Animal portraits in black & white as fine art

Atem © Wolf Ademeit

Wolf Ademeit is a German photographer who considers himself a hobbyist, although he owns an advertising agency and a photo studio. His specialty are incredibly expressive portraits of zoo animals, many in black & white – one example is shown to the right. For some more background either see read the interview by Topaz Labs (advertising their software, but explaining his approach) or read the 'about' section under his own pages.

Water wigs - fun with splashing balloons

Tim Tadder is a professional photographer in California who created quite a splash with his wonderful water wig photos – created without image manipulation! The current issue of the German magazine c't Digitale Fotografie has a feature on Tim Tadder who freely explains his approach.

The basics are very simple and well known for high-speed photos: a dark studio, camera shutter open and flashes with short flash duration to freeze the movement, triggered at an opportune moment. The colours come from colour filters in front of the flash lights. The 'wigs' are simply water-filled balloons either dropped on the models heads (sic!) or for the lengthy ones, oblong balloons that can be shaped and then are burst by an assistant with a needle.

Tim points out some important points to remember if you'd like to try this yourself:

• Make sure your equipment is splash-proof and have the model stand in some recipient for the water!
• Make your trials for the set-up with some non-living item, most models get impatient quite quickly with balloons being dropped on their head :-)
• Bald heads work best for this approach.

Yearbook 2012 published...

yearbook 2012 by esacphotoclub | Make Your Own Book

Our sixth edition of the Yearbook has just been published and congratulations go to Benja for his fantastic self portrait, which was the most popular voted image on our gallery pages in 2012, and therefore rightly deserves pride of place on the cover.

For those of you who haven't seen a print version, the 'Book Preview' above will hopefully give you a small taste of what to find inside.

I still think that each year we surpass the quality of the previous years edition and I am convinced we have done it again. A big thank you to all the members for once again putting in the time and effort to produce the images throughout the year. Without this, the club could not produce such a high quality product. Hats off to you all !

The London Olympics and David Burnett...

We last spoke about David Burnett in May of 2008 and its good to see that he still remains true to the use of anologue cameras and especially when you consider that the London Olympics coverage broke all records with respect to the number of digital cameras used and all the new technology needed to control them remotely and get all those images back to the internet world in mere seconds.

PetaPixel have a nice article on their webpage that you'll enjoy if you a retro sort of guy like me, and if your not, you may realise that digital is the only alternative out there.