Frank Breslin Wants To Help You With Your Post-processing I’ve been talking with Frank Breslin who is a PFRE reader that’s spent a long while in NZ working with Open2view. Frank has relocated to Barcelona, Catalonia, España and is setting up a retouching business. Frank says: I am an experienced professional photographer with over 14 years experience with top international award winner architects and […]
Real Estate Photography Terms Of Service Summary
Real Estate Photography Terms Of Service Summary Jason recently posed the question: I am trying to find a sample ‘terms and conditions’ and a ‘contract’ to offer agents. I have seen a couple of posts you have previously added, but the web links are now dead. The old podcast you recommend has also gone. Can you help at all? We’ve discussed the […]
Pine grosbeak by Anna-Liisa Pirhonen
Pine grosbeak by Anna-Liisa Pirhonen
Pine grosbeak by Anna-Liisa Pirhonen
Sunday, 1st February 2015
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New Themes under Development
New Themes under Development
Today we want to share some great news, especially for lovers of magazine-styled themes.
It’s been some time since we released a theme for this niche, and we plan to fix this by releasing several magazine themes in the next months. Of course this doesn’t mean that we will not be releasing themes for other niches, as we also have in works Business and Portfolio themes.
And here are the sneak peeks of designs that will be soon released as WordPress themes on our website:
Magazine Theme with full-width slideshow at the top:
Sports Magazine Theme:
Magazine Theme with an experimental layout:
Portfolio & Business Theme:
If you like these designs, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll notify you when a new theme is released:
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How to Make Sure Your Photos are Everything You Envisioned Them to Be
How to Make Sure Your Photos are Everything You Envisioned Them to Be
One of the reasons people become consumed by their creative endeavors is due to an overwhelming desire to overcome a challenge. Any challenge worth confronting will, once defeated, yield an appreciable sense of personal satisfaction. But such challenges are also, to varying degrees, frustrating — you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but making it there is the hard part.
Something that new photographers commonly struggle with (though this is hardly limited to just beginners) is translating the pictures they conjure in their mind’s eye to match the images that come out of their camera. We’re so accustomed to the concept of what you see is what you get as it applies to computers; it’s easy — when you enter text and print it out, the hard copy looks like what you have on your monitor.
With photography, you’ve got to put forth a little more thought and effort in order for the final product to match what you originally envisioned. Here are some ideas on how to accomplish this.
Clearly Define Your Subject
That means you’ve got to make a decision. You can only fit so much in one frame. But it’s not really about trying to squeeze a bunch of things/people into one shot, is it? Focus on whatever or whomever it is that has your attention in the first place. Sure, there may be other elements that appear in the shot, but you want your subject to have top billing. Ask yourself, “When others see this photo, will they know right away what my main subject is and why it’s interesting?” You don’t want to create visual confusion or ambiguity.
Get Out of “P” Mode
In contrast to a camera’s fully automatic modes that do all the thinking for you, Program mode still keeps the lion’s share of the decision making with the camera, while you get to have control over ISO, white balance, and flash. P mode is a great tool for incremental learning. But a great deal of creative photography is about competent use of the exposure triangle — aperture, shutter speed, ISO. So if you’re serious about capturing shots that are in reality as good as you imagine them to be, you are going to have to ditch P mode. Staying there will only ensure that you continue to be unfulfilled in your creativity.
Take Control of Depth of Field
So you’re finally ready to graduate from P mode. What shooting mode should you use now? In context of the aforementioned goal of clearly defining your subject, aperture priority seems appropriate. Of the three components of the exposure triangle, aperture is the one that dictates depth of field; depth of field, in turn, determines how much of a subject is in clear focus. How much — or how little — depth of field is present will go a long way in helping you further define your subject.
Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Composition
If you really want to give your subject the star treatment, give the subject a prominent and meaningful place among all the other elements within the scene. Depending on your subject and environment, some compositional techniques (rule of thirds, fill the frame, leading lines, etc.) will work better than others, but the point is to put some thought into the composition, as it will bring order to the contents of the photo and solidify the aesthetic qualities of the image wholesale.
Remember that Your Eye is a Better Camera than Your Camera
This is particularly true when it comes to dynamic range. Dynamic range in this context is, in short, the ability to simultaneously discern extremes of shadows and highlights…and the human eye is exceptionally good at this. Some cameras have better dynamic range performance than others, but none are as good as your eyes. This is why you can’t wholly rely on your camera, shooting mode notwithstanding, to perfectly duplicate everything you see. For example, your eyes will be relatively successful at balancing a scene where the subject is backlit; your camera, on the other hand, will render the subject as a silhouette. If a silhouette isn’t what you’re after you will have to make some adjustments to your camera settings or even use a flash to balance ambient and artificial light.
Keep Trying
Continue to develop your vision. Trust yourself. Your camera doesn’t have a brain, so you simply need to learn how to make it do exactly what you want it to do. Perhaps that’s easier said than done, but with plenty of practice — a nice way of saying “trial and error” — you will get there.
Random Excellence: Damon Winter
Random Excellence: Damon Winter
A superb double portrait of actresses Tonya Pinkins and Dianne Wiest by Damon Winter, surely one of the best editorial photographers working right now. Winter, like a pitcher with two great pitches among many good ones, has a strong graphic sense and an acute eye for the telling detail, gifts he can often be seen using to excellent effect in the same pictures. This shot illustrated a New York Times article about the play Rasheeda Speaking.
Damon Winter's website is here. See especially the sections entitled "Stories."
Mike
Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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Annie Dillard Sure Can Write (OT)
Annie Dillard Sure Can Write (OT)
Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning; in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well underway.
