Posts Tagged ‘photography’
All the Tutorials/How-To’s You’ll *Ever* Need!
This single blog post should last a photographer 100 days. You see, with the ‘scooping’ of scoop.it and the kindness of abheygupta.com, we now have 100 Helpful Photography Tutorials for Beginners and Professionals all on one page!
This epic guide of guides features tutorials from the likes of Outdoor Photographer, DPMag, Shutterbug, DPSchool, ePhotozine, Digital Photographer, and Strobist. And the pickins are lush!
For example, you can find two tutorials on Low Key Portraits plus two more about Low Key lighting. Then there’s three on histograms which tell you what the ‘spread’ of tones is in a picture. These tutorials will show you how to ‘read’ a histogram and make use of it.
The number and breadth of tutorials here beats Baskin-Robbins’s flavours and even Heinz’s varieties. You’ll find a goodly number of ‘DIY’ guides from inexpensive reflectors to flash diffusers to ‘string tripods’. Then there’s one that provides advice on how to shoot architecture that has lots of lines and grids. And there’s one that brings you up to date – as of July 2010(!) – on the viability of shooting at high ISOs.
Ever wanted to master that recent fad: photographing exploding thingies in the last split-seconds of their lives? Dive into this Hot 100! How about something more gentle, like this bokeh / iris flare technique?
(It is not sterile, as the samples seem to suggest. You can use the contrivance the article outlines to shoot a portrait or any foreground against a dark background dotted with small points of light or a black sheet of cardboard pricked with holes and covered with transparent coloured paper and bright light behind the setup.)
Granted, there will be a few dud tutorials – after all, there are a hundred tutorials here! However, there will be more winners than losers, plus something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. (The age-old concept of depth-of-field, the new style of Post-HDR, the borrowed look of vintage old photos, and the blue of the ocean.)
When you get to the how-to on photographing live insects at home, you’ll know this Hot 100 is a keeper!
Schedule at least 90 minutes just to go through this list. You’ll probably end up spending a good bit of time with these how-tos and make good use of a few of them. You may even find one or two that serve up the answer to a long-lingering question you may be having!
The Photographers’ Gallery — All Things to All Photographers?
If you, as a photographer, are looking for a one-stop shop to learn, workshop, compete, exhibit, buy – whatever – look no further than The Photographers’ Gallery. According to their website, this is “largest public gallery in London dedicated to photography.”
The Gallery is not only a website, it occupies capacious premises in London near the Oxford Circus tube station.
The Gallery’s interest areas and topics span the gamut. Consider their lecture The Lens and the Gun which explores “the historical, mechanical and metaphorical relationship between photography and guns.” So now you’re thinking, “Ah, so this is one of dem high-brow, chi-chi ‘art institute’ thingies.” Not so fast – would a precious lah-de-dah institute offer a five-week iPhone Photography Course?! Now ain’t that democratic and down-to-earth? And also up-to-date: this course includes lessons on ” social platforms and sharing forums, both online and offline, where mobile photography is being showcased and discussed.”
That’s what The Photographers’ Gallery is (or tries to be):– All things to all photographers.
Besides the said lecture and course, you can find other events ranging from the tried-and-true to the offbeat.
As of now, it hosts two exhibitions, one of which definitely falls in the ‘offbeat’ category: Shoot! Existential Photography.
Apparently carnivals in the inter-War years used to have an attraction in which you tried to shoot a target with a gun; if you succeeded, a camera would shoot a photo of you and that would be your prize. (Shades of the Lens-Gun lecture!) Some photographers – including Man Ray – took inspiration from that fairground novelty to try to draw parallels between shooting with a camera and shooting with a gun. That’s what this exhibit is about.
The second exhibition is much more prosaic. It features photographs of the people of Liverpool – many days in the life of a city as reflected in its inhabitants. The photographer, Tom Wood, has taken a “documentary . . . approach” to his Merseyside subject matter. If he truly has, then Anfield and its denizens are surely well-sampled in his works.
