Whatever you want '09...

The club made a fantastic start to the year with its biggest ever presentation of a total of 52 images from 18 members.

Baerbel, Debbie, Erik, Nacho and Toni presented images for the first time, hope the experience wasn't too traumatic !?

I highly recommend taking some time to go through all the images on our gallery pages, you won't be disappointed as there are lots of crackin' shots.

Don't forget to give a 'thumbs up' to those you like and comments are always appreciated as well.

Owners of the photo's can also use the same comments mechanism to give a bit more information regarding their image if they so wish...

The next theme is 'Nighttime'.... am I being too presumptious in thinking that we can better this first presentation of the year ?

Word Press Photo Awards

The Word Press Photo Awards 2008 were announced yesterday. Have a look to the winner.

You can review the whole list of winners for the different categories here.

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=blogsection&id=19&Itemid=223&bandwidth=high

Have fun.

Ricardo

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:

Historic + modern pictures of cities

During the last club meeting some one (Nacho, I believe) mentioned the idea of repeating old photographs of Madrid showing how those scenarios look like nowadays.

There is a quite implementation of this idea in this page.

The picture on the right is a nice example.

This months featured photographer...

This months featured photographer slide show isn't really an individual photographer at all. It is all the images that have been favourited by strobist in their flickr account.

Enjoy... as it really is a stunning collection of images...

Previous featured photographers:

• January '09 - Tommy Oshima
  

Gallery pages re-designed...

Our gallery pages have been given a complete facelift as you can hopefully see from the image on the right.

The homepage now consists of a very snazzy slide show, the top 12 most popular photo's to showcase the clubs images that have received the most 'thumbs up'and 'ratings.

You will also find links to the 'members', 'theme' and 'most popular' galleries, as well as one to this very blog !.

We also have a new logo with a fun space theme.

Try it out and let me know what you think...!

Yearbook 2008 published...

As you already know, our yearbook has finally been printed and most of you have already received your copy.

The yearbook has increased from 80 to 160 pages, it has a new style 'imagewrap' cover, and utilises blurbs new heavy weight premium paper.

This year the president got the cover and Celia the back page as they were at the top of the 'most popular' images on our gallery pages. Don't forget that it always the most voted image over the year that gets the cover so its a good idea to enter images into all the themes and add images to your personal galleries as well.

As you can also see at the top right of the blog is a blurb badge which if you click will take you directly to our shop, should you wish to purchase further copies for your family and friends.

As always, thank you all for contributing to making the club such a success and we could never really hope to produce this book if it wasn't for your enthusiasm and participation in the club activities... my hats off to all of you..!

Blog style change..!

As you have probably already noticed the blog has had a major re-style and now has a few more features:

• Each month we will feature a slideshow of chosen photographers images that we think are wothwhile to showcase.
• Blurb book badges that take you directly to the clubs shop page to purchase our yearbooks.
• Links have been re-organised into groups to ease use.

....anyway, hope everyone likes it, and if you have any more suggestions please feel free to let us know...

Round up of 'Best of 2008'...

National Geographics Editor in Chief, Chris Johns selects some of his favorite photos published in the magazine in 2008. click here

The Online Photographer posts its list for Photobook of the Year. click here

Nature Photographers online magazine pick their Favourite images from 2008. click here

The Sacremento Bee has a number of galleries, for Photojournalism click here, Sports click here and The US Election click here.

The NY Times has a slide show of the Best of 2008. click here

Reuters have their best of 2008. click here

Song Title...

This theme proved to be tricky with a smaller than usual number of images presented, but it was still very interesting to see which song titles you all chose to represent.

For example this image presented by Celia would you have guessed it was 'African Eyes' by Sister Sledge....

...or the one below from Alberto as 'Lonely stranger' by Eric Clapton

This was our final theme for 2008 and marks the end of what has been a very successful year for the club.

As is our tradition the first theme of 2009 will be 'Whatever you want' look forward to seeing all you images soon...

Holidays 2008...

Always a popular theme, this year was no different with more than forty images being presented by members.