That's a tiny well-crystallized sample lump of prose by Annie Dillard, author of the celebrated Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which Eudora Welty said is "a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing)." It's from her memoir An American Childhood . She tosses off such gorgeously crafted observations seemingly with little effort. Her writing is a tangible pleasure.
The other book I'm reading might be of interest to some TOP readers. It's by Greg Milner and is titled Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music 
Here's a small sample:
...The World War II generation were audiophiles who longed for hi-fi; their boomer offspring were not and did not. In the new pop world, what mattered was sound that hit you like a train, as opposed to sound that mimicked a train about to hit you.
Really a fun book and one I'm enjoying immensely. I wouldn't have believed that a book on this subject could be a page-turner. Highly recommended if you like recordings.
As an aside, I noticed in looking her up that Annie Dillard has a book called The Writing Life 
Mike
(Thanks to S., who loves A.D.)
Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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John Camp: "I have to tell you, I have spent time at writers' conferences ridiculing The Writing Life. Honest to God, if I'd read that book before I became a writer, I'd be selling real estate today. She makes writing sound like one of the more onerous and tedious tasks in the world, one step backward for every two steps forward, entire days spent juggling a dozen words to create a simple sentence. Life is much too short for that. To paraphrase Mark Twain on Henry James, I believe Ms. Dillard often chews more than she bit off.
"I wouldn't recommend you persist in this ambition, but should you decide to read The Writing Life, I would suggest you simultaneously read Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft . The King book is one of the best ever written on writing, IMHO, both in dealing with the craft and the life. The contrast will be stark."
[Reader John Camp is a very successful writer of thriller novels, under the nom de plume John Sandford
Mike replies: I read and liked the King book. It would probably be a great experience to read those two books back to back or simultaneously, if indeed, as you say, the contrast is stark. Some of my bookshelves are arranged in pairs of books that complement each other; I like reading that way.
It's curious too how this relates to David McRaney's thoughts on survivorship bias. According to his formulation, King and Dillard are the last people we should listen to when it comes to how to write. King's how-to might go, "first, write a book in your spare time while working at a laundry. Next, open an envelope you receive in the mail and have a $400,000 check fall out of it." Not everyone can follow that advice.
Perhaps the best writing advice I ever got was from you, John, when I asked you for the secret of writing a novel. You said "finish it," adding that your observation has been that when people finish their books, good things tend to happen. You also mentioned that most people who want to be writers and most people who are working on novels never do finish one (unfortunately, that's true of me).
William Schneider: "I required our photography grad students to read a story by Annie Dillard in September. While it may seem odd to give a literary reading to visual artists, they quickly realize that she sees the world better than most photographers do."
pbass wil responds to John Camp: "S. King has a great command of prose writing, and he's a wonderful story maker. But if his content dug as deep as A. Dillard's, he too would find the act of writing onerous. It's one thing to construct compelling sentences and paragraphs. It's another to mine the psyche as deeply as Dillard does and then convert that inchoate stuff into language. She's the Jung of lit! Different genre, different goals—different effort."
Winter Blues by Dusty Demerson
Winter Blues by Dusty Demerson
Winter Blues by Dusty Demerson
Saturday, 31st January 2015
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Photographers You Should Know: Guy Bourdin
Photographers You Should Know: Guy Bourdin
| Guy Bourdin was an early influence of mine. His approac […] Categories: |
Humans Of New York Raised Over $1,000,000 To Help Send Kids To College With A Single Photo
Humans Of New York Raised Over $1,000,000 To Help Send Kids To College With A Single Photo
By now, we’ve everyone is pretty much familiar with Humans of New York. The wildly popular project has nearly 12,000,000 followers on Facebook alone. And this month, Brandon Stanton, the man behind it all, is using his project’s widespread popularity for a good cause. After taking a portrait of a Vidal Chastanet, and eight grader [...]
The post Humans Of New York Raised Over $1,000,000 To Help Send Kids To College With A Single Photo appeared first on DIY Photography.
Canon’s 50MP Camera Specs Leaked. Could It Be Lacking Video?
Canon’s 50MP Camera Specs Leaked. Could It Be Lacking Video?
The much anticipated specs of Canon’s upcoming megapixel monsters have been leaked and, if correct, the rumors were pretty accurate. The sensor will pack 50.6MP, besting Nikon and Sony’s current 36MP, but did the megapixel race lead to a camera unable of capturing video? Below are the specs, originally posted on Digicame-Info: 50.6MP full frame [...]
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David Bailey Books
David Bailey Books
I saw a number of great books on my visit to MoMA, and curiously two of the best were by British photographer David Bailey, who is perhaps the éminence grise among the celebrated stars of the photographic firmament in Great Britain today. Bailey was a leading light of 1960s fashion and culture in Britain and has been an important photographer there ever since. A member (with Terence Donovan and the late Brian Duffy, whose last exhibit we highlighted here) of the famous "black trinity," he was the model for the photographer in the Michelangelo Antonioni movie Blow-Up.
Anyone interested in fashion photography or celebrity portraiture will want to own Bailey's Stardust . A big, bold, beautiful book with a premium feel, it's chock full of superb reproductions and is as good a summation as any of Bailey's major lifetime accomplishment in that genre. It was originally an exhibition catalogue from a traveling show that originated at the National Portrait Gallery of London in the Spring of last year. If that sort of thing is your sort of thing, I can almost guarantee you're going to love this one. It's a hit in every way.
More interesting to me personally, and an even better book if that's possible, is Steidl's Bailey's East End 
Here's our link to Amazon U.K.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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Collapse by Gilad Mass
Collapse by Gilad Mass
Collapse by Gilad Mass
Friday, 30th January 2015
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