YNWA.
Attention Travellers: Seasonal Photography Tutorials
The holiday season is round the corner and some of you will be travelling to the Mother Country or elsewhere in Europe – or even to America. There, you’ll find radically different conditions for shooting – it’ll be winter! Here, then, are three tutorials for effective winter photography.
Low sun, bare trees, snow and frost – winter scenes are almost nature-made silhouettes. Accentuate the mood and effect by following the tips in How to Photograph Silhouettes This Winter.
The author provides exposure techniques that may be informative for beginners, including ‘exposure locking’ – fooling the camera into exposing (as 18 percent grey) for a very light or very dark area in your composition. The author also assists by identifying what subjects will work best for winter silhouettes.
This article contains a really sharp example of how even a body of water can be treated in silhouette fashion, so to speak – it is in such high contrast that the crests and troughs are in near-whites and near-blacks resulting in a dramatic effect.
Another tutorial provides guidance for exactly the reverse situation: Coping with Contrast in Winter. This how-to is really about retaining shadow detail and highlight detail in high-contrast situations. It combines advice on capturing appealing images alongwith a few hard technical details.
For instance, the photographer is advised to take advantage of the histogram to check that highlight detail won’t be lost. Also, understanding issues of colour temperature will let you control just how snow looks in your photographs – do you want it to look pure white or do you want it to take on and reflect the cast of the sky or sun?
In Brilliant Prints’s Countdown: 7 Rules for Surefire Holiday Snaps we had said, “the mid-day and afternoon sun’s flat hard light makes for dull, lifeless images (try a polarizer). Instead, take outdoor photographs in the morning and evening. Sure, you’ll get shadows but early and late sunlight makes for better colour and finer detail.”
This advice is echoed in Working With Winter Sun: “Regardless of the time of year, the best lighting conditions for landscapes occur when the sun is low in the sky, when the shadow-forming angle of the light creates a strong sense of three-dimensional form in your pictures.” However, they also mention, “when the sun comes out in winter it remains low in the sky for the entire day. So . . . when the sun makes an appearance it is perfect for landscapes.”
As you might guess, this how-to concentrates on getting the best out of natural lighting. It goes beyond that to inform you of photographic conditions you can expect to find when shooting on winter mornings so that you can – like a boy scout – ‘be prepared’.
These three tutorials complement each other very well and will lift your winter photography skills to a new level.
Eye Versus Camera. And the Winner is . . .
In a direct face-off, which is superior: the Camera or the Human Eye? That is actually the question Cambridge in Colour seeks to answer – even the title reveals that this is a adversarial contest: Cameras Vs. The Human Eye – note the ‘versus’!
Given that a photographer has at least a tangential interest in sensitivity to, and perception of, light, and issues of optics, this article is quite a fascinating read.
The similarities abound but so do the differences. For instance, while a camera and lens will capture a sharp image over the full frame, even with an intermediate aperture (for a given lens) for a scene where the depth of field is not too deep, our eye does not ‘see’ a sharp image over the full field of vision. Notch up one for the camera and also put a tick in the ‘Differences’ column.
But wait— the article states that we see a fairly sharp image in our central angle of view, and that is 40 to 60 degrees, which is “incidentally . . . close to a 50 mm ‘normal’ focal length lens on a full frame camera (43 mm to be precise).” Thus, what had seemed to be a ‘Win’ for the camera turns out to be a ‘Tie’ and a ‘Difference’ is in truth a ‘Similarity’.
On other factors, such as Resolution and Detail, a comparison is scarcely possible because of how far apart the eye and the camera are. Actually, as the article points out, it is more meaningful to compare the eye to a video camera than a still camera.
After all, a still camera ‘sees’ a picture for an instant – only so long as the shutter curtain is open. The eye and a video camera ‘see’ a picture continuously. Indeed, they even have something in common: an iris/pupil or aperture that adjusts dynamically according to the amount of light in the scene being viewed or filmed.
