs can be enjoyed for years to come, don’t skimp on the mat!

Many professional photographers (us included) print exclusively on Kodak Professional Supra Endura VC Digital Paper. Even though prints on this paper typically last 100 years in home display or 200 years in dark storage, the mat surrounding your print can have a detrimental effect on its longevity.

When framing your photographs, pay attention to the type of mat you’re using. In most cases, if the mat doesn’t specifically indicate that it’s acid-free (neutral pH), the mat paper is probably acidic. Another way to tell is by looking at the cut edges of the mat. On a white mat, the edges of an acidic mat will look yellowish. These acidic mats can cause ‘mat burn’, which shows up on your prints as a dark brown line around the edge or as a thick band of discoloration.

There are five kinds of mat board available [1]. Ordered by quality, they are:

1. Museum Board: The highest quality material available – 100% cotton fiber.
2. Museum Mat or Rag Mat: Constructed of cotton liners and cellulose (wood pulp) middles. Less expensive than Museum board, while still offering good protection.
3. Conservation or Archival Mat Board: 100% pure high alpha cellulose (wood pulp) and treated to be inter for up to 300 years. This is the highest quality paper matboard available.
4. Acid-Free: Lined with a wood based liner and treated to prevent short term acid burn.
5. Regular (Acidic): Avoid this; it can discolor your photographs.

Since the paper we use has an archival value of 100-200 years, Museum Boards and Museum Mats will likely outlast the photograph and may not be worth purchasing.

One final note: to avoid any discoloration over the life of your print, make sure all materials touching the print are acid-free. This includes any backing behind the print, and any adhesive tape used to affix the print to the mat. If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments below!

[1] Wikipedia

We just updated our galleries to provide a great new experience on your iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android device. Previously, our galleries were only available via the Adobe Flash plug-in (boo!), but we now have a universal player for everyone. This works for our portfolio galleries as well as all client galleries (yay!).

If you’re on a computer with Flash installed, the galleries will look exactly the same. If you’re on an iOS or Android device (without Flash), tap the “View Gallery” button to load the slide show in a beautiful full-screen player.

To move from image to image, simply swipe your finder, tap the arrow buttons, or tap the play button to auto-advance from image to image. Tap the black tab on the bottom to bring up a film strip of all available images in a particular gallery, then use your finger to quickly move through these images, and tap to view a specific one.

Try it out today and let us know what you think!

Updated Gallery

Just a quick note to let you know that we recently updated our gallery. Pop on over to the Little Sprout Photography homepage to take a look at some of our latest images. San Diego Baby Photography.

Lightroom Workflow Tips

Came across an interesting post on a few Lightroom timesavers. We also use the clarity brush for sharpening and have brushes set up for dodging and burning (and softening skin, whitening teeth, etc…) — some good tips here; definitely worth a read.

Speaking of Lightroom…

Here’s an interview with fellow San Diego photographers, the Boudoir Divas discussing their photography business. I found this fascinating:

We are happy to say that our post-procession workflow is now completely streamlined… to the point that we are able to do same-day viewings for ALL of our shoots! Here’s how it goes: Immediately after a session, we have our client leave the studio for an hour, to go grab lunch or a cup of coffee… and while they’re gone, we download their images and edit and process in Lightroom, using presets that we’ve created to go with all of our distinct sets and lighting set-ups. When the client returns in one hour, we have her proofs all ready to go…

We’re not able to turn our images around that quickly because our image processing workflow involves a lot of handcrafted dodging and burning, but, wow, that’s impressive.

Want to instantly improve the quality of your portraits? Whether you’re using a point-and-shoot or an expensive digital SLR, set your camera’s white balance to Cloudy. And leave it there. If you’re shooting people, the cloudy setting does a really nice job of warming them up just a bit…and people usually look better slightly warm than cool. Your mileage may vary, but I find that 9 times out of 10, you’ll see better results.

To illustrate this point, here’s an image using the camera’s auto white balance. This photo was in the shade, about an hour before sunset. The camera decided that the optimal white balance should be 4750 degrees Kelvin, which is a little on the cool side for my taste.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 70mm | 1/200s | f4 | ISO400

Here’s the same image using the Cloudy white balance setting of 6500K. Skin tones seem more natural and the background picks up some of the golden tones of the setting sun.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 70mm | 1/200s | f4 | ISO400

What about RAW files?

If you’re shooting RAW files, I still recommend leaving your white balance set to Cloudy. Your photos will look much better coming into Lightroom and it will save you the time of adjusting your images. Of course, since it’s RAW, you can always tweak the color temperature later.

If you’re manually adjusting the temperature in Lightroom, a good rule of thumb is to start around 5000K and slowly increase the temp. until it looks good. Somewhere between 5000-6000K seems to be the sweet spot for portrait photographs in natural light.

We’ve recently been experimenting with balancing ambient light and flash. Thanks to the wealth of information on Strobist and some of the examples in Joe McNally‘s books, we’re finding it pretty straightforward to add a little pop to an image or use light for creative effect. We wanted to share a couple sample images and explain the process we went through to arrive at the final result.

In this first photo, the sun was behind and to the left of the kids. It was pretty early in the morning, so the sun was pretty low in the sky and giving the left sides of their heads a nice golden highlight. Unfortunately, their eyes and the shadows on their faces were a bit too dark. Because the basic exposure was pretty good, I kept it as metered and added just a flick of flash (dialed down a stop or so) to fill in some of the shadows and provide a a slight catch light to their eyes. The flash was also aimed above their heads to feather the light a little bit. The result is an image that looks naturally lit; the flash is nearly invisible.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 50mm | 1/500s | f5.6 | ISO500

In this next image, we were feeling a bit more adventurous and wanted to try some of the examples from The Hot Shoe Diaries. Though the sky looks like dusk, the image was actually taken around 2:30pm. First, we set the camera’s white balance to tungsten, which shifted everything to blue, and also underexposed the image by -1 stop to get the sky even darker. The main light is an off-camera speedlight (triggered via Nikon CLS) shooting through a white umbrella just out of frame on the right side. To compensate for the darker image, we added +2 stop to the flash output setting.

At this point, the entire image is still blue since the flash is daylight-balanced. To get Ainsley back to the right color, we added a CTO gel (orange color) to the front of the flash. She comes out properly lit, but everything else stays blue.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 38mm | 1/250s | f10 | ISO200