November 2009 Archives
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Also go to PATH.
Jim
When I belatedly discovered photography several years ago, a book being consistently recommended as an essential component of my self-directed education was David Hurn and Bill Jay’s On Being a Photographer.
Eager and anxious to make up for lost time, I acquired a copy and began devouring it as rapidly as possible.
Upon reaching page 89 however, I distinctly remember being stopped in my tracks, forcing myself to repeatedly reread the text . . .
Hin Chua
NSFW
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
The Contact Sheet Comes Out of the Closet by Sarah Boxer
In New York three museums have brought the contact sheet, once the photographer's secret rough draft, out of the closet.
Maybe it's a case of longing for the obsolete, a hunger for something analogue in a digital age.
Whatever the reason, it's happening.
Sarah Boxer
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Buying Smart; UV Haze And Skylight Filters; Do You Really Need One? by Jon Sienkiewicz
The guy at the camera store told you that a filter is "cheap insurance against fingerprints and expensive repairs" but was he really looking out for your best interests?
Jon Sienkiewicz
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Schneider Diffusion Filters for DSLR Cameras
A favorite tool of Hollywood cinematographers thanks to their ability to "hide the trick," Schneider precision optical glass diffusion filters are routinely requested by top talent who appreciate looking their best.
And getting the image right in-camera also means big savings over costly, time-consuming post-editing.
Shutterbug
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
How to Make Your Own Book in 3,000 Simple Steps by Jeff Severns Guntzel
Printmaker Abigail Uhteg made each of the 35 copies of her latest book by hand at the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosedale, NY.
The process is documented in a fabulous video consisting of some 3,000 photos.
Enjoy!
Jeff Severns Guntzel
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Also go to How to Buy a Camera.
Jim
measey - Find the best digital camera by taking a quiz
My budget is . . .
measey
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Before You Buy a Graphics Tablet by Sue Chastain
If you're a budding graphic artist, you may have been told that a graphics tablet can benefit you.
This article discusses the features of graphics tablets to help you decide if a tablet is right for you, and which tablet best fits your needs and budget.
Sue Chastain
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Pain Relief Through Photography by Roni Caryn Rabin
Can looking at the photograph of a loved one make pain go away?
Roni Caryn Rabin
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Wild Spaces, Street Patterns and a Splashdown by Sam Roberts
Originally invited by the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, to document all 29,000 acres under his department's jurisdiction, Mr. Meyerowitz chose instead to focus on the 12,000 of those acres that are woodlands, wetlands and meadows.
Those are "wild spaces, the unmanaged leftovers in the parks system," he wrote, where "spiritual regeneration can play on our senses."
His photographs are stunning.
Sam Roberts
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Fixing Panorama Alignment in Photoshop CS4 by Sean Duggan
Photomerge in Photoshop CS4 does an amazing job of aligning and blending panoramas, but occasionally you run into an image where there's a glitch that has to be fixed manually.
Sean Duggan
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Julie Larsen Maher: The A List: At the Zoo
The more you know about your zoo and the more familiar you are with it, the better you can plan your shoot.
Julie Larsen Maher
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Photography can cause undue stress and madness by Leonard Goh
Here's a funny video clip by two photographers in Colombia, South America.
Taking a jab at some of the gearheads who troll Digital Photography Review's forums, one of them portrayed a delirious photographer who is crazy about aligning his lens just because "the professionals on DPreview said so."
Leonard Goh
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Slow Photography by Rosecrans Baldwin
The decision to write on the images was a conscious choice.
When I first immersed myself in the life of Pistoia, a Tuscan town in Pistoia, I had so many questions, and when I first began taking photographs there I'd often look at them and wonder, who are these people?
How are they connected to each other?
What are they doing? What are those strange objects around them?
Douglas Gayeton
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Interview with Stacia Spragg-Braude by eatthedarkness
No, it hasn't worked out the way I thought it would.
And yes, it has worked out the way I thought it would.
I left in 2005 when the photojournalism world was still fantastically different from now and I envisioned doing projects abroad and actually getting paid for it.
But I got pregnant right away and basically spent the next 10 months eating Krispy Kremes and wondering how the hell I would salvage my professional life, or if I was doomed to trading a camera bag for a diaper bag.