Amidst all the comparisons there is one game-changer, as this article points out: “What we really see is our mind’s reconstruction . . .” While one can compare the eye to the camera, the eye doesn’t work in a vacuum: you’ve surely read about another organ-technology comparison between the brain and the computer, right? Well, the human mind and its neuronal circuitry does an immeasurable amount of ‘post-processing’ and ‘Photoshopping’ every nanosecond to convert the ‘raw’ images captured by the eye into what we end up ‘seeing’. The game-changer is the human brain.
When a photographer reads and studies the educational ‘Eye Versus Camera’ face-off, there’s only going to be one ‘winner’ . . . the photographer!
Painting qua Photography – Photorealism
Is it a photograph or is it a painting? While so many photographers attempt to introduce ‘painterly’ effects to their photographs (say ‘thank you’ to Photoshop), artists who possess advanced technique have eschewed Post-Modern Art and practice ‘Photorealism’ – a style of painting which aims to be both true to life yet expresses the subject from the painter’s perspective, i.e. realism through the medium of the painter.
Earlier today Christie’s concluded an auction in Amsterdam, Property Of The Scheringa Museum Of Realist Art, which contains several Photorealist paintings. The works in this 158-lot auction may be viewed as a slideshow or as a catalogue.
One of the founders of Photorealism of a kind was surely William Waterhouse. Yigal Ozeri’s Priscilla in Ecstasy is ’21st Century Waterhouse’, so to speak. This painting represents a sub-style that is just about where painting ends and photography begins. Also check out Ozeri’s Untitled (Lot 43).
We, however, are more interested in the photography aspect of the Photorealist School and, to start off, doesn’t Michael Taylor’s grl rstng on svle chr (sic) look like a ‘stream of consciousness’ ‘day in the life’ photograph you’d see in an art institute’s exhibition?
The oddly-named Portrait of Mr. Gachet by Stefan Hoenerloh has nothing to do with Vincent and is a wonderful composition of an impersonal urban-scape which ties in the ‘Golden Ratio’ and the ‘Rule of Thirds’ to arresting effect. The very different tones of the foreground and background buildings and their converging angles add to the coldly hypnotic ‘pull’ of this photograph – er, painting.
Gerard Schlosser’s C’est en Novembre is a study in lines, countours and hues which – except for a tiny green-black patch – are exclusively in ochre and beige. Had this picture been a photograph, it would have been classed in the Modernist or Post-Modernist style but as a painting, it is classed as Photorealism!
Do you like underexposure? Polarizer? Other filters? Those are probably what Damian Loeb (figuratively) used when he painted Straw Dogs, a moody landscape – and this is how Vincent would have shot if he had been a photographer.
On the other hand, in The Sum of Human Knowledge, Terry Rodgers seems to have taken a photograph of a few lucky bachelors and their ravishing stripper friends, and then tightly cropped it and Photoshopped it to make it just a little ‘harder’. Note how the tableau vivant of a kind is vertically divided by a central foreground figure into a major and minor sub-tableau.
The above are just a few of the highlights from this very fine auction. Don’t miss Lot 77.
Not all the works are paintings posing as photographs. You’ll find many that are true-blue paintings and a few that seem to have elements of both painting and photography, say, a painted-in figure over a ‘photographed’ background. As a photographer, you’re sure to find some images here to inspire you so click on the slideshow or catalogue, and On With the Show!
Offbeat Day: The Silly, the Spooky, and the Sad
Silly
Bad photographs are making a comeback because . . . well, because apparently they’re cool! The fashion world strikes again. I know it sounds silly but it’s true.
The photography techniques and ideals of the day are now “blurry shots, shadows, overexposure” according to Anne-Marie Conway, who seems (at least a little) enraptured by this retrograde development. Known as ‘Lomography’, boiled down to its essentials this Art & Science centres around deliberate use of el cheapo cameras to simply point and click, and then see what happens.
