Mark recently did a series of shots for the Hyatt 48 Lex, one of Midtown Manhattan’s newest hotels, which is billed as being “for the discerning traveler looking for an intimate, familiar, pied-à-terre in New York City.”

What was the best prop in the shoot? Perhaps the corkscrew curls of the little blond beauty, who seems to just love the camera (at least, the camera loves her).

People who are away from home want to feel as if they’re at home. The best way to convey that familiar feeling? Adorable children (and you can never hear them cry in a photo).

Chef Arthur Cavaliere of In Riva, East Falls

In fact, that’s true most of the time. Professional portrait photographers take the time to set up their studio and equipment environment meticulously, just so that they can relax and joke with their subjects during the actual shoot.

The appearance of being staged is never enjoyed. The benefits of preparation are.

Wrapping around the Schuykill from Center City towards the northwest is Fairmount Park, one of the largest urban parks in the country. Within the park are several sections and segments, each home to its own charms.

At any time of year, the Belmont Plateau offers up a great view of the Philly skyline, but fall may well be its peak season.

Just down the hill from the plateau peak is the Shofusu Japanese House & Garden. Though not open past October for inside tours, the exterior grounds still provide a lovely tableau of tranquil garden life.

Both of these images were photographed and then digitally painted using Corel Painter. Mark has been using Painter ever since it was a product of a now-defunct company called Fractal Design. The software was then purchased – and much improved upon – by Kai Krause’s MetaCreations (also no longer in business). Happily, Corel snapped up the rights to the program and has continued to release it.

Though it’s no longer the several-days-long drag it was in the 1990s, it still takes quite a bit of computing power, as well as good judgement, to create a digital painting from an photo. Mark first crops, optimizes and color-corrects his photos, then sets up several different brush combinations in Painter and fuses the multiple results into the gorgeous images presented here.

The lens is not outfitted with “modern” features – for example, it does not have a silent focus motor – but it does sport a macro ratio of one-to-one in a finely crafted piece of glass. Only available for the Alpha line, the lens is a steal at $199.

As it’s designed for 1.5 crop-factor cameras, the 30mm effectively translates to 50mm, long a photography standard. The lens can focus as close as 2 cm, allowing great capture of food and small details. Best of all are the intangibles – this glass captures a pretty picture, with pleasing bokeh and clear colors.

Don’t these shots from Philadelphia’s modern Greek Opa just make your mouth water?

700,000 square feet of space is outfitted with state of the art cooling systems, assuring that produce on its way from shipping containers to our markets and restaurants does not have to get warm as it awaits transfer. This means less spoilage, better efficiency and better flavor for almost every type of veggie or fruit that crosses our palates.

The Philadelphia Regional Port Authority and O’Neill Properties Group collaborated on the project, and built a structure that would be sustainable and not wasteful. However, they also made sure that the building was aesthetically pleasing, and to this end, Major Industries was contracted to build a huge skylight. The large, overhead glass ceiling allows natural light to shine throughout most of the enormous hallways of the facility.

We were recently contracted to photograph this skylight, and shot it both from the ground and via helicopter (chartered from Independence Helicopters, who employ skilled pilots). It was a fun flight, and Mark was pleased with his results.

The Philadelphia Center City DoubleTree by Hilton presents an especially tricky situation, because its centerpiece is a huge, custom-made fiber-optic chandelier. It demands a photo taken during evening hours, when its changing colors shine the brightest. However, the lobby also is home to the hotel lounge, which sees patrons at the bar until the wee hours of the night.

In order to capture the chandelier during the dark yet when there was no one around, Mark headed to the hotel at 4 AM to capture this shot. And, guess what? It worked beautifully.

Looking North-East:

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Looking North-West:

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Looking East:

Several more to come!

Mark found himself in Pittsburgh to photograph a hotel, but couldn’t resist heading up Mt. Washington to capture this view of the skyline. USA Today named this vista the second-best “city view” in the United States.

The shot was taken in parts with the Sony a55 on automatic HDR mode, then stitched into this final panorama.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3vtpGtyw1k

Would you trust your car to a robot?

New residential tower 1706 Rittenhouse is an impressive structure, featuring whole-floor condominiums and unique city-wide views, but the most interesting facet of the development is hidden underground.

The building’s automated parking garage is one of only four in the U.S., and is the most sophisticated model currently offered by German manufacturing firm Wohr.

Recently tasked with capturing imagery of all of Philadelphia-based development and management company Parkway Corporation (who made this skyscraper happen, along with Scannapecio Development Corp.), Imagic decided to produce a video showcasing how this “auto auto lot” works.

The president of Quality Elevator, in charge of maintenance of the facility, took us on a ride on the robotic lifts, on which we descended below-ground and filmed the computerized parking system doing its thing. Moving cars around is no easy feat, and doing it in minimal space with zero damage to the vehicles is another step entirely.

Bottom line: the automated underground facility saves time, space and money. Check out our two-minute showcase, above.

Though I’m not a pro shooter, I have used Photoshop for over 15 years. I also have a business partner who is a very talented commercial photographer. This has allowed me to develop an easy method for optimizing images for the web, one that anyone with access to Photoshop can adopt. The 10 tips below trace my quick processing procedure for just about all the photos I post online. Follow along with the steps or just use the tips as one-offs.

Part I: Fix the tonality

1) Bring out initial contrast with Auto Contrast

A good first step for any file is to choose Image > Auto Contrast. Now you have a good sense  of the colors and tones you’ll be working with in this photo.

