A Week With A View — a day anyway :)

June 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A friend of mine, Chris Penn, sent me an email ask­ing me to par­tic­i­pate in A Week With a View whereby we choose one image a day on Flickr and blog about why we think it’s beau­ti­ful. I’ve got a nutty week ahead so I can only play today, but it ‘s a great idea and I encour­age peo­ple to participate.

The photo I choose is called 0253 By Cia de Foto. Click the image to see it on flickr.

0253

For me, part of what makes an image beau­ti­ful is some type of story or the sug­ges­tion of a story. In this image the light is on but the woman looks star­tled. Did the light go on by itself?‚ Did the dog turn it on? What IS going on here? It’s left up to us but we are def­i­nitely engaged.

Another thing that I find beau­ti­ful (Ok it’s a bit tech­ni­cal but it’s my post :) ) is how our eye is beau­ti­fully guided. We go from light to girl to dog and go back and forth between the lit ele­ments. Our eye does not wan­der because the pho­tog­ra­pher is skill­fully guid­ing us.….and for me, it’s a thing of beauty.

and if you don’t accept that, then the star­tled girl is beautiful.

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries Tagged With:

68 — Creating a photography portfolio

June 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #68 dis­cusses how to to pre­pare a port­fo­lio for clients, agen­cies gal­leries etc. Even though we are in the dig­i­tal age, when it comes to pre­sen­ta­tion, noth­ing beats a beau­ti­fully printed pho­to­graph. This pod­cast shares some tips and tricks on putting together a great portfolio.

Links /resources men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Pre­sent­ing pho­tog­ra­phy to gal­leries — Pod­cast #53
June’s low shoot­ing angle assign­ment on the Photography.ca forum

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

Filed Under: Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: ,

‘Signing’ your prints

June 23, 2009 By 2 Comments

When Picasso signed his paint­ings, he did so using his paint­brush and oils and gen­er­ally placed his sig­na­ture at the bot­tom right or left of his art pieces. So when ‘sign­ing’ a photo that you are selling/giving away, what can be done as an artist to label your work?


A nice idea is to place a sim­ple bor­der around the photo, and have your sig­na­ture and the photo’s title 1/8 of an inch below the photo. If not opt­ing for a bor­der, another idea would be to keep it ‘clean’ by plac­ing a sig­na­ture in the bot­tom right cor­ner of the photo itself. Keep in mind though that you want to keep the photo clear and not have your sig­na­ture or bor­der dis­rupt ele­ments in the photo.

Some pho­tog­ra­phers choose to sell their pho­tos with mats already attached, and some­times they sign the mat­ting and not the image. This seems silly IMO; after all the pho­tog­ra­pher cre­ated the image not the mat­ting so why sign the mat­ting? Also, the mat­ting can be sep­a­rated from the print and so the sig­na­ture or logo can get ‘lost’.

Some clients how­ever pre­fer not to have a border/signature/title ‘dis­rupt­ing’ their photo. In cases as such, you may want to con­firm with your client first prior to print­ing. As an alter­nate way to sign your prints, a stamp with your logo/signature on the back of the print may be a nice final touch.

For more info, feel free to check out the link on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: ,

‘Signing’ your prints

June 23, 2009 By 2 Comments

When Picasso signed his paint­ings, he did so using his paint­brush and oils and gen­er­ally placed his sig­na­ture at the bot­tom right or left of his art pieces. So when ‘sign­ing’ a photo that you are selling/giving away, what can be done as an artist to label your work?


A nice idea is to place a sim­ple bor­der around the photo, and have your sig­na­ture and the photo’s title 1/8 of an inch below the photo. If not opt­ing for a bor­der, another idea would be to keep it ‘clean’ by plac­ing a sig­na­ture in the bot­tom right cor­ner of the photo itself. Keep in mind though that‚you want to keep the photo clear and not have your sig­na­ture or bor­der dis­rupt ele­ments in the photo.

Some pho­tog­ra­phers choose to sell their pho­tos with mats already attached, and some­times they sign the mat­ting and not the image. This seems silly IMO; after all the pho­tog­ra­pher cre­ated the image not the mat­ting so why sign the mat­ting? Also, the mat­ting can be sep­a­rated from the print and so the sig­na­ture or logo can get ‘lost’.

Some clients how­ever pre­fer not to have a border/signature/title ‘dis­rupt­ing’ their photo. In cases as such, you may want to con­firm with your client first prior to print­ing. As an alter­nate way to sign your prints, a stamp with your logo/signature on the back of the print may be a nice final touch.

