100 — Shoot in any light

September 20, 2011 By 5 Comments

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #100 cel­e­brates our 100th pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast and focuses on the tag line of the pod­cast which is ‘keep on shoot­ing’ in any light.

I’d like to take this moment to thank all our lis­ten­ers! Your sup­port and encour­age­ment dur­ing these past 100 episodes has been awe­some. Thanks for all the feed­back, all the com­ments and all the con­tri­bu­tions. Spe­cial thanks as well to all the guests that have shared their knowl­edge so freely. More inter­views are planned for the future.

In this pod­cast I offer up tips on how to shoot in any light so long as it suits the subject.

 

I shot this image at about 2pm. The light that most of the ducks were rest­ing in was bright and harsh. Had I shot this duck in that direct light, the shad­ows would have been too harsh. This par­tic­u­lar duck though was rest­ing under a shel­ter that soft­ened the light and the soft light suited this sub­ject far bet­ter and holds details in the blacks and the whites. Straight shot — No flash was used here.

 

Links /resources men­tioned in this pod­cast:
– How to pho­to­graph with hard light — Pod­cast #97
– Rain pho­tog­ra­phy — Pod­cast #88 
– Stu­dio light­ing for begin­ners — Pod­cast #33 
– September’s reg­u­lar assign­ment on the Photography.ca forum — Yel­low
– September’s level 2 assign­ment on the Photography.ca forum — Macros of any kind


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Thanks to Rob vE, Rich, Anuj, Photo art cafe and Best who posted  blog com­ments about our last pod­cast. 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. Most of the links to actual the prod­ucts are affil­i­ate links that help sup­port this site. Thanks in advance if you pur­chase through those links.

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

Thanks for lis­ten­ing and keep on shooting!

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

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

Mois De La Photo in Montreal 2011 — First Impressions

September 19, 2011 By 1 Comment

This Sat­ur­day I spent about 3–4 hours going to dif­fer­ent exhi­bi­tions that make up Mois De La Photo (Photo Month) in Mon­treal. I’m not fond of writ­ing about things I don’t like, I MUCH pre­fer to select a few things that I do like and write about those.

I was dis­ap­pointed in the work that I saw over­all. I saw about 8–10 exhi­bi­tions and I won’t name them. It wasn’t because the work was bad or any­thing, it just was not my cup of tea. Almost every­thing I saw was dark-themed, abstract, overly-intellectualized, and WAY too exper­i­men­tal imo. I have noth­ing against exper­i­men­tal, but imag­ine if 99% of every­thing you heard at the Mon­treal Jazz fest was experimental.…it would suck for most peo­ple. Peo­ple expect fes­ti­vals that they go to, to some­what rep­re­sent their idea of what the fes­ti­val is about. Of the 8 Exhi­bi­tions, 3 of them had videos…Video is not pho­tog­ra­phy. I DO have an open mind BTW; I guess I just would have liked even a teeny rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the work that I saw to be sim­i­lar to the fine art pho­tog­ra­phy that I like to see.

So at the end of the day, I guess my issue is with the Title, “Mois de la photo”. Such a con­ven­tional title, it makes you think you will be see­ing ‘some’ con­ven­tional pho­tog­ra­phy. You will not (as far as I can tell from my sam­ple). I’d much rather they title the thing Exper­i­men­tal photo Month.

Of the 8 exhi­bi­tions I saw, the only one I liked a bit was The Dead by Jack Bur­man. Large prints of dead peo­ple pre­served in formalde­hyde. Not try­ing to be face­tious here, but Burman’s exhi­bi­tion was one of the most con­crete, and “acces­si­ble” ones. You know full well what you are look­ing at.

Image from ‘The Dead’ by Jack Burman
Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries Tagged With:

Photography forum image of the month August 2011

September 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Every month on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum mem­bers nom­i­nate images that they like. Then at the end of the month I choose an excel­lent image and talk about why it rocks. The photo I choose is not nec­es­sar­ily the best one of the month. I’ve come to real­ize it’s not really log­i­cal to pit images from totally dif­fer­ent gen­res against each other. That’s why there are cat­e­gories in photo con­tests. I just choose a photo that has extremely strong ele­ments that we can learn from.

My Lit­tle Friend by Wicked Dark

This Month’s choice is  (click to see the large ver­sion of this image) My Lit­tle Friend by Wicked Dark.

I chose this image for sev­eral reasons:

Sharp­ness — It’s dif­fi­cult to get this level of sharp­ness when doing macro work and the sharp­ness on the crawler here is won­der­ful and very strik­ing! On the oppo­site end the back­ground out of focus ele­ments also work well to iso­late the pri­mary subject.

Com­po­si­tion — All eyes are on the bug here and this is due to good com­po­si­tion with almost no dis­trac­tions. The curved part of the crawler is well seen due to the comp and the diag­o­nal branch at right act as a frame and helps keep our eyes on the most impor­tant element.

Colour/Lighting — The image busts with colour due to shoot­ing in softer light along with some (likely) pro­cess­ing to enhance the greens.

For all these rea­sons, this is my choice for image of the month. Since we all have opin­ions, some mem­bers may dis­agree with my choice. That’s cool but THIS thread is not the place for debate over my pick, NOR is it the place to fur­ther cri­tique the image. The pur­pose here is to sug­gest strong ele­ments in the photo that we may learn from.

Con­grats again Wicked Dark for cap­tur­ing this strik­ing crawler.

Filed Under: Image of the month, Photographs, Photography blog entries Tagged With: