Lith printing in photography — Photography podcast #39

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #39 fea­tures an inter­view with fine art pho­tog­ra­pher Vicki Reed aka hol­ga­girl on Flickr. In this inter­view we talk about lith print­ing which is an alter­na­tive print­ing tech­nique using a tra­di­tional dark­room. For those that only want to try this dig­i­tally, see the links below.


Sumac and Sun — Vicki Reed

Pho­tog­ra­phy links men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Vicki’s fea­ture on Photography.ca
Holga cam­eras
Foto­speed lith paper Do a search for lith on this site to get more lith prod­ucts
Ken­tona paper
2 Tim Rud­man videos on Lith print­ing
The World of Lith Print­ing
Dig­i­tal lith print­ing
Dig­i­tal lith print­ing action for pho­to­shop
Dig­i­tal lith print­ing by Adobe

Is it still art — what is art — thread on photography.ca forum

Thanks as always for the com­ments by‚Gary H,‚‚seyDoggy, Yves Janse and Mikael. We LOVE com­ments and sug­ges­tions so please send more.

You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

One light portraits — Photography podcast #38

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #38 talks about cre­at­ing dra­matic por­traits using only 1 light. Using 1 light cre­ates very harsh shad­ows which is PERFECT for a dra­matic por­trait. The fol­low­ing 2 shots illus­trate this dra­matic effect. In the first shot Lorne and Boog are being lit by 1 light located 45 degrees toward the right. The sec­ond shot is side­light. Both these shots use no reflec­tor to bounce light back into the sub­jects’ faces. Note that the light in the sec­ond pho­to­graph reveals a lot of skin tex­ture, so this type of light­ing would not be good for a ‘fash­iony’ shot in most cases. Thanks to Lorne and Boog for being the mod­els. I Love how lit­tle Boog is star­ing me down in the first shot. You can click all the shots to make them tastier on the eyes.

One light portrait

1 light portrait - side lighting

You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below this image.

Photo of the week
This week, the pho­to­graph is by Zseike and I com­ment in the pod­cast on why I think this pho­to­graph is fantastic.

Photo by Zseike

Thanks as always for the com­ments by‚Gary H, ‚Andre, Tom, Yves Janse, David and Mikael. We LOVE com­ments and sug­ges­tions so please send more.

Freezing and Melting

It’s funny how‚various pho­tog­ra­phy tech­niques can resur­face at any moment depend­ing on what you are look­ing at.…Given the infi­nite vari­ety of things to see, it means that there is never a lack of sub­jects to photograph.

I guess this shot was inspired by the macro on the cheap pod­cast but it’s not a macro shot at all. It’s a sim­ple lower angled shot of some melt­ing ice but for some rea­son its shape intrigues me. When‚I first looked at it, it‚seemed like a mini model of some­thing larger. It was pho­tographed using the long end of my 70-200mm zoom. There was actu­ally water mov­ing through the ice that unfortunately‚I was unable to cap­ture because‚I needed a slower speed and it was too bright…and oh yeah, I for­got my fil­ters like a bone­head. Still, there’s some­thing here that pleases me.
Exif Data — ISO 100 — F-32 1/6. You can click the image to make it tastier on the eyes.

Stairway to Heaven .….…nope

What is going on here?‚

Where does the lad­der go?

Are there treats at the end of the ladder?

This pho­to­graph is an excel­lent exam­ple of lens com­pres­sion. For those that may not know, longer lenses tend to com­press the fore­ground and back­ground while wide angle lenses tend to do the reverse. I shot this scene on 1 frame from about 50 feet away. The white in the back­ground is actu­ally a mas­sive con­tainer filled with oil and the lad­der is part of that con­tainer. The tree is actu­ally about 20 feet in front of the container.

I shot this scene from my car while snow was lightly falling. Exif data — Shot at ISO (The light was quickly fading)‚1000 F-16 at 1/400 at the long end of my 70–200 zoom lens. You can click the image to make it tastier on the eyes.

Macro photography on the cheap — Photography podcast #37

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #37 focuses on cheap macro pho­tog­ra­phy setups. In this pod­cast we talk about using revers­ing rings, exten­sion tubes, close-up lenses and cheap macro lenses in order to achieve good macro results for lit­tle cash.‚Special thanks to ‚Yves Janse who sug­gested this podcast.