When Junior came, it wasn't quite as dire as my imagination lead me to fear and I got inspired to turn the Navajo project into a book, because I felt I had come full-circle in the bigger picture of life, and more importantly, the Begay family I had photographed had come full circle as well.
It was time.
Stacia Spragg-Braude
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Visual Poetry: Learning to See by Chris Orwig
The slide show marched on, darker and darker.
It was painful to watch. The show ended and the room was completely black.
The lights remained off, and in the quiet darkness few eyes remained dry.
One day all of us will lose our sight.
The surest way to learn to see is to savor what we have now.
Savor every marigold, every mountaintop, every cloud, every color, every farm, and every face.
Chris Orwig
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
 |
HDR Street Photography: Working with Natural Light by Pete Carr & Robert Correll
High dynamic range (HDR) complements street photography by allowing you to work under less than ideal lighting conditions, most often without a flash.
You are able to keep highlights from being blown out and bring out details in processing that normal raw editors cannot.
You won't be shooting brackets during street photography unless you have a camera with an exceptionally high shooting speed.
Therefore, your work will mirror the examples shown here: HDR created from a single raw photo.
Pete Carr & Robert Correl
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Window Watchers in a City of Strangers by Julie Scelfo
Or as Ms. Halaban, a fine art photographer who spent more than three years on her project, put it: "In a large city where there's a lot going on around you, it can feel very isolating and lonely."
"By having contact with these total strangers through the window, it's a safe way of having a relationship without the hard part of a relationship."
Julie Scelfo
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Bruce Davidson - Like a Plant, His Roots Are Showing by Randy Kennedy
Mr. Davidson's work has always been marked by a quiet sympathy that balances even his more caustic visions — gaudy Los Angeles, waitresses in a topless restaurant, the dead-end members of a Brooklyn gang called the Jokers — and by a sophisticated, undramatic sense of form.
The critic Michael Brenson, writing in 1982 in The New York Times about a highly regarded series of pictures taken in the subway, a rare foray into color for Mr. Davidson, called his brand of realism "almost novelistic in its multilayered ambition."
Randy Kennedy
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
The Color of Sin - Why the Good Guys Wear White by filthy light thief
When the Chrysler car company released its new model Dodge Coronet in 1967, the theme of its ad campaign was the "White Hat Special," with some ads featuring the "Dodge Girl" in her signature white Stetson, saying that "Only the good guys could put together a deal like this."
These ads didn't need any elaboration. Madison Avenue knew the potential buyers had all been raised on film and TV Westerns, and knew the symbolism of white hats.
Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger — cinematic heroes wore white hats, and bad guys wore black.
It was all very simple.
The colors white and black have carried layers of moral meaning since long before American infatuation with cowboys and automobiles, and some scientists believe that those associations may be automatic and universal and ancient (abstract).
filthy light thief
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Fluidr is a hobby project of Sidath Senanayake (haelio on Flickr) and was initially developed as a way to share photos with friends and family without them having to wait for page loads each time they moved from one large-size image to the next.
They soon found that they would get a lot further into a photostream before moving onto something else when they used early versions of Fluidr.
In light of this it was decided to offer Fluidr to a wider audience as a way to give something back to the wonderful Flickr community.
Fluidr will always remove free to use and ad-free.
I hope you enjoy using it as much as I do! If you like Fluidr, please tell your friends about it.
Fluidr
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
The Animated Life & Work of Jeff Scher by Mark Webster
He has since then made well over one hundred films, mixing both painting, typography, graphic elements and film to create beautifully vibrant and emotionally charged works.
Scher draws inspiration from everyday life, he is a poetic observer, a modern day Baudelaire enjoying the limitless boundaries of experimentation.
To watch his films, is to engage in a moment of pure emotion and a visual spectacle that has you eager to repeat.
Mark Webster
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Artist Bryan Zanisnik: The Heeb Interview by Ernest Loesser
When I was 13-years-old, I shot eight hours of war movies with my grandmother.
I had her act out scenes from World War II, and then other movies where she acted as a recent immigrant to America.
Then years later when I was in graduate school, I went back to my parents' house and found these videos in their basement that were never finished.
I edited the eight hours into five-minute videos, so about 25 minutes of finished work.
Ernest Loesser
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Martin Parr: Parrworld by Carole Cadwalladr
What's remarkable about Parrworld is that it's all here: his arcane interests and photographic passions and influences and inspirations and, more perhaps than anything else, his sense of humour.