For more info, feel free to check out the link on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: ,

Photography.ca winning member images from May 2009

June 16, 2009 By 2 Comments

For the past few months we have added a new fea­ture on our pho­tog­ra­phy bul­letin board where the Admin on Photography.ca (Me, Marko), chooses 1 photo that he thinks is great and talks about the photo. This month I teetered hard between 2 images and in the end decided that they were both win­ners. Wood Duck by Michaelaw and Navy ‘LST 325′ by z-06-jim were my choices for this month. (check the pre­vi­ous link for the explanation).

We have lots of pho­tographs being sub­mit­ted each month on our forum for cri­tiques, assign­ments or just to show the photo. Choos­ing Michaelaw’s and z-06-jim’s photo as the ‹“win­nersž took many hours of care­ful sift­ing. Given that it took so long to choose, I came across many close con­tenders. Seems like a waste of time just to include 1 photo so Ižd like to include 4 hon­ourable men­tions right here.

If you havenžt joined our forum I would encour­age you to do so. We are an extremely friendly bunch that share and learn daily.

Herežs the win­ning photo by Michaelaw:

Wood Duck by Michaelaw

Herežs the win­ning photo by z-06-jim:

Navy ‘LST 325′ by z-06-jim


Here are the 2 hon­ourable men­tions in no par­tic­u­lar order:

Frog/Toad by Michaelaw

First Action Pics by casil403

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries Tagged With: ,

Filters for lens protection

June 12, 2009 By 2 Comments

There is a great debate among pho­tog­ra­phers as to whether or not lens fil­ters need to be used for lens pro­tec­tion. Pho­tog­ra­phers are divided when it comes to fil­ters and image qual­ity. Many believe that adding a fil­ter to the lens reduces the image qual­ity while other pho­tog­ra­phers feel there are lit­tle to no effects to the photograph.



A fil­ter is not only used to‚protect against every day use. UV fil­ters offer pro­tec­tion against UV rays that may dam­age our lenses, and Sky­light fil­ters reduce the haze and clar­ify the photo. But really, are these truly nec­es­sary? Many pho­tog­ra­phers sug­gest that they have no notice­able effect in most cir­cum­stances. Lenses are made so strong today, that the ques­tion remains…“To use a fil­ter, or not to use a filter?”

Feel free to add your com­ments here or join our pho­tog­ra­phy forum and add to the con­ver­sa­tion. Here’s a link to the topic in the pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: , , ,

Quality of Lenses

June 8, 2009 By 1 Comment

What real advan­tages are there when spend­ing extra money on an expen­sive lens over its cheaper counterpart?


When com­par­ing pro lenses to the ‘cheaper’ lenses, the higher priced lenses deliver bet­ter qual­ity for the most part. Depend­ing on the lens you might also get expe­dited auto-focus, sharper images and less chro­matic aber­ra­tion.‚ Per­haps the biggest advan­tage though is with regard to aper­ture. More expen­sive lenses are often faster. This means that their largest F-stop (small­est num­ber eg. F1.8, F2.0, F2.8 etc) is usu­ally larger than cheaper lenses. Remem­ber, the larger the aper­ture, the more room you have to use a faster shut­ter speed. In addi­tion, the larger the lens’s aper­ture, the eas­ier it is to shoot in lower light because when you look through the viewfinder you are look­ing at a scene through the lens’s largest aper­ture. If a lens has a max aper­ture of F2.8, any scene you look at through your viewfinder will look BRIGHTER than if the lens’s widest aper­ture was F4.0. It makes no dif­fer­ence what F-stop you use dur­ing the actual expo­sure. This doesn’t make a dif­fer­ence in bright sun­light, but in makes a huge dif­fer­ence in low light where it is eas­ier to focus if the viewfinder is brighter. On the neg­a­tive side, higher priced lenses with larger aper­tures will often‚ buy you sig­nif­i­cantly more ‘weight’ as well.

When com­par­ing the results of pro lenses to the ‘mid-range’ priced lenses (pro-consumer level), there doesn’t seem to be a notice­able dif­fer­ence to many advanced pho­tog­ra­phers so long as the images are kept small. This is espe­cially true if the images are for Inter­net use only.

If you’re still skep­ti­cal and want to test the waters your­self, you can always take the same pic­ture using two dif­fer­ent lenses to prove a point. Or, an eas­ier route is to search the web for some­one who’s already taken the time to do it — much easier!

As a final point, when peo­ple (pho­tog­ra­phy newbies/hobbyists) ask me what cam­era to buy, they never ask about lenses which is a mon­ster mis­take. I ALWAYS coun­cil newbies/hobbyists to spend MORE on the lenses than the cam­era, espe­cially the first ‘expen­sive’ cam­era. This is because the cam­era is just a box with a flap to let light in. The LENS does all the focus­ing so a poor lens on an expen­sive cam­era will give you a poor result. A great lens on an aver­age cam­era will give you a great result (in the right hands of course ;) )
When you’re just learn­ing though you can eas­ily learn on a used or lower end DSLR that you’ll surely replace as tech­nol­ogy changes. The lenses though, you can keep those for decades. Trust me, spend the dough on the lenses.

Check out the link in our pho­tog­ra­phy forum for more info.

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: , ,

67 — Orton Imagery — The Orton Effect — Interview with Michael Orton and Darwin Wiggett

June 3, 2009 By 30 Comments

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #67 dis­cusses how to use Orton Imagery (AKA the Orton effect or the Orton Tech­nique) to give your pho­tographs an ethereal/painterly feel. This tech­nique was invented by Michael Orton in the mid 1980’s using 2 pieces of over­ex­posed slide film sand­wiched together. The prin­ci­ples of this tech­nique can also be used in graph­ics pro­grams like Pho­to­shop to achieve a sim­i­lar effect. This pod­cast con­tains 2 inter­views; one with Michael Orton dis­cussing‚ the technique’s his­tory, and one with Dar­win Wiggett,‚ dis­cussing his method for cre­at­ing Orton Imagery using Pho­to­shop and other graph­ics pro­grams. Darwin’s step-by-step is out­lined below and his Pho­to­shop action is also included. Thanks a ton Michael and Darwin!!

Image by Michael Orton - click to enlarge

Orton Imagery by Michael Orton — Click to enlarge

NMP2823 - Non-Orton image by Darwin Wiggett - Click to enlarge

NMP2823 — Non-Orton image by Dar­win Wiggett — Click to enlarge

NMP2823 - Orton image by Darwin Wiggett - Click to enlarge

NMP2823 — Orton image by Dar­win Wiggett — Click to enlarge

NMP9058 - Orton image by Darwin Wiggett - Click to enlarge

NMP9058 — Orton image by Dar­win Wiggett — Click to enlarge

NMP6435 - Orton image by Darwin Wiggett - Click to enlarge

NMP6435 — Orton image by Dar­win Wiggett — Click to enlarge

Here’s how to cre­ate Orton Imagery Using Pho­to­shop. Por­tion reprinted from from Orton Imagery — A …œHow to‚ guide for Pho­tog­ra­phers by Dar­win Wiggett. Thanks to Nature Pho­tog­ra­phers online mag­a­zine for allow­ing me to reprint this.

Dig­i­tal Tech­nique to Cre­ate Orton Images

Here, there are many ways to sim­u­late an Orton slide sand­wich. You can do it the same way as out­lined above for slides over­ex­pos­ing two sep­a­rate images and then in the com­puter stack­ing the images together in soft­ware and blend­ing them. Per­son­ally, I pre­fer to take my exist­ing dig­i­tized pho­tos (either from film scans or dig­i­tal cam­era files) and run­ning them through the process below to see if they work as …œOr­ton Images‚.

Here is the step-by-step recipe for mak­ing Orton images in Photoshop:

  1. Open any image you wish to try the tech­nique on. Make a dupli­cate of the image (Image>Duplicate). Close the orig­i­nal image.
  2. Lighten the image as fol­lows: Image>Apply Image‚¦ then in the dia­log box that comes up change the bend­ing mode to …œScreen‚ and the Opac­ity to 100%. This will give you an appro­pri­ately over­ex­posed image.
  3. Dupli­cate this over­ex­posed image (Image>Duplicate).
  4. Blur this sec­ond image (Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur‚¦ and in the dia­log box use a Radius set­ting of 15 to 50 pix­els ‚” the higher the pixel set­ting the blur­rier the photo and the more ‹“painter­lyž the image‚¦ but you can go too far!). Exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent set­tings, for my tastes and for the size of my dig­i­tal files (50–100 megabytes) a radius of about 25 pix­els works perfect.
  5. Now select the move tool from the Pho­to­shop tool bar (or just press …œv‚ on your key­board for quicker access to the move tool). Hold down the …œshift‚ key and use your mouse to drag and drop the blurry image onto the sharp one (donžt let go of the shift key until after you release the mouse but­ton or the images wonžt be in per­fect alignment).
  6. Bring up the lay­ers palette in Pho­to­shop (F7 is the key­board short­cut). Under the word …œLay­ers‚ in the lay­ers palette will be a menu box of blend­ing modes. Change the blend­ing mode from …œnor­mal‚ to …œmultiply‚.
  7. Now …œflat­tenž the two lay­ers by press­ing …œCTRL+E‚ or by click­ing on the side­ways tri­an­gle in the lay­ers palette to select ‹“flat­ten imagež.