The boxes of choice for the hip and cool (and silly) crowd are Diana+, Holga and Lomo LC-A (which are said to represent a serious threat to Nikon, Canon and Olympus’s long-term viability). Evidently these are ultra-complicated rigs, for Create Studios offers a half-day Holga and Diana Workshop, according to Conway. No doubt it will be expensive but I am sure it will be well worth the stiff price so I am booking a place . . .
Spooky
Talk about this lomography business’s “burry shots” and “shadows,” Julie Griffin’s blurry shots of shadows from the spirit world represent a much more honest endeavour than the lomography fraud, er, I mean fad.
Cathy Torrisi writes about Griffin’s childhood in a purported haunted house in which para-normal activity was . . . normal. Swaying chandeliers and swinging doors aroused a desire in Griffin to photograph the spooks and she set about her task with whole-hearted dedication.
Spooky Goffe House is said to be one of the more in-demand retreats for sophisticated ghosties and Griffin tried to hunt down a few with notable success: “Last week, she set up her camera with a motion detector inside the Goffe House when no one was there, and it did go off,” reports Torrisi. The results of Griffin’s ghost-hunting exploits are at http://www.ghostlyphotographs.com/. Definitely worth a look-see.
Sad
We move from hunting ghosts to hunting elephants, and from the ghosts of humans to the ghosts of elephants – slaughtered, mass-murdered elephants.
Ivory, though illegal under CITES, is big business. NatGeo’s sad story, Blood Ivory – Ivory Worship, exposes the Elephant Killing Fields and reveals that the outlawed ‘Blood Ivory’ trade runs into the unknown ‘multi-tons’ and spans the Middle East and Far East.
Here’s the photography connection: attached to the article is a photo album by Brent Stirton. It captures some low points in the transit route of illegal ivory, including a nice pic of the ‘Elephant Monk’ outside his temple.
The killers will surely stop someday . . . that sad day when all the tuskers are gone.
No Studio? No Problem. Rent One!
If you’ve ever idly planned to set up a home studio but never got around to it or simply wanted to shoot in a studio but ‘knew’ you couldn’t unless you set one up yourself, well, Russell Masters has some good news for you: rent one!
Though renting a studio may seem like something a photographer in a different sector, say outdoor or industrial, may want to do from time to time, it’s actually an excellent way for an amateur to significantly sharpen his/her indoor photography skills and technique.
Masters’s very original how-to is pretty frank in stating “Just like you I have always found the thought of shooting in a studio exciting but have until recently never been brave enough to actually try. . . . the thought of putting ourselves in a high expectation situation such as a studio shoot is enough to ensure we never actually do it.” Reading this interesting how-to will make you jump up and want to ‘do it’!
The main advantage of renting a studio is the considerable variety of lighting equipment and reflectors plus props and backdrops. Masters explains how to use the Web to find rental studios near you and offers tips and hints as to how to approach the session including advice as to how to engage a model or whether to bring along a friend.
One point I would like to add is that the first-timer make his/her booking in person, doing so when the studio is not occupied. Then, spend five or ten minutes acquainting yourself with the studio you’ll be shooting in and also take a gander at the rental equipment that will be at your disposal so that you don’t suddenly parachute into unknown territory.
If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll recall that it was about Nikon’s newly announced D600. Well, the Nikon-Canon Love Affair that revolves around the oh-so-romantic line “Wither Thou Goest . . .” continues. Canon has “followed” Nikon and released a rumour to the effect that their “EOS 6D DSLR camera will be the direct competitor of the Nikon D600”! Which one do you like?
Hiya Shutterbug! Here’s a new blog for you
Hiya Shutterbug!
Brilliant Prints is delighted to bring you a cool new blog that won’t try to keep ‘educating’ you with a never-ending stream of photography how-tos . . . most of which you already know! We’ll mix it up by telling you about photography exhibitions and auctions, plus gadgets and gizmos, all seasoned with the practical lesson and spiced with the offbeat item, say about the love-hate relationships our chi-chi ‘celebrities’ have with the lens (go ahead Angelina Jolie, strike another whacko ‘binbag’ pose and make our day . . . puh-leez!)
