136 — Lube up your Old Filters

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #136 talks about cre­at­ing dreamy images by plac­ing Vase­line or petro­leum jelly on an old UV fil­ter attached to your lens. By doing this you are often able to cre­ate dreamy, impres­sion­is­tic images. The pro­ce­dure is sim­ple; take an OLD UV fil­ter (because remov­ing the vase­line from the fil­ter after use might dam­age its coat­ing) and screw it onto a lens. Then place a wee bit of petro­leum jelly (just a bit goes a long way) on your fin­ger and apply it to the front of the UV fil­ter. Take a few images and see what you get. Play with the level and posi­tion of the blur by remov­ing some Vase­line or mov­ing it around with your finger.

It goes with­out say­ing that you need to do this care­fully so as not to allow the Vase­line to touch your cam­era or lens. The Vase­line should only be on the front of the fil­ter. When you’re done shoot­ing, remove the fil­ter imme­di­ately and place it in a plas­tic bag. Then clean it (I just used reg­u­lar dish soap) when you get home. If you have a few wet wipes along with a dry cloth (to thor­oughly wipe your fin­ger between mov­ing the vase­line around and touch­ing the shut­ter release but­ton) and an extra plas­tic bag or two, you should have no prob­lem doing this.

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Click the player at the end of this post to lis­ten to (or down­load) this 9.5 minute podcast.

Here are some of the pho­tographs I was able to make with this technique;

 

Crossing Ducks - Lafontaine Park Montreal

Cross­ing Ducks — Lafontaine Park Mon­treal — Image shot with a 50mm lens using a UV fil­ter coated with petro­leum jelly

 

 

 

Dreamy Carmy - Laurier Park Montreal

Dreamy Carmy — Lau­rier Park Mon­treal — Vase­line in front of an old polar­iz­ing filter

 

 

 

Lily pads - Centre de la Nature - Laval, QC.

Lily pads — In this series of images I took a straight shot and then 2 vase­line shots over the UV fil­ter. You can see how com­pletely dif­fer­ent the 2 vase­line images look from one another. This dif­fer­ence is sim­ply due to the quan­tity and position/pattern of the Vase­line on the filter

 

Links /resources men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Exhi­bi­tion and Film on Impres­sion­ism and Pho­tog­ra­phy (Lorin’s com­ment from pod­cast 135)
Pic­to­r­ial Com­po­si­tion and the Crit­i­cal Judge­ment of Pic­tures by Henry Rankin Poore

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Thanks for lis­ten­ing and keep on shooting!

 

Photography forum winning images of the month — Round two 2015

Hi photo lovers,

In case you are new around here this is where the Admin (me) chooses one excel­lent photo nom­i­nated by other mem­bers from the Member’s monthly choice forum. Once 10 images are nom­i­nated, I choose a ‘winner’.

Just so it’s clear, the photo I choose are not nec­es­sar­ily the best ones of the month. I’ve come to real­ize it’s not log­i­cal to pit images from totally dif­fer­ent gen­res against each other. That’s why there are cat­e­gories in photo con­tests. My goal is to sim­ply choose an excel­lent photo and talk about why I think it rocks. 

This round of nom­i­na­tions, once again yielded images of excep­tional qual­ity and I waf­fled for a few it was very dif­fi­cult to choose just one. This round’s win­ner is Late Snowy Owl for the GTA by Rdben­der. I chose these images for sev­eral reasons;

1 — Colour/exposure — The colour here was well seen with the yel­low sign match­ing the owl’s yel­low eyes and blend­ing into the yel­lowy back­ground. Expo­sure is well han­dled with lovely non-clipped white tones.
2 — Sharpness/aperture — The eyes look razor sharp as they should be and I really like the super-shallow depth of field that sep­a­rates the owl from the back­ground.
3 — Framing/composition — Unlike many com­po­si­tions that include words that become a dis­trac­tion, here the word ‘cau­tion’ on the sign com­pli­ments this com­po­si­tion big time. We see the owl’s direct intense stare as well as its sharp claws and we should indeed take cau­tion. I very much like the scratch marks on the sign that may well have been the result of those sharp claws.

For all these rea­sons, this is my choice for this round. 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 Rdben­der!

 

 Late Snowy Owl for the GTA by Rdbender

Late Snowy Owl for the GTA by Rdbender