Parrworld lets it all hang out.
It's like a more sophisticated version of a Facebook page: everything, it seems, is on display.
Carole Cadwalladr
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Photoshop and Nature Photography: How Far is Too Far? by Darwin Wiggett & Samantha Chrysanthou
This means that we all have to adjust to the idea that a photograph is an illusion, a representation, and not literal truth or reality.
We as photographers need to do two things: educate the public by not pretending our photographs are "reality" when they are not, and be permissive with each other to avoid that tendency of photographers to pretend they have only "manipulated" their image to make it look "like what I saw."
Who cares?
The viewer was not there with you when you snapped the shutter.
She should be encouraged to engage with the image for its own sake rather than be called upon to compare your work with some objective realty.
When we free up photography to be about expression, then this medium will really soar.
Darwin Wiggett & Samantha Chrysanthou
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
10 Tips for Top Sharpness by Rob Sheppard
Nature photographers are always on the quest for sharp pictures.
I know I am.
I want to be sure that when something should be sharp in a photograph, it's indeed sharp.
Rob Sheppard
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
The goal of the Week of Life documentary project is to document the lives of people on planet Earth.
Through the unique medium of photography, we have an opportunity to share our lives with the whole world and thereby overcome many barriers.
All that's needed is to take a camera in one hand and press the shutter button.
And thanks to the advent of digital photography, sharing one's photographs in the largest documentary project is a matter of minutes.
Every individual week of life is like a small documentary, which together with others helps to create a truly unique photo library of humanity.
Week of Life
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
National Geographic Society - Infinite Photograph
What makes up our world?
Dive into this photo-mosaic portrait of the Earth to see it through the eyes of users like you.
It's made up of hundreds of photos of the natural world, each submitted by users to My Shot.
National Geographic Society
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Also go to Scanning Negatives & Slides and Scanning Old Photos.
Jim
Scanning Negatives with your Digital Camera by Craig Melville
This tutorial will show you how to "scan" your film using a Digital SLR.
The reason for using a digital camera instead of a film scanner is to save money and ensure that your film is safe.
Craig Melville
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Also go to Camera Obscura.
Jim
Last summer Leslie Bowman, a photographer friend and colleague, recreated this miracle multiple times during a long afternoon of camera obscura photography in which my wife Judy and I were an eager participants.
Frank Van Riper
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Also go to DeCarava's Photos Improvised the Music of Life and Roy DeCarava.
Jim
Remembering Roy DeCarava's 60 Years of Photos
Photographer Roy DeCarava, who died Oct. 27 at age 89, dedicated his 60-year career to capturing images of African Americans.
His subjects ranged from daily life in his hometown of Harlem to the Civil Rights movement, but his most noted work featured photographs of jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong.
NPR
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Robert Bergman - A Kind of Rapture by Rosecrans Baldwin
Bergman is not, however, a loquacious interview subject, as seen below; probably better to let the work speak for itself.
Rosecrans Baldwin
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Also go to Dorothea Lange.
Jim
Dorothea Lange - American Pastoral by Jonathan Raban
Migrant Mother has become the symbol of a now-remote decade, to which the passage of years has lent a period glow.
Yet across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition, which existed before the 1930s and is still there now, though it shifts from place to place and fluctuates in its severity.
The warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange's photographs for the FSA are closer than they may appear.
Jonathan Raban
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Paris de Nuit is a favorite book of mine.
Also go to Brassaï.
Jim
Paris de Nuit by Graham Harrison
When photographing on the streets he carried a number of prints in his pocket to prove to the disbelieving that photography in the dark was possible.
In the early 1930s no one had heard of the concept of night photography, and the police needed convincing that what he was up to by the canal at three a.m. was not dumping a body into it's murky green waters.
Graham Harrison
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
10 Fascinating Recently Discovered Photographs by Blogball
This list looks at some rare and hopefully interesting photographs that were uncovered in recent years along with descriptions of the photos and how they were discovered.
Blogball
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
 |
Photojournalism: Why Bother? by Jack Zibluk
Why bother?
I hear the question all the time when I talk about photojournalism education, photojournalism internships and photojournalism careers.
Jack Zibluk
Add to Favorites, Bookmark, Send to a Friend, & Share