We where all privileged to see images from such exotic places as Hawaii, Canada, Russia, Turkey, Switzerland, Canary Islands, Bulgaria, United States, Malaysia, Sardinia and Cadiz (!)

Alberto took full advantage of the theme with his original 'photos on a table' composition which you can see above.

Landscapes where by far the most favorite subjects as you can see from Celia's image of Canadian lake tranquility above and Jose Manuel's splendid shot taken in Hawaii below.


But we also saw stunning underwater images from Luis from his diving trip in Sipadan, clearly illustrated by the photo of the ghost pipefish you see below.


The next theme is 'Song Title' which you may of guessed means that you have to interpret a song title with you photo's. It will be interesting to see if the other members can guess the song !

As always, please go to the galleries and leave your comments and thumbs up !!!

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.

Holiday theme preview: Solar eclipse 2008

I know I should wait until September to present my photos for the 'holiday 2008' theme, but I can't resist to post these two photos now!
On August 1 I was in Novosibirsk, Siberia, Russia to observe a total solar eclipse. It was a really exciting experience (and I mean not only the solar eclipse ;-).
The total eclipse lasted 2 minutes, with 'first contact' about an hour before. The sun was partially obscured until about an hour afterwards.

The first image is a crop of a photo taken with my compact camera (canon g9, 12Mp, 6x optical zoom). I used a short exposure time so that you can see the details in the corona. Note that the solar activity is at a minimum and no sunspots were present.

The next image is a composite of some of the many frames I took from the whole period of partial/full eclipse. Obviously the partially eclipsed sun frames were taken with a solar filter (I made a small filter, from cereal box carton and a small piece of Baader AstroSolar (tm) safety film, which I could put easily on the extended lens).

'Through the Window'...

A rather modest turnout, due mainly to the holiday season, enjoyed the diverse and well thought out entries for the theme of 'Through the Window'.

This time we also managed to calibrate the projector beforehand such that we could see all the images at their very best.

Not all members who presented images could be present unfortunately, but special mention surely has to go to Celia, whom despite being on holiday in Canada, still managed to send in images from across the pond... how's that for dedication..!

You can see one of her entries below from inside a very colourful building in Montreal.

I have to admit the image above from Nick was my personal favourite, with its lovely muted colours and pure simplicity.











Bjoern also continues to bring original images which you can clearly see from his shot of the island of tabarca below...



As I think you have all deserved a well earned rest, no complicated themes for the next round... we resort to the same theme we did last year... 'Holidays'...

You have a couple of months to put together those vacation images and we will present then at the end of September...

Many thanks to all of you who participated and attended the meeting.. enjoy the holidays !!!

....and before you all disappear off somewhere windswept and exotic, don't forget to leave your 'thumbs up' and comments on the gallery pages for all the images that you like...

D Hump does it again...

If you check back to the blog entry for 24th june you will see that I talk about the surf photography of Dustin Humphrey or 'D Hump' as he is more often known.

Well he's been busy with the surf conglomerate Insight51 to produce a series of posters for their latest advertising campaign Dopamine.

Here's a description of whats going on:
"Steve Gorrow embarked on a journey beneath the sea to explore the depths of the mind and creativity. Along with the help of his brother, Steve shipped out to Bali to take on the massive feat of building above, and beneath the sea, to give birth to the latest Insight surf spectacle.

Not one to cut corners on creativity, Steve combined upside down bedrooms, naked girls on motor bikes and underwater shanty towns with the amazing skill of the Insight surf team (surfnics) and the photographic talents of Dustin Humphrey to create an array of split double world madness.

Welcome to Insight's latest surf campaign featuring surfers Kai Otton, Luke Stedman, Warren Smith, Jared Mell, Made Lana, Jason Apparicio & The Jamaican Surf Team."

Pix Channel.... What makes Photographers click...

The PixChannel website has been mentioned on a few blogs lately and it is an absolute goldmine of of wise words given to us by some of the greatest photographers of our time.