2) Even things out with Shadows/Highlights

Image > Shadows/Highlights can help you recover dark areas, such as under tables or in corners, and also overexposed bright spots, like sun shining through windows or gleaming off white surfaces. Check off Show More Options and start playing around with the settings.

I find good results usually come with Shadows set to Amount: 25%, Tonal Width: 15% and a large Radius, like 180px. Highlights I usually set much lower, defaulting to Amount: 5%, Tonal Width: 20% and Radius: 30px. Under Adjustments, set, everything to 0.

You may want to dial in settings such as these and choose Save as Defaults for a quick starting point on your next photo.

3) Use Levels to adjust brightness

If the photo as a whole is still too light or dark, use Image > Adjust > Levels. (Do not use Brightness/Contrast – it’s destructive and won’t give good results.) The main thing to remember about Levels is that you only want to play around with the Input settings, and only the middle slider (called the gamma) which defaults to 1.00. By moving it left or right, you lighten or darken your whole photo.

Part II: Fix the color

4) Color correct with a Curves trick

Unfortunately, Image > Auto Color is not quite as handy as Image > Auto Contrast, and rarely gives pleasing results. Instead, use a relatively hidden dialog within the Curves panel for a one-click quick fix. Choose Image > Adjust > Curves and click on Options. In the Auto Color Correction Options window that appears, check off Snap Neutral Midtones, and try out the three different Algorithms options, watching what effect each has on your image. Chances are, one of them will jump out at you as an enhancement.

Bonus Tip: if this step has taken you too far away from your original color, try using Edit > Fade and bringing the effect down to 50%, combining your old and new results.

5) Fix skin tones with Hue/Saturation

The color of human skin is very tough to get right. A quick fix for lighter skintones is found in Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation. From the drop-down that says Master, first choose Reds. Set both the Hue and Lightness to +5. Then choose Yellow, and set the Hue to -5. This will even out a lot of splotchiness in your subjects.

Part III: Fix the perspective.

6) Straighten your horizon with the Ruler tool

For exterior or landscape shots where you can see the horizon, this is a great trick. Zoom into 100% and use the Ruler tool (hidden below the Eyedropper) to draw a line along the horizon (or anything that you know should be horizontally level. Then choose Image > Image Rotation > Arbitrary. The pre-filled-in number will make your drawn line straight, righting your image.

7) Rely on Guides to correct perspective

All wide angle shots suffer from parallax, and lines that we know should be perpendicular to the horizon diverge outward from the camera’s viewpoint. To make your shot hew to architectural standards (and generally look more real and appealing), fix this with a simple transform.

First, drag a couple of vertical guides from the rulers (hit ctrl/⌘-R to show them) and drop them next to obvious straight up-and-downs on the far left, far right and center of your photo, such as corners of walls, doorframes, bookcases or lampposts.

In the Layers palette, double-click the Background to make your image a layer. Press ctrl/⌘-T (or Edit > Transform > Distort). Hold down ctrl/⌘ again, click on one of the corners and pull it in or out of the frame, until your reference line (e.g. the corner of the wall) is mostly straight up and down. Do the same with the opposite corner, and keep tweaking and pulling each corner until you have straightened all the vertical lines.

Hit Enter to keep the transformation, then crop out your new, perspective-corrected shot, and re-flatten your image (Layer > Flatten Image).

Part IV: Shrink your image

8 ) Resize for the web

Now is the time to size your image appropriately for the web. First, save your work thus far at original size (as a TIFF, PSD or other non-lossy format). Then, resize with Image > Image Size.

Make sure Constrain Proportions is checked off (we don’t want to smush or stretch the image). Also check off Resample Image, and choose Bicubic (best for smooth gradients) from the drop-down. We’ll be sharpening separately, later.

Use the top set of measurements, checking that the units are set to Pixels. For a photo you want the viewer to be able to blow-up to full screen, type something like 1200 pixels into the Width field. The Height field will adjust accordingly.( If your file is already smaller than this, don’t enlarge it. It won’t help.)

For a photo that will be placed in a blog post or article and won’t be blown up, 600 or 800 pixels wide is a good size. And for a photo that will only be used at thumbnail size, go for 200 or 300 pixels. Choosing the right size is important because that’s the size that we’ll sharpen in the next steps.

Part V: Sharpen

9) Add contrast using Unsharp Mask

With its oxymoronic name, Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask is not best used for sharpening of detail. Instead, it’s powerful at adding that last bit of contrast and making colors stand out. To achieve this, dial in some unconventional settings as a starting point. Set the Amount somewhere between 6 and 11%. Bump the Radius almost all the way up, to around 220 pixels, and make sure the Threshold is set to 0. You should see the photo pop and glow.

10) Smart Sharpen

To gain actual detail, use Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. This wonderful filter came along in later versions of Photoshop, and is a fantastic solution for slightly blurry images, and also files that have been down-sampled (when you shrink a file, you lose hard-edge detail due to interpolation).

Keeping the settings on Basic, choose Gaussian Blur as the type of fuzziness to remove. Start with an Amount around 60% and a Radius of 0.6 pixels, and play around with both. Settings here will vary greatly with the type and size of image you want to end up with.

And voila! Save your file as a JPG (I default to a quality setting of 8), and show off your work in your desired web destination.

Let me know if you use any of these tips, or agree/disagree with any of them. I’m always looking to refine my workflow.