Just Kerplunking Along? Kaboom Your Photography!
Copyright Facts
Photographs, other artwork, and text, in the photokaboom.com blog, not by Jim Beecher, are reproduced for non-commercial and educational purposes in accordance with the fair use provision of U.S. Code Title 17, Section 107.
If you want to use these copyrighted items, you must obtain permission from the copyright owners.
If you're not familiar with fair use, go to U.S. Copyright Office - Fair Use, Understanding Fair Use (Carolyn E. Wright), Fair Use Network, and Wikipedia - Fair Use.
You may have to consider whether a usage is fair use before sending a takedown notice. Go to Judge Copyright Owners Must Consider 'Fair Use' Before Sending Takedown Notice Threat Level.
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Also go to Brian P. Lawler.
Jim
Photo Murals Make You Think Big. Really Big. by Brian P. Lawler
Another issue with large-format graphics like this is the dimensions of the rooms in which they'll appear -- you want them to be exact.
I worked with a contractor to measure the spaces twice.
These graphics cost several thousand dollars each, and making one the wrong size would be a costly mistake.
Brian P. Lawler
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Rehabilitate Old Photos by Sara Frances
A bride brought me her 18-year-old photographic horror story.
Angry and distraught over poor-quality wedding pictures, she fumed bitterly through close to two decades and several children before deciding to invest in recreating her dream nuptials into a contemporary wedding storybook.
Sara Frances
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Ten Newborn Photography Tips by Claire Wilson
I thought it might be useful to pass on a few things I've learned from photographing these tiny ones.
Claire Wilson
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Also go to PATH.
Jim
Going deeper may require more abstract excursions by Joe Reifer
Outside the morass of online photography talk there must somewhere lie something more pure and true.
Joe Reifer
Finding the Heart of Your Work by Craig Tanner
In this episode, inspired by a great blog post from Joe Reifer, Craig takes up Joe's challenge to the photograph community to engage the discussion about creating more meaningful and powerful work.
RadiantVista.com
What is the purpose of the drive? by Joe Reifer
I listened to Craig Tanner's podcast on Finding the Heart of Your Work.
I'm impressed that Craig saw the original article as a challenge, and was able to see this dark time of questioning as a smaller phase in a larger creative process.
Joe Reifer
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Also go to Jon Canfield.
As well as Photoshop Elements Tutorials.
Jim
Adobe's Photoshop Elements 6; A Very Capable Image Editor at an Affordable Price by Jon Canfield
Adobe's Photoshop application is the standard for many digital photographers.
Heck, it's even a verb now, as in "that looks Photoshopped."
But, at $500 and up, depending on the packaging, Photoshop CS3 is overkill for many users.
Recognizing that the majority of photographers don't want to be spending their time learning a complex program, Adobe has offered Photoshop Elements, a reduced but very capable editing program for a much more reasonable price (about $90).
Jon Canfield
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Also go to Insects.
Jim
Every year, New York City's American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) comes to life with a teeming array of mesmerizing and vibrantly colorful butterflies (and some moths) from around the world.
The Butterfly Conservatory houses numerous specimens reflecting the rich diversity of insects known collectively as Lepidoptera.
In fact, this collection even includes the world's largest moth species, the Atlas moth.
Jack Neubart
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Also go to Kevin Moloney.
Jim
On Assignment; The Photography of Kevin Moloney by Rosalind Smith
Moloney believes there are three kinds of photographers in photojournalism and documentary, the first being "the readers' photographer," someone whose primary goal is to inform and please the reader, straight and clear.
The second group is "the editor's photographer" who uses the latest techniques and stays with the certain look that is popular in magazines at the time.
"That," he says, "makes good business sense because we need to sell our images."
"The third," he says, "is the photographer's photographer, one who makes complex and intriguing images like a lot of the Magnum photographers do today or like those of Cartier-Bresson and Joseph Kudelka.
These may baffle the average person, though."
"Good photographers try to be all three," Moloney says.
Rosalind Smith
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Also go to A. T. Willett and Jeff Smith.
As well as Lightning.
Jim
Lightning Strikes; The Photography of Tom Willett and Jeff Smith by Lorraine A. DarConte
Separately, they each developed a passion for photographing the powerful lightning displays that typically accompany the storms.
And so it was no surprise that they eventually began working together
Lorraine A. DarConte
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Also go to Noah Kalina.
Jim
So it is in these images that we find scenes of "potential energy" culled from a collective pursuit to understand the world.
The scientists have gone home, but the ideas remain, manifested in experiments, moving autonomously in the darkness toward a revelation.
Seed Magazine
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Flickring, Out What will become of photojournalism in an age of bytes and amateurs? by Alissa Quart
They've been struggling with downsizing, the rise of the amateur, the ubiquity of camera phones, sound-bite-ization, failing magazines (so fewer commissions), and a lack of money in general for the big photo essays that have long been the love of the metaphoric children of Walker Evans.
Like print journalists, photographers are scrambling not only to make sense of the new world, but to survive in it intact.
Alissa Quart
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In Thousands of Images, a Photographer Builds a History in Harlem by Niko Koppel
Alix Dejean lives a long subway ride from Harlem.
But being a resident of Brooklyn has not prevented Mr. Dejean from becoming a fixture on the streets of Harlem, where people regularly call out to him by his nickname, "Alley Cat."
Niko Koppel
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Home Movie: An American Folk Art by Ernst Star & Steve Zeitlin
In 1974, as part of the Family Fbolklore Program of the Festival of American Folklife, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., put out a call for families to bring in their home movies and have portions of them copied for a documentary film.