There, you now have an Orton image — if you like your new mas­ter­piece save the file!

Copy­right Dar­win Wiggett and Nature Pho­tog­ra­phers Online Mag­a­zine — All rights reserved.
—————————————————————————————————

Dwayne Oaks from our pho­tog­ra­phy forum also lists the way he uses the Orton effect using NX2 soft­ware. Thanks Dwayne.
1-use mid­tone (lev­els) slider to brighten photo (2.04)
2-select gauss­ian blur, set radius slider to (15.85)px and opac­ity to (100)%
go to blend­ing mode and select (mul­ti­ply)
3-readjust (lev­els) slid­ers if nec­es­sary
4-in the case of my work to get the muted col­ors just turn down
the saturation

Links /resources men­tioned in this pod­cast:
More of Dar­win Wiggett’s work on Timecatcher.com
Pho­tograph­ing Cre­ative Land­scapes: Sim­ple Tools for Artis­tic Images and Enhanced Cre­ativ­ity by Michael Orton
Dances with Light by Dar­win Wiggett
Down­load Darwin’s Orton Action
June’s low shoot­ing angle assign­ment on the Photography.ca forum
See and vote on May 2009’s mem­ber images

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography podcast Interviews, Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: , , ,

Removing Backgrounds from Images

June 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

So you’ve just taken the per­fect shot of a pair of shoes for a client. But wait… ooops. The client didn’t want the shoes to be on the table. So what can be done to remove the table? There are a few ways to go about it. First (and most obvi­ous) is to shoot the pair of shoes on a sim­ple back­drop with no distractions.


But if this is not pos­si­ble, Pho­to­shop can help you achieve that ‘near per­fect’ shoe shot by extract­ing it from the back­ground. Photoshop’s selec­tion tools work well to get the job done. The quick selec­tion tool is great for sim­ple extrac­tions. The back­ground eraser is another great tool. Although many peo­ple loved the extract tool in Pho­to­shop CS3, it’s miss­ing from CS4. (If you loved it and still have CS3, you can copy it from the CS3 Plug-ins-Filters folder to CS4).  But depend­ing on the sub­ject, these tools may miss out on some of the finer details like a model with frizzy hair. In cases like these, man­u­ally trac­ing the edges with the pen tool and then con­vert­ing it to a selec­tion is ideal. Tedious yes, but it will give you opti­mal results.

Plug­gins are also avail­able for remov­ing back­grounds if you’re up for the expense.
Who knew shoes could be so tech­ni­cal?!
Link from our Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: , , ,

Removing Backgrounds from Images

June 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

So you’ve just taken the per­fect shot of a pair of shoes for a client. But wait… ooops. The client didn’t want the shoes to be on the table. So what can be done to remove the table? There are a few ways to go about it. First (and most obvi­ous) is to shoot the pair of shoes on a sim­ple back­drop with no distractions.


But if this is not pos­si­ble, Pho­to­shop can help you achieve that ‘near per­fect’ shoe shot by extract­ing it from the back­ground. Photoshop’s selec­tion tools work well to get the job done. The quick selec­tion tool is great for sim­ple extrac­tions. The back­ground eraser is another great tool. Although many peo­ple loved the extract tool in Pho­to­shop CS3, it’s miss­ing from CS4. (If you loved it and still have CS3, you can copy it from the CS3 Plug-ins-Filters folder to CS4).‚ But depend­ing on the sub­ject, these tools may miss out on some of the finer details like a model with frizzy hair. In cases like these, man­u­ally trac­ing the edges with the pen tool and then con­vert­ing it to a selec­tion is ideal. Tedious yes, but it will give you opti­mal results.

Plug­gins are also avail­able for remov­ing back­grounds if you’re up for the expense.
Who knew shoes could be so tech­ni­cal?!
Link from our Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: , , ,