Down and Dirty

Anyway I am going to continue to post tutorials that concentrate on making the technical aspects of shooting a whole lot less expensive.

Most of my studio still life shots are made with window light, either indirect or diffused. Shower curtains, tracing paper, anything without a color cast works.

Here's one. A black card (at an angle) provided the background.

I put an almost rotten pear on a curved sheet of typing paper and shot hand held at ISO 400. Tweaked it in Photoshop - since I can't afford to buy all the chemicals to do historical processes, I let Photoshop do the dirty work.

AND: Why most books I've read on Photoshop are almost worse than useless.
Most computer books are way too expensive to start with. And when I pay $30 - $50 for a book that promises to unlock the secrets of a given program, I almost always feel cheated.

One is faced with a glut of information, and some pretty pictures, ande told to purchase all sorts of extra back up drives, monitors, and such. It's like wanting to learn cabinet making and being given instructions on how to use every tool in the shop in one sitting, leaving no room for what one wants and needs to know.

You don't need to know how to operate a lathe to build a shelf. Or a book case.

I'd prefer that these books kept it simple and concentrated on making images, and not selling us stuff.

To paraphrase old Ansel Adams - making a print (image) is akin to the performance of a piece of music - each time a performer plays the piece there will be slight variations, changes in expression, deeper maturity and understanding of the composition.

1. open image
2. duplicate background
3. save image as a PSD file!
4. stare at image

Repeat step 4 as often as needed.

5. decide what you are going to do with the image (print it, post on blog, email to your cousins, etc.)
6. stare at image some more
7. does it need anything? decide what you need to do.

When I first started printing for publication i was always asked for prints that had "snap" that "popped" and generally would catch the attention of the viewer and would withstand the degradation of the dot screen process as well.

Fast popping technique #1 - open the Levels adjustment layer and move the top right hand slider to the left a little.

#2 - add a thin black line around the image (edit/stroke/black/one or two pixels).

Straw Men

I recently came across another article (don't remember where) in which the author, in the first three sentences raised the old art v science "debate". I don't remember much else about the article because the first sentences stopped me cold. We've heard versions of this for years and years and years and years.

Is there a way art can exist without science? Science without art?

Chemists who make pigments, optical scientists who make lenses possible, metallurgists, mathematicians, textile and paper makers...

And, since science relies on observation - an ability to see, compose, sort, frame, use perspective, and make intuitive leaps seems essential in both disciplines.

These are scary times (when aren't times scary?) partly due to a rush toward ignorance and superstition. Anti vaccinators, homeopaths, psychics, Qui Gongers et al., and religious fundies of all stripes are gaining ground. This is where the art v science "debate" can become dangerous. Scientists are portrayed as nerdy unfeeling cold Mr. Spock logical godless sorts, and the new age/fundie/alt med crowds all vie to be depicted as the owners of spirituality that "art" is built on.

The occasional scientist who paints (or writes, or composes music) is sometimes held up as if to say "see, we make art too!"

I once was speaking with a surgeon who got all "gee golly I could never do what you do how do you do it" with me about my art. I mentioned to him that his ability to take people apart and repair them, to keep them alive and well was probably just as valid as making pretty art. He got all waffly with me again.

The need to make order out of chaos seems to me what drives both disciplines.

Pride Parade NYC 2010 and other odds and ends

The more things change, the more things change... When I was a kid anyone dressed like the gentleman above would have been arrested, hauled off to the laughing academy, and/or worse

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This one would have caused a small to medium sized riot...

And for al the world this looks like Aunt Flo from Fort Lauderdale. It is to wonder.

When I was done shooting the event I wandered over to a local garden where weddings are sometimes held on the weekend. Not for the wedding, but to shoot perty flars and such. Wafting from the garden were the strains of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring". It was a Jewish wedding. This confused me. It's a little like serving pork chops at a Seder.

The bee didn't care...

Points of View

Locked elbows and knees are the bane of photography - how many pictures of tops and backs of heads do we see?

As I get older, and cameras get heavier (or so it seems) I am also tempted to get lazy and not try to get a different viewpoint.

Was once at an event, struggling to get a decent shot of the speaker, a shot without the microphone smack dab in the middle of his face, when I noticed the other photographer sitting in the center of the auditorium, shooting with a gazillion dollars worth of Canon equipment (lenses the size of fire hydrants) and shooting head on mike over the face blandness.

In any event, most of the time I shoot these kinds of things, I hear "Great shots, could we have two of the handshake, and the group shot?"

I guess it boils down to shooting for one's own satisfaction, and not settling for "good enough".

How to Shoot Too Many Pictures

That one's easy. In my case, I have a habit (from the old days of film) of shooting three frames of everything. Did this as insurance - anyone who has had film returned with scratches can identify with this. It was also cheaper than getting dupes made.

Now we have huge memory cards, hard drives, external drives, and the days of only being able to transmit 256 color Gifs or 65kb JPEGs are over.

So now I'm clogging up hard drives, dvds, and the interwebs with files, as is everyone else.

This has taken down the elitist aspect of photography a notch.

Last Shot of the Day...

Back on line - uploading images all over the lot (selling absolutely nothing, but uploading away).
Got a new video card and set up two monitors. Still getting used to it. Have the feeling they should be both streaming blue text against a black background while the zombies snarl at my door.

Playing Catch-Up

Been updating my site - adding pictures - all was going fine and WHAM! All I get for a gallery is a blank page...

Anyhoo - I'm off line for a little while while I add new doo-dads to my computer in an effort to soup it up enough to handle some of the newer memory hogging software I've added. It really doesn't seem that there is a computer that can't be slowed to a crawl.

Mind has come grinding to a semi-halt since I've been wrangling huge raw files from the Canon 5D - 120 megs at 16 bits. I remember when Photoshop was somewhere around 40 megabytes. A respectable image file starts at 60 megs now.

So it's about playing catch-up since the boffins that come up with all the new software are working on the latest, fastest, hottest and bestest equipment, us poor plebeians are in a race to replace.