If you snap the shutter for a living then do we have more good news for you! You’ll find a more professionally-oriented blog on our BPro site. However, if you’re a casual shutterbug then (in real casual way) mosey along to the Pro Blog; you just might find some useful tip or trick or it may even inspire you to take the plunge and go pro!
In any event, this blog’s purpose is to keep you informed and excited about photography, and sometimes even amused and entertained. As we said on the Pro Blog, “You don’t have to trawl the Web – because we do it for you!”
Today has to be ‘gadget and gizmo’ day, courtesy of Sony. In our pro blog yesterday we mentioned that Pentax had made a ‘news splash’. If that was right, then today Sony has made a news SPLASH! They’ve announced an assortment of gear – semi-pro cameras, snapshot cameras, zoom lenses, fixed-focal-length lenses . . . . The SLT-A99 is surely the ‘Headline Act’ in glitzy Sony’s lineup – it’s certainly a lightning rod and is attracting a slew of comments. Also take a peep at the new DSC-RX1 which too is getting a lot of attention.
In closing, we at Brilliant Prints don’t plan to do this in a vacuum so feel free to wade in. Tell us if there’s anything in particular you’d like us to discuss or dig up!
Cheerio,
Kersie
How to take a soulful portrait
Today we bring you the first in a continuing series of articles written by some of our keen staff photographers.
It is every photographer’s goal when taking portraits: to show the subject’s soul.
That’s the only way for your audience to grasp the entirety of the person on the photo, and get to know your subject than just the color of the eyes or the age of the skin. When you capture the soul of a person on a photograph, a lot of things naturally follow: personality, heart, strength, experiences, humor, and priorities.
When you take photos of your kids, your wife, your friends, and even strangers in the streets, do you attempt to bare the story of their lives, their souls?
How do you make that happen? Is there a button on your camera that can do that? The bad news is that there is none. The good news is that there are tips you can rely on to help you and your camera do the trick.
The Non-Rules of Photography: How You Can Enjoy the Experience More
Long ago, Lomography.com listed ‘8 Golden Rules of Lomography,’ rules which may very well apply to photography in general. Technically, they are labeled rules but to those who practice photography, they are more like guides to breaking the formulated rules in taking pictures — right composition, accurate lighting, sharpness, what-have-you’s. They focus more on enjoying the experience of shooting and capturing.
So let’s go with the non-rules.
Take your camera wherever you go. In the park, the flea market, your school, your office, your friend’s bridal shower, in the laundry shop — everywhere. As long as you have your camera in your hand, everything around you starts to have a different color and story about them that just craves to be captured on film.
Use it anytime — day and night. They say that the best times to take a photo is at dawn or at dusk because it offers fantastic lighting. But anytime of the day is just fine. Don’t worry about night photography for the darkness of the night has its own charms.
Photography is not interference in your life. On the contrary, it’s a significant and integral part of it. The results of your photography are wonderful signs that you are alive.
Try the shot from the hip. You don’t need to always look through the viewfinder to get a good picture. Have more freedom in terms of perspective and you just might be pleasantly surprised. Hand it up in the air or lower it down to the ground. No one’s stopping you!
Approach your objects as close as possible. One of the most striking photographic themes includes photos shot on macro. It’s great if your camera has a good macro feature, but if it doesn’t, who cares? Get close. People show more soul up-close, so does your pet, for instance.
Don’t think. Just shoot.
Be fast. Sometimes your money shot will only last a quarter of a second. Always be prepared to shoot and do it fast. Don’t worry about getting the right settings.
Don’t care about any rules. Actually forget about the rules. Discover your own kind of photography and define your own rules. Just do it, do it the way you want and do it now.
Do you follow any rules in your photography? Share it with us.
Monday-Friday
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