Red Bull Illume Quest 2010 Winners...

Red Bull has been running this great competition to celebrate and honour the best action and adventure sports photographs on the planet.

Below you will see a few of my favourites, if you would like to see all the finalists you can go here.

I know it doesn't have much to do with photography, but while we are on the subject of Red Bull activities, you might want to check out the video at the bottom which is just incredible !

Overall Winner and Illumination Category Winner - Chris Burkard

New Creativity Winner - Eric Berger

Energy Winner - Stuart Gibson

Tourist photo's, an artistic approach...

Saw this pop up on the Online Photographer the other day regarding the work of Corinne Vionnet a Swiss based photographer and her use of readily available tourist snaps on the web.

Corinne 'collects' hundreds of these images and then artistically blends them all together to produce the final art work.

Do you happen to have any online images of the Alhambra, maybe they form part of the one you see here.

Apart from the copyright discussions that ensued on the Online Photographer I find it fascinating that so many people take the same image of the same thing from the same place.

There are more examples over at My Modern Met of all the typical tourist spots.

Phase One IQ180 Back...

With an incredible 80Megapixels the Phase One IQ180 Medium format Back will be available in May this year and once again raises the bar for image resolution and quality.

I would really love to have one of these for the club, but its slightly out of our price range at more than 30,000 Euros.

However, if you do have the means for such an item, you may want to head over to the Luminous Landscape for a hands on report to tempt you even further and it will also give you the perfect excuse to upgrade you computer as well, handling 480Megabyte 16bit TIFF files is not something to be scoffed at.

Anyway, the video above which shows Jens Honoré on the Sitges Terramar Racing Circuit with an IQ180, is worth a look (check out what happens around 0:55 for a good example of photographer/subject trust !)

There are some more 'In Action' videos over on the Phase One site if you also want to see what Fashion and Architectural Photographers have to say.

Selection of Themes for 2011...

Poll will close 7th March.

Something to make you smile...

DIY Beauty Dish...

The Chinatown Special: The Best DIY Beauty Dish from The Browyoungs on Vimeo.

The Beauty Dish gets it name for a very obvious reason... the quality of light it produces is very flattering in portrait photography.

The above video, gives a quick overview of how to build one and here you will find one of the best and most detailed tutorials I ever seen.

This is one for that weekend when you can't find anything to do :-)

FujiFilm FinePix X100...

This little camera is causing quite a stir at the moment and looks like being one of the hottest sellers in 2011.

It's retro on the outside and cutting edge on the inside.

For more information go here and for a pre-release review check here.

Danny Santos, Weekend Warrior...

Danny Santos II is a self confessed weekend warrior who likes to shoot strangers in the streets of Singapore. 

He's been shooting street photography for about 2 years and is a graphic designer by trade.

In this article, Danny explains his motivation and exactly what he goes through when he spends his weekends wandering up and down Orchard Road asking strangers if he can take their pictures. Would anyone dare to do this on Gran Via in Madrid ?, maybe we should put it as a theme ?

If you want to know more about Danny, who is very articulate as well as an excellent photographer, you can check out the following sites:

His Flickr page
His Webpage

Pep Bonet...

Found out about this guy from the 500 Photographers website (by the way this is definitely one of the pages you should visit daily), and what really struck me was his approach to photography, travel and I suppose in a way, life in general.

Whilst War/Disaster photography is always difficult to view and digest, and almost always leads to questions regarding the morality of the photographers involved, I think its worth to see the video above and take a bit more of a look into the work and philosophy of Pep Bonet.

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 :-)

Yearbook 2010 published...

yearbook 2010 by esacphotoclub | Make Your Own Book

Firstly, congratulations to Silvia whose photo graces the cover of our fourth edition of the Yearbook as the most popular image on our gallery pages in 2010.

This year we have reduced the number of pages to take advantage of the new premium lustre paper, which I think really adds a lot to the look and feel of the book.

Above you can take a quick look at the 'Book Preview' which hopefully gives you an idea of what to expect.

