Tips for Better Portraits...

Pete Hurley, one of the best known (and most successful) headshot photographers shares some nuggets of information that can help you turn your portrait from the mundane to the marvellous in the article below from the The New York Times.

If you liked what you read, you'll probably enjoy the video below and maybe even tempted to cough up for his DVD. Enjoy !



Peter Hurley: The Art Behind The Headshot DVD from FStoppers on Vimeo.

Landscape tips... the Kai way...

Kai from DigitalRevTV gives us some of his invaluable Landscape Photography tips in his own unique style, viewers with a weaker disposition may want to give this one a miss ;-)

Wet Plate Photography...

Also known as the Collodion Process, this technique invented in the mid 1800's was rendered all but obsolete by the dry plate technology that arrived in the early 1880's. However, the process is experiencing somewhat of revival recently with many artists now using this old technique; like Sally Mann and Joni Sternbach just to name a few.

Rather than attempt to explain the process here, I came across this very nice video from [FRAMED], which shows very nicely whats involved and the very distinctive results that can be achieved.

I find it totally fascinating and I am currently tracking down a suitable workshop to attend... Anyone else interested ?

Polarising Filters 101...

Probably the one filter every photographer should have in his bag is the polariser, great for saturation, removing unwanted reflections and generally souping up you images (you can even use it a neutral density filter, if you need to lose a few stops of light) .

Take a look at the video below for a quick tutorial on the sort of things you can achieve with the most versatile of all the filters.


Polarizing Filters for Photo and Video from Olivia Speranza on Vimeo.

Studio for 70 Euros...

This is not the first time we have featured Bert Stephani on our blog.

This time the photographer from Belguim shows us that with a couple of halogen working lights, shower curtains and old blankets you can produce shots like the one over on the left.

What are the disadvantages, you may ask.... for a start the lights generate a lot of heat, so you have to be a bit careful about placement and in the end the amount of light you have to play with is not that much, so expect to be using a tripod and slow shutter speed.

Well, in the end thats not so bad, the fact that you are forced to use a slow shutter speed along with a wide aperture is something I really like, it just gives a look that is more analogue and it this case fits the moody portrait perfectly.

Anyway, I'll handover to Bert to explain further in his video below and you can always check out his blog which is an absolute goldmine of information (and yes, if you like the idea of using an iPad to see each image instantly after its taken, he has a blog entry for that as well !)

GIGAntic PANoramas

Panoramic photography is surely one of the areas having gained most from digital photography. Some people push it to the limit - or beyond, regarding the capacities of normal PCs. At the GigaPan website one can find images with hundreds of gigapixels, stitched together from thousands of individual images. Via the Web interface one can zoom into the images and find details invisible in the full image. See, for example, this nice panorama of Prague at dawn or this (relatively low resolution) sunset shot of Madrid.

These photographers are helped by the hardware sold by GigaPan which moves the camera around automatically. Should we consider a GigaPan EPIC Pro for the Club to create such special images ourselves? Since Neil is now with Gaia, he should soon know everything about dealing with enormous datasets :-)

Composition 101...

Rule of thirds, Golden triangle, Golden Spiral and Golden Rectangle Division are all ways of attempting to define perfect composition.

Alfie Goodrich over at Japanorama has recently published an article on compositional rules, very interesting and well worth a look.

In addition, the long number you see above is the 'Golden Ratio' or Phi and has the habit of defining rather well images/paintings that appear to be attractive to the human eye.

Here's how to construct a 'Golden Rectangle'

1: Draw a square (here marked in red).
2: Draw a line from the midpoint of one side of the square to an opposite corner.
3: Use that line as the radius to draw an arc that defines the long dimension of the final Golden Rectangle.

Now start dividing up your favourite image with these rectangles and see what happens. Here are a few examples:

HDR Video - FACT or FICTION?

Right, I'm going to sneak this in before Neil takes away my posting rights... this one aimed at the videography wing of the club. Maybe some of you saw this when it rolled up on Slashdot a few months ago:



Now if you happened to have a pair of 5Ds and a beam splitter lying around the house I guess you could do this at home if you had enough patience. But I have to say that it does really look quite unreal. The clip of the man just looks like he's just lost a fight with a bag of icing sugar.

