Sweet Tooth, detail
The pic above is one of many moderately successful photos that I made very recently. The entire concept really came together pretty well, mostly courtesy of my wife. See, the original thought was to embed the tooth in a cupcake. Click to continue »
Spiderweb in the Golden Hour
Yesterday I posted the spiderweb in the image to the right to Flickr. This particular photo is, perhaps, my favorite (self-made) spiderweb shot to date. I said that at the time, now I’ll give a bit of an explanation.
Typically I tend to *not* like spiderweb photos: they’re all the same. Particularly the ones that I take – I see something & try to bring out that detail. But I never quite… catch the beauty of what I see.
A week or so before going on this vacation, however, I re-read the first couple of chapters from Photography and the Art of Seeing
Webs are so beautiful in their own right that they had kept me from examining them carefully, and especially from photographing them in a personal way…
…When you think sideways you will find new ways to see your subject matter, and you will stumble upon discoveries and happy accidents. Abandon your normal premises , and go on a search for new ones.
This was in my mind when I first saw the spiderweb. But it was just a web at mid-day. Nothing special, kinda dingy. Later that afternoon, the light began to yellow, and the dinginess turned golden. At this point I noticed it again, pulled out my camera, and started to circle the web. Looking up, down, climbing on a chair, squatting under it. On a monopod, off the monopod, against the light, with the light…
… at some point, I found that there was an entire side that brought out the gold in the light. It wasn’t the typical angle I’d normally look for, but I found the view more pleasing. I kept working up & down, within the same basic area of light (and quickly, the light fades fast), playing with different depths of field. I was finding the background to be better than the web.
The end result is what you see; the focus on this one wasn’t the spiderweb itself. Rather, it was creating an abstract in the background, and then using the spiderweb to break up that pattern.
Trail closed, selective color
Or seconds, as the case may be. You may remember this post from a few days ago. It was also posted to my photostream on Flickr, where one of the comments expressed surprise that the selective coloring took no more than a few minutes relative to the rest of the image (total time was two hours).
The trick to getting the selective color so quickly was twofold:
To explain: if I were to do this quickly, without the editing out of distracting objects and fine-tuned sharpening, the steps to create this would boil down to:
Looking at it like this, you would think that I hand-painted each bit of color. This should take a lot of time, no? Well, doing it that way would take a lot of time.
I did it a better way. Remember that this is essentially a monochrome image. Mostly green, with some blue and some orange. That means we can almost safely use the Color Select tool in Photoshop to select the individual elements. The sign, for example:
Repeat for the blues.
Continuing and contrasting with the concept in yesterday’s post, the concept of cyanotype processing. Except, unlike in the link just preceding this, I refer to *digital* processing of a cyanotype.
Following the duotone instructions, it’s certainly possible to achieve a similar result, but it’s not really true-to-form. Then again, nothing in the digital world is. But the folks at Nik have done a pretty good job of getting close with their Silver Efex pro tool. Click to continue »
Duotone. I suppose the first thing to say about them is to take a look at a few, to get a feel for what a duotone is. The Wikipedia link gives a good idea, with a pretty good example.
It’s pretty easy to make a duotone in Photoshop – I’ve been using PS since version 5.5 and I don’t remember it *not* being there (although I didn’t really use it until CS2 came out, so my memory may be faulty). The effect can be quite nice, and it’s a favorite technique that I often use with infra-red photos.
So, how to convert your image: Click to continue »
After re-reading my post the other day, I came to the conclusion that it really wasn’t that helpful. Not to me, at least.
No, to properly write up an overview of the creative process, it should really be set in order. So in bullet points, here is the thought process that led to the layout for the final shot: Click to continue »
Snakehead Cowry, side profile
By taking just a few flashes with me on trips, I can create DIY studio shoots wherever I may be. Take the image to the right, for example: you’re seeing a snakehead cowry. We found this shell (about 3 inches long), washed up on mile 69 beach, just south of Hapuna beach. A gift from moana, one could say. Its owner had long since been eaten, this being just a memory of a life that was.
Now, the sea-lover in me wanted it in the deeps. What a perfect home for a young hermit crab! But the photographer in me wanted to see it up close, under the lens. So to the condo it went, for a short while. Click to continue »
With over one hundred blogs in my feed reader, several publications, numerous books and videos to keep on top of, how do I keep up? Such was the question asked recently.
The purpose of questioning, I suppose, was due to curiosity: I spend so much time doing things, that it seems impossible that there would be time for learning. Since most of us are busy, including the questioner, there is also the subtext to the question: “how can I keep up?” questions the questioner.
The answer is, perhaps, not helpful: “it depends.”
However, I do have a few tricks. So consider this the first installment: Keeping Caught up with Educational DVDs.
What sort of DVDs, you ask? Mostly Photovision’s Video Seminar (note: not a plug!). Every other month they send a 2-hour DVD, and I have to find time to watch it. Time in front of a TV or screen with a DVD player. This competes with various other DVDs: Tony Sweet videos like Visual Literacy
Watching these takes away from work, rest, and family time. But I do make time: when I get them, I rip them to MP4 and load them onto an iPod. This gives me a mobile viewing opportunity, and then I watch: during downtime, when waiting for appointments, etc.
So that’s it: the cheap way of keeping caught up with DVDs.
When I originally created this composition, I made it pretty clear that it’s a composite. Two images, completely unrelated – but from the same general time and location. This took only a few minutes to make, and that had a few people asking how.
So, for starters: the two images.
 Original Treeline |
 Moon, correctly exposed |
The last post in this series gave you visual examples of making bokeh. What was the key concept?
The more out-of-focus the target, the larger and dimmer the bokeh.
Bokeh behind bread
Now here’s the thing: focus on the background is relative. Let’s say you’re photographing something that’s in front of a Christmas tree. By focusing on the object, the tree becomes a background of bokeh. A perfect example: the monkey bread to the right.
So here’s the thing: if the bread is closer to the tree than it is to the camera, the smaller and brighter the bokeh. Closer to the camera and it’s larger and dimmer.
This is also effected by the overall distances: for this shot, I was maybe two feet from the bread and three feet from the tree. Larger bokeh. Step back two feet, and the bokeh grows smaller. Increase the distances with the same ratio (say, 4 feet from the bread, six feet from the tree): bokeh grows larger still (it’s further out of focus). Tighten your f-stop from f/1.4 to f/2 and the bokeh shrinks again.
Getting the feel? It’s kinda like a dance. Mentally, I tend to associate it with hyperfocal distance, but instead of maximizing sharpness, it’s maximizing the bokeh.