Underdog photo exhibition — Montreal

September 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Yes­ter­day I went to see the Under­dog pho­tog­ra­phy exhi­bi­tion in Mon­treal. It’s a gallery specif­i­cally opened to sell beau­ti­ful prints of shel­ter dogs AND have dogs there at the gallery (from shel­ters across Mon­treal) that are avail­able for adop­tion. The pho­tographs are by pho­tog­ra­pher Jaime LeBlanc and they are well done indeed. All the money from the sale of the images goes to shel­ters. This image was taken at the exhi­bi­tion yes­ter­day with my cameraphone.

Today was sup­posed to be the last day until 7pm at 4922 Sher­brooke W. (514) 969 3376
BUT the response has been so amaz­ing that they are con­tin­u­ing the exhi­bi­tion for a short while.

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

Portrait without a head

September 7, 2009 By 2 Comments

Do all por­traits need a head or is it okay to frame or crop a photo so that it is head­less? Most times I’d say, “for the love of God include the head”. Nor­mally we con­nect with the sub­ject of a por­trait pri­mar­ily by look­ing at the subject’s eyes, which reveal much about the per­son being photographed.

But.…once you know the rules, you can try to break them to achieve a par­tic­u­lar result. This image is a good exam­ple of a head­less por­trait that works IMO. If we try to ana­lyze WHY it works, it works because the cou­pled ele­ments tell a story. The Jake tat­too on the hand cou­pled with the suit, cou­pled with the Royal Monaco car actu­ally tell a SPECIFIC story. These are all ele­ments of the movie The Blues Broth­ers and both the pho­tog­ra­pher and I likely show our age by know­ing this fact.

How­ever, even if I did not catch the Blues Broth­ers con­nec­tion, for me this shot still works. The ele­ments are still there. The tat­too, older freck­led skin, suit and older car all sug­gest a story. The fact that the shot is in black and white rein­force this fact. It’s up to the viewer to extract the story for them­selves, but all the ele­ments are there.

Okay then — do you agree? What do YOU think about this shot and the con­cept of a head­less portrait?

Many thanks to 1putts of our pho­tog­ra­phy forum for allow­ing me to use this image. Here’s the orig­i­nal photo.

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

To crop or not to crop this photograph

August 21, 2009 By 4 Comments

Aside from tak­ing a ‘win­ning shot’ myself, I love to help peo­ple get the most from their images and I try to pro­vide daily advice to those peo­ple that post on our forum. Some­times peo­ple take my advice and some­times they don’t and that’s totally cool. The pho­tog­ra­pher of course decides the ulti­mate fate of his/her photograph.

Here is an exam­ple image that I wanted to share taken by JJelling a mem­ber of our pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

When I first looked at this image, I imme­di­ately liked it. I like the envi­ron­ment and the expo­sure is very well han­dled here. The thing I like about the shot the most though is the expres­sion of the girl on the right. It sug­gests day­dream­ing, veg­ging out or‚pensive thought dur­ing the daily com­mute.‚ What I like least about this shot is the woman on the left. She’s just not doing any­thing that con­tributes to the photo, she is shot from behind and takes up a promi­nent posi­tion in the pho­to­graph. I wish she was not there.

My sug­ges­tion to JJelling was to sim­ply crop her out and MAKE the shot about the girl on the right. Here’s my crop of his pho­to­graph which he gra­ciously allowed me to do.

For me, this image tells a stronger and tighter story, it’s clearer. But what about those beau­ti­ful win­dows on the left that get cropped out along with the girl?‚ Although I liked those win­dows and the light­ing, for me they needed to be sac­ri­ficed to get the strongest image pos­si­ble, albeit a dif­fer­ent image. Crop­ping out extra­ne­ous parts of images is a great way to guide the eye of the viewer and make the image stronger. Some­times the result­ing crop is obvi­ously bet­ter. Other times (like in this shot per­haps) we may be less sure.

What do other peo­ple think?‚ Which shot do YOU pre­fer? here’s the orig­i­nal link to the thread.

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Thanks Mad Aussie

August 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A short while ago a mem­ber of our pho­tog­ra­phy forum, Mad Aussie, toured west­ern Aus­tralia. Dur­ing one of his shoot­ing days, he etched out our web­site address on a beach. I thought that was really cool and just wanted to say thanks!

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries

Painting with light

July 30, 2009 By 1 Comment

LIGHT PAINTING
Light paint­ing has actu­ally noth­ing to do with ‘paint­ing’ per say, but rather is an artis­tic form of pho­tog­ra­phy. To go about it, choose a sub­ject to shoot, turn off the lights, and while hold­ing your light source, move it around. Play­ing around with‚your shut­ter speed will affect the out­come of the shot; a good shut­ter speed for this type of artis­tic imagery is 20–30 seconds.

Image by Marko Kulik

Image by Marko Kulik

This is a fun way to exper­i­ment with your cam­era and light­ing, and can pro­duce some fab­u­lous results. Best thing? You don’t need to have much‚patience for it! 20–30 min­utes is all you need and you’ll get a nice hand­ful of shots.‚Nice idea when doing this type of exer­cise is to wear black cloth­ing… oth­er­wise you may become the focal point of your shoot!

For some tips and exam­ples check the link in our pho­tog­ra­phy forum
You can also take a lis­ten to our paint­ing with light podcast

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

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:

‘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: ,

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: , , ,

How to Create Sepia Tones

May 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

To add a cer­tain nos­tal­gic effect to pho­tos, many fine art pho­tog­ra­phers‚ enjoy chang­ing the colour of the pho­to­graph or actu­ally ton­ing the print to sepia. Using the dark­room to achieve your sepia effect is an option if you have the facil­i­ties avail­able. If not, you have two other options — an in cam­era option on many DSLRs and good old photoshop.

This image was printed in the darkroom and then toned in a sepia bath to get this rich brown colour.

Venus and Cupid by Marko Kulik — This image was printed in the dark­room and then toned in a sepia bath to get this rich brown colour.


Many dig­i­tal cam­eras now offer you the option of tak­ing the image in sepia (and other tones as well like blue, red, green etc.) This is quick and effi­cient for imme­di­ate results. It does have it’s lim­i­ta­tions though, like los­ing all of the colour infor­ma­tion in the image. This is why most pho­tog­ra­phers like to ‘play around’ with their photo in photoshop.

Pho­to­shop not only allows the option of con­vert­ing to sepia, but it fur­ther allows a whole range of brown/orange tones to choose from. Some artists pre­fer a more muted sepia, while oth­ers pre­fer it to appear more dras­tic. Either way, there is really a vast array of tones to choose from.

What­ever the method, just make sure of one thing — save an orig­i­nal copy of your photo just in case you decide that sepia wasn’t for you after all.

Here’s the link from our Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

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

Photography.ca winning member images from April 2009

May 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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. The pen­guin photo below titled A zoo more by Siejones was my choice 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 Siejones’s photo as the ‹“win­nerž took many hours of care­ful sift­ing. Given that it took so long to choose, I came across many many 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 Siejones:

A zoo more by Siejones


Here are the 4 hon­ourable men­tions in no par­tic­u­lar order:

A Mallard’s Por­trait by Michaelaw

A Walk On Deck by Lovin

Cloud bank BW by Barefoot

Gui­tarist by AcadieLibre

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries Tagged With:
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