I think we've just trained to see pictures and film in a certain way and it will take some time to untrain our brains to accept HDR as soemthing which corresponds to our perception of the world.

A cute trick

Reading some lens reviews I stumbled about this cute trick to create your own creative highlight shapes. In the digital age, you could also use the tool of your preference, but it still would be much more work.

Embarrasingly enough, it took me a moment to figure out how it works - you are effectively replacing the closed aperture of your lens by a frontside aperture, while keeping the normal aperture wide open. I might give it a try some day.

Sun Bouncing....

Amongst some of the clubs recent purchase's was the Sunbounce MICRO-MINI PRO with flash bracket. This light, fast to assemble reflector, can be used with both available light and with flash to direct the light exactly to where you want.

The material for the reflector is white on one side and a mix between gold and silver
on the other (see image below), which produces a wonderfully warm light, like that found at the beginning and end of the day, without being too over the top.

I hope to get more of these products for the club in the future, especially the SUN-SWATTER and BOUNCE-PRO, which means you can effectively work in the midday sun and still produce wonderful images, something that's no very easy to do in Spain with its unforgivingly harsh midday light.

Also, take a look at the video above where Bert Stephini of Squeeze the Lime fame, gives us a more light hearted look at the MICRO-MINI's many uses.

One for the iPhone users...

You may remember Chase from previous blog entries, and he continues to innovate with his latest application for the iPhone. I'll let Chase explain what its all about in his video above... you should porbably check out his blog for further details and also his new iPhone image sharing site at thebestcamera.com.

He's certainly not one for letting the grass grow under his feet !!

What the heck is an Octa...!?!

I mentioned the other day that the club had purchased an octa, if you don't know what one is or what its capable of.... take a look at the following videos:

Create a mini-world from your panorama pictures

This is a short description on how to create a so called mini-world from a panorama scene. This is one way to creatively display panoramas, which may otherwise be quite difficult considering the high width/height aspect ratio of your typical stitched panorama shot.

We start with the following panorama of the Hong Kong night skyline



And we and up with the following "Hong Kong" mini-world

For the purpose of this explanation I will assume you already managed to create a panorama photograph like the one I show above (using e.g. photoshop or another proprietary or freely available stitch software such as: canon photostitch or Hugin). You need to have a picture with a aspect ratio (width/height) greater than two. Panoramas with a well defined foreground (sand, floor) and a neutral background (sky) work best.

You will have to go through the following steps with, for example, Photoshop or Gimp.

PHOTOSHOP

(1) image -> resize image: deselect fix aspect ratio make height equal to width.
note: this can create a very big image! you might want to reduce the image size first ;-)
(2) image -> rotate canvas> 180 degrees
(3) filter -> distort -> polar coordinates: select rectangular to polar
(4) image -> rotate canvas: rotate the image to your prefered angle
Basically in this way the left edge and right edge of your panorama will be connected, this will work automatically well when you have a 360 degree panorama, although this is not necessary (in that case you may want to crop the edges such that the matching is improved).

GIMP

(1) image -> scale image
(2) filters -> distorts > polar coords: check "to polar", un-check "map from top". For nice planet look set "circle depth" to 100 percent. Map backwards (un)check as you like. You can also rotate your image (you may want to experiment with the options here).

In some cases you may have to edit your panorama to optimize the final image. For example, you may want to crop some unwanted edges or straighten the horizon. To create the Hong Kong mini-world I removed the edge artifacts from the panorama before resizing (the image below shows what happens if you don't do that). You can still notice a small deviation at the connection of the left and right horizon (due to the slight skewed skyline).



A nice short tutorial, with examples, has been published also at photojojo.

HDRI Updates....

Remember in the past we have talked about High Dynamic Range Imaging, which had its origins in CGI Graphic artist industry and is now finding its way more and more into photography.?

I just discovered a new website "HDRI News" which is dedicated to the theme, and that also offers software, news, an online community and lots of inspirational images...


You might also want to take a look at "Digital Outback Photo" as well, which is pioneering new HDRI techniques using DSLRs with fast frame rates (> 5fps), thereby eliminating the need for a tripod and opening up the opportunity for using HDRI without limitations...