The fol­low­ing images describe the dif­fer­ent inex­pen­sive tech­niques used to cre­ate macro photographs

macro photography

1 — Shows my shot with a zoom lens only
2 — Shows shot with cheap close-up lens #1
3 — Shows shot with cheap close-up lens #2
4 — Shows shot with cheap close-up lens #4
5 — Shows what close-up lenses look like
6 — Shows what exten­sion tubes look like
7 -‚Shows what a lens mounted back­wards using a revers­ing ring looks like
8 — Photo by Yves janse (Thanks Yves) show­ing how you can stack close up lenses and tubes
9 — Shows a Plamp for hold­ing macro subjects

Links men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Revers­ing rings on Ebay
Close up lenses on Ebay
Exten­sion tubes on Ebay
Phoenix AF lens review (A cheap ded­i­cated macro lens)
Plamp clamp for hold­ing macro subjects

Thanks as always for the com­ments by‚Al, Tim and Yves Janse who also sug­gested this. We LOVE com­ments and sug­ges­tions so please send more.

2 old bananas huddle for warmth in the snow

Much to my delight some­one tossed out 2 old bananas. Then I came upon them and decided “hey bananas in the snow, cooool”

The first shot‚shows the real bananas and the sec­ond shot‚shows the bananas after hav­ing frozen to death. OR… the sec­ond shot shows still­born oxy­gen deprived bananas.

Kid­ding aside all‚I did to get the deep blue in the sec­ond shot was push the hue/saturation slider all the way to the right in pho­to­shop. Shot at F5.6 at 1/200 ISO 100. Click the images to make them big­ger, and of course…you are invited to comment.

Backup your photos — CLONING your hard drive

There is no com­puter mal­func­tion as dev­as­tat­ing as los­ing the con­tents of your hard drive. This can hap­pen due to a virus, or a hard­ware or soft­ware mal­func­tion. Back­ing up your com­puter reg­u­larly is a must and there are sev­eral ways to do it. The most com­mon way is to use a pro­gram that breaks up the con­tents of your hard drive into chunks and save it on another exter­nal hard drive. In case of hard drive fail­ure, you can rebuild your old drive with those chunks.

Thatžs not the way I like to do it as my first line of defense. I con­fess, I still do backup that way as well, but itžs not my pri­mary way. Call me neu­rotic or squea­mish but I donžt like chunks.

If my hard drive fails and I have some­thing impor­tant to do, I want to have an EXACT COPY of my hard drive already saved. I donžt want to have to rebuild any­thing or look for a disk to reboot my com­puter with the saved chun­ked data. It should still work of course (as long as the inter­nal hard drive is not irrepara­bly dam­aged) and even­tu­ally you have to deal with the com­put­eržs prob­lem inter­nal drive, but who wants an ulcer? Frankly Ižll pay a wee bit for piece of mind.

The answer is to make a clone, a copy, or an exact intact image of your hard drive. That way, I can just take my exter­nal drive (which is a clone of my desk­top) attach it to old 50 dol­lar lap­top via USB and boom ‚” my whole com­puter shows up as a new drive on my lap­top. No need to look for any disks or reassem­ble chunks and ZERO down­time and zero lost files.‚

Herežs how I do it. I buy an exter­nal drive that is the exact same size as my com­put­eržs inter­nal drive. That way when I clone the drive, I clone it exactly. You should know that that backup exter­nal drive can ONLY be used for backup in this way. You canžt save other files on that exter­nal drive, you can only save the clone of your inter­nal hard drive. Each time you re-backup your com­puter onto that exter­nal, it deletes the pre­vi­ous backup. My 500 gig inter­nal drive takes about 1.5 hours to clone onto the West­ern Dig­i­tal 500 gig exter­nal drive (which costs $130.00 dol­lars 3 monts ago) via firewire (you can of course use USB).

There are many pro­grams that can do this but the one I use and like best is Acro­nis True Image 11. It costs about 50 dol­lars and you can try it for free. When you load it up youžll see dif­fer­ent choices on how to backup. To clone your hard drive DO NOT CHOOSE BACKUP AND RESTORE. That option backs up your hard drive in chunks. Instead choose DISK UTILITIES and then Clone Disk. I use man­ual mode after that and fol­low the prompts care­fully and I MAKE SURE TO ‹“KEEP DATAž WHEN IT ASKS HOW I WANT TO MODIFY MY OLD DRIVE AND I CHOOSE ‹“AS ISž (because both dri­ves are the exact same size) when it asks how I want to move data from the old to new drive.

The other pro­gram I am some­what famil­iar with that does just about the same thing is Nor­ton Ghost. Again to make an exact copy of your drive (non-chunk) donžt choose Back it up now, instead choose Copy My Hard drive (advanced) and fol­low the prompts very carefully.

Using either of these meth­ods gives you the peace of mind that even if your hard drive crashes in a ter­ri­ble way, you can still work from a new com­puter by plug­ging your exter­nal into it. Obvi­ously, youžll need to copy or clone your inter­nal drive reg­u­larly to have the fresh­est copy. If you have irre­place­able pho­tos and other files on your inter­nal hard drive, it is also safest to burn them to CD or DVD.