Quoting the website :

"Pix Channel is an ongoing series of vignettes that explores the creative process of iconic photographers in their own words. It has been a collaboration between photographer Randi Lynn Beach and graphic designer Doug Beach. The project began out of Randi's passion for photography and desire to capture the thoughts and motivations of historic photographic figures"

If you have the time this is definitely one not to miss.

Exploring the hidden features of your Canon Powershot

I came accross this nice Linux development project called 'CHDK'.
It is a bunch of software that you can load onto most (not all) canon powershot compact digital
cameras in order to release their hidden potential!
It can make your camerea do long exposures (up to 65 secs) or very fast exposures (1/25,000 sec),
you can record images in RAW format and display a live histogram. You can even run scripts to take bracketing pictures or on motion detection.
At linux.com you can find a nice overview by Nathan Willis.
Unfortunately, my camera is not supported (yet). But if anyone fancies trying it on your (older) powershot let me know how it works out.

Film is not dead, it just smells funny...

Just recently I seem to be more inspired by the images produced by photographers using film, than the output from digital cameras.

Is it because I know how difficult it is to produce a good image on film, that I know the amount of time and dedication it takes to learn and develop this skill and therefore I have an inherent admiration of photographers that can take such good photo's with what the clueless may call an obsolete format... I don't know....

Anyway, I had been a follower of a website called 'Film is not Dead it just smell funny' for some time now... which unfortunately has shutdown recently... not due to lack of interest as you might think... quite the opposite in fact.... read the following statement from one of the founders Frans Verter Verheyen :

" After a year of “Film is not dead it just smells funny” web site we made the following decision. If you look at the web site it's nice, cool and with a great number of visitors. But it is just a blog. And besides the fact that we show high quality of pictures to the world, it is just that. We would like to do more and more structured. With the summer holidays on the way we have decided to shut down the web site. And to come back in September with a new concept. A bigger and more international staff and a more organized structure. (also in technical way, the structure of this web site is too focused on a blog) More in-depth article's and interviews, an online magazine and a print magazine. We are planning of starting “The International Analogue Photographic Society” And no it will not be another APUG. The web site "Film is not dead it just smells funny" will come back and so will the Featured Artists. This will take some time, although we are already working on it. This group will stay unchanged So we wish you a good summer and hope to surprise you all with a new concept in September"

In the meantime, you can visit their flickr site here, if you would like to get a small taste of what its all about... I recommend going to the discussion section first.

And while you at it, go out and buy a secondhand film camera (they are really rather cheap at the moment), then use it like mad and after you have gone through a number of films you will begin to slow down, think about what your doing, learn to understand the quality of light and how different films react to it... You not going to get instant satisfaction from a screen on the back of the camera... but your not going to take 50 photo's (because you can and just in case) when more often than not, one or two is more than sufficient... and the wait for you photo's to be developed is really quite exciting and actually quite gratifying....

Go on..... I dare you.... ;-)

Dustin Humphrey, Surf Photographer extraordinaire...

Dustin Humphrey's work is very much sort after by the many surfing publications which exist in the marketplace today.

His fresh, original style has separated him from the rest of his fellow surf photographers, due to his experimental approach to the images he takes, his choice of equipment (mainly film cameras) and how he often chooses to cross process his film.

He could be well considered more of a surf photojournalist as his images encapsulate not only surfing but the cultures and people he meets on his travels.














His collaboration with Taylor Steele and the production of the book 'Sipping Jetstreams' is a must have for any one who not only appreciates surfing, but the travel and adventure that often goes hand in hand.













In fact I would also get the DVD that accompanies the book, as apart from being lavishly shot on 16mm film it contains extra's showing the concept and the idea's behind the Sipping Jetstreams movement.

Photography night (PHE08)

Dear all

As you all now, PhotoEspaña 2008 started last week and there are plenty of exhibitions all around Madrid (and Cuenca, you always get surprised by that city).

Within its activities there is a "photography night" (Noche de la fotografía) taking place next friday 13th of June, including a photo marathon with both cameras and "shoebox cameras"... I think it is worth to have a look.

Have fun.
(And don't deconstruct yourselves too much :) )

Ricardo