Virtual collages...

A few people have asked how I did the collage effect on the Torres Kio image I presented recently.

Basically, you have to choose a spot where you see the entire scene you want to capture. Select a focal length, not so long that you need 200 photos and not too short that you only get 3. Set your camera to manual (if you can) so the exposure doesn't differ between each photo and start clicking away.. but don't change your position and try and move the camera around a bit so the images are not all on the same plane (and don't forget to re-focus as you go along).

Then you need any image manipulation software that allows you to resize, rotate to any angle, and change opacity of your images... and then you basically start overlaying the images on top of each other to build up the complete scene... adjust contrast and saturation to taste and there you have it...

It can be a bit time consuming depending on the amount of images you have and how precisely you want to match them up... but it can make an otherwise touristy shot turn into something a bit move interesting...

There's a tutorial over at Photojojo that describes the technique in detail that you should take a look at, there also other examples that may inspire you further...

Model Photography... ;-)

Is it real or is it a model.?.. Someone with far too much time on their hands or trickery...

Well....... its real but it looks like a model don't you think..? This effect can be done quite easily if you happen to own a Tilt and Shift lens... which I imagine none of us do, because its used mainly in architectural photography to handle perspective issues which normally arise when you point you camera up in the air to take a picture of your favourite building and find out when you look and the image afterwards that it looks like its falling over or that it has slopey sides... anyway I digress... what in reality your doing with this type of lens is controlling the plane of focus... but the interesting thing is we can also fake it digitally...

Go here and here for step by step tutorials (They are for Photoshop so I'll leave Manuel to tell us how to do it in Gimp), the only thing that I would recommend is that you take your original image from above the subject as this is how you normally look at one of these types of models, and that it is well lit, so that you can pump up the saturation to give it that kind of smooth plasticky look... all adding to the illusion...

If you like the idea, check out these examples, some of which you'll have a hard time believing that they are not models.!.

Use YouTube to learn Photoshop

For anyone who is interested in learning Photoshop, YouTube (and other video sites) can be a good source of free learning that you might not have thought of. Both YouTube and MetaCafe have a lot of photoshop video tutorials and while not all are the best quality video, the ability to see techniques in action with video is great for quick learning.
The following page has a collection of links to these video tutorials: http://www.fortysomething.ca/mt/etc/archives/006129.php

As an example, it post here the linked video about Chroma Keying (removing objects from their background).

Camera tossing... a new olympic sport...??

Came across this recently and thought it was pretty ironic when you consider that most of the time we are trying to eliminate movement of the camera in anyway possible (tripods, image stabilisation etc)... Serendipity is the name of the game when you launch your camera into the air (and hopefully catch it again) but the results can be quite stunning... check out this blog for all the facts and techniques... Lets see if anyone dares to try, inspiration for the 'Whatever you want' theme possibly?

(credit to Ryan Gallagher for the inspiration)

A poisonous chameleon

I think that digital photography is a two part history. Neal taught us a lot about the first part the other day. Shuttering, exposure, iso, light... and a lot of things that are to come are common (more or less) with traditional photography.

But this is a new era. We do not have films anymore, but bytes. After taking a photo there are a lot of things you can do: correct white balance, increase sky saturation or just transform them to a funnier photo.

Yes, Photoshop is the word. But as it lacks some useful characteristics (you have to pay for it, it does not work under Linux) so I will try to convince you about using the best alternative: GIMP.

There are tons of good information about Gimp, and most existing about Photoshop is somehow "compatible" with this free software. I suppose that the best entry point to this program is:
www.gimp.org

And if you want a free introductory book you can also look at:
http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html

I pickup Neal's chameleon photo and transformed a bit just to show an example of what you can do in just a few minutes. Next time I will teach you how to change someone's hair colour.

Neal's chameleon poisonous cousin

Want to remove people from your photo's.?...

Remember the scene in 'Abre los ojos' where the guy is running around Gran Via in Madrid and there's not a person in sight.... well... this chap has a piece of software that will allow you to create your very own empty Gran Via... automatically..(damn... could I use something like that every time I drive in Madrid....!!)...

While you at it, you might want to check out his tone hacker as well...