More than 100 families responded to the call, bringing in 16 mm and 8mm home movies, as well as photo albums.
The result was the documentary, Home Movie: An American Folk Art by Ernst Star, then a student in the film department at Temple University, and Steve Zeitlin, a student in the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania.
folkstreams.net
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Cadillac - Photographs by Stephen Salmieri
Perhaps no other car has so symbolized or embodied the notion of "The American Dream" as Cadillac.
From 1972 to 1984, Stephen Salmieri traveled the United States, from New York to Beverly Hills, photographing Cadillacs.
In over eighty pictures, he captured the evolution of an American automotive icon.
Joseph Bellows Gallery
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Also go to Landscape.
Jim
This site is dedicated to documenting various abandoned places through both text and photographs; recording their transformations through time before they are demolished.
The abundance of abandoned asylums and psychiatric hospitals in the New England area create the bulk of the locations here; these beautiful state funded structures are vast and complex, giving insight to both the humanity and mistreatment towards the mentally ill over the past two centuries.
Mr. Motts (Tom Kirsch)
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Why your images are worthless by Martin Joergensen
Trying to make money from your photography is a very long shot.
The market is so saturated with quality pictures with extremely high availability and extremely low prices that getting a foothold is close to impossible.
Martin Joergensen
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George Eastman House's photostream
George Eastman House, an independent nonprofit museum, is an educational institution that tells the story of photography and motion pictures—media that have changed and continue to change our perception of the world.
George Eastman House
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Print Like Ansel Adams by Ming Tshing
As the digital march continues onward, there's one thing that will never change: the pure aesthetic quality of elegant black-and-white imagery.
My position at Nash Editions has exposed me to a wide variety of photographic art, and with that variety comes a plethora of problems.
Much of my Photoshop skills are a direct result of problem solving.
Every day I work with photographers, optimizing their images, helping them to realize their vision on paper.
Rather than covering a comprehensive overview of my black-and-white workflow here, I'll focus on some of the more unique techniques I use to improve black-and-white images.
Ming Tshing
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The Silver Standard, reprise by Paul Butzi
And there's just no comparison.
The digital prints win on expressiveness, they win on tonal range, they win on rendering of subtle tonal stuff.
They win on overall appearance, they win on every metric you might apply.
They're so much better than the gelatin silver prints (and than the inkjet prints I was making just a few years ago) that I think that in some way, all this adds up and they're different in kind, not just in quality.
Paul Butzi
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Also go to Daryl Benson.
Jim
Making Summer Color by Daryl Benson
In the summer, hot on the heels of a season that positively bursts with varied hues, the color that most comes to mind is green.
The landscape becomes a green carpet, and finding dramatic color combinations can be a daunting task.
Sure, there still are flowers and blooms to work with, but compared to the explosion of spring colors, summer photography can be tough.
To make summer color really pop, you can turn to some special equipment and technology.
Daryl Benson
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Everyone Will Be Lonely Eight Months From Now by Seth Stevenson
I was startled to realize that stock photo and video purveyors actually create material in anticipation of demand.
Seth Stevenson
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I Look Stupid by Michael Agger
In other words, this analysis confirms the elegant Montaigne observation that it quotes: "[Beauty] holds the first place in human relations; it presents itself before the rest, seduces and prepossesses our judgment with great authority and wondrous impression."
Michael Agger
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How to Create Depth in Landscape Photography by Jeff Wignall
One of the toughest visual concepts to communicate in a landscape photograph is depth: the sensation that you're looking at distance when, in fact, all you're really looking at is a flat sheet of paper.
Jeff Wignall
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Also go to Documenting The Paradox Of Oil, Poverty In Nigeria and Ed Kashi and the Importance of Advocacy Journalism.
Jim
Ed Kashi - Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta
Photojournalist Ed Kashi, the book's co-author, spent years documenting the country's oil industry.
He tells Liane Hansen that Nigeria has reaped more than $600 billion of oil wealth in the past half-century.
But for the people in the region, he says, oil has brought dire poverty and a lack of development and fostered government corruption.
NPR
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Patrick Tsai - The Death of My Little Dead Dick by Selena Hoy
When it comes down to it, I want to show why China is a great place, but portray in a way in which you need an entirely new frame of mind to appreciate it than in the ordinary sense.
For example, I've seen sky scrapers on fire near my house; a man standing on a freeway overpass wanting to jump on my way to an interview at Starbucks; a dead body in a famous tourist lake on my first day in a city; and people paying money to see tigers eat live chickens and cows.
It sounds a little dark the way I am describing it now.
Patrick Tsai
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Also go to Efex.
Jim
Watch Out, Silver Efex is Addictive! by Micah Walter
It's Saturday afternoon and I am having a blast experimenting with the new edit plugin from Nik Software called Silver Efex Pro.
Micah Walter
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The Art Institute of Chicago Photography Collection
Spanning the history of the medium from its beginning in 1839 to the present, the Art Institute's photography collection contains works of many of the medium's celebrated practitioners.
The collection originated in 1949, when Georgia O'Keeffe donated the Alfred Stieglitz Collection.
The acquisition of the Julien Levy Collection, a gift of more than 200 photographs by Edward Weston, and purchases of the work of Paul Strand, Eugéne Atget, and André Kertész have made the department's collection of modern masters one of the strongest in the world.
The Art Institute of Chicago
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