I may be biased, but I think this years edition is our best yet and if it wasn't for you all taking the time and effort to produce the images you do throughout the year, the club could not produce such a high quality product. Many thanks to all of you for your time and enthusiasm !

In the bag with David Burnett...

In The Bag with photographer David Burnett from PhotoShelter.com on Vimeo.

We've spoken about David Burnett in the past, recently I came across this series on Photoshelter which gets various photographers to open and explain what they have in their camera bags. Always interesting to have a nose around in the bag of a professional photographer.

Blog Overhaul...

As you may have noticed the blog has been given a new look and a few new additions.

Firstly, you'll see the previous slideshow panel for our featured photographer has been changed for a very nice 3D Cloud style widget (many thanks to Roy Tanck for making this available).

Also, all the blog posts have now been labeled/tagged and you can now select entries based on their labels by using the label widget over there on the left. If you post remember to choose one of the already existing or add your own.

I'll also tidy up the links lists over time.

Hope you like it..
 

Best of the Best Of's...

Life Pictures of the Year 2010
Reuters Best of Year
BBC Pictures of the Year 2010
New Scientist 12 Best Pictures of the Year
LA Times 2010 The Year in Pictures
mnsbc The Year in Pictures
NY Times 2010 The Year in Pictures

...if you've got any more add them as comments.. Happy New Year by the way ;-)

Simply Beautiful

National Geographic's mails contain almost too much self-advertising for my liking these days. But the link in of the last ones drew my attention: Simply Beautiful Pictures has nothing revolutionary, but shows some nice specific examples of how choices can lead to a beautiful picture. Now I only should remember better, when in the field.

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:

This months featured photographer...

This months featured photographer is Maxi, who I assume is from the north of Spain.

To be honest I couldn't find out anything more than the obvious fact that he is a very good surf photographer.

Enjoy...!

Previous featured photographers:
October '10 - Gary Newman
September '10 - Martin Stranka
July '10 - m_i_n_o_r's
June '10 - AndersonImages'
May '10 - Siprico
April '10 - Lucie Debelkova
March '10 - Kent Mercurio
February '10 - Midnight-Digital
January '10 - Art Libre
December '09 - Ray maï
November '09 - *6261
October '09 - Vladimir Longauer
September '09 - LJ
August '09 - alex.alexander
July '09 - falsalama
June '09 - micmojo
May '09 - orvaratli
April '09 - ArTeTeTra
March '09 - Tom Hoops
February '09 - Strobist Favourites
January '09 - Tommy Oshima

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 Challenger Appears

TalkUrbex is one of the sites on the urban exploration scene that caught my attention; a mainly British group of borderline lunaticsintrepid explorers who spend their free time mooching around decaying asylums, hospitals, factories and military bases.

Much of their time is spent into and around places with unsafe floors, walls and roofs, without much light to see with and all the time playing Hide and Seek with security guards and/or police. However they are also pretty decent photographers. Their shots are shooped to hell and back and they do appear to have an indecent love of HDR pictures but there is a pretty stark beauty to their work.

There does appear to be similar Spanish scene, for example Rutas Abandonadas has a nice showcase of locations (it appears that the Vicente Calderon does not qualify yet but surely just a matter of time).

Holidays 2010...

Always a popular theme and this year was no exception with almost 40 images presented.

Once again the club members have travelled far and wide with images from Iceland, Cuba, Patagonia, France, Bulgaria, Germany, Holland, Spain and the list goes on.

Daniel and Marion presented images for the first time and below you see the epic 'man conquers mountain and satiates his thirst' shot from Daniel and a clever shot from Marion with the jet aircraft contrails mimicking the bridge supports.

Above you will see Celia's iceberg image which drew a lot of comments from the spectators.

If you want to see more (and I can't believe you don't...) head on over to the gallery pages to check out all the images. And whilst your there if you feel like leaving some comments and giving some thumbs up, it's always greatly appreciated.

Next theme is 'Landscapes', so, until then...

Happy shooting..!.