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Film Fridays: pushing the functional limits of a cheap point and shoot

03 Apr

Photo: 35mmc.com

The Olympus AF-10 Super is by all stretches of the imagination, a very basic film point and shoot. Features are limited to a flash (with three settings) and a self-timer… and that’s about it. But limitations can inspire creative workarounds, and creative workarounds can lead to really satisfying photos, something 35mmc.com’s Hamish Gill found to be true. Read about his experience with the Olympus AF-10 Super, below.

Read: Olympus AF-10 Super – Pushing the functional limits of a
cheap point and shoot

About Film Fridays: We recently launched an analog forum and in a continuing effort to promote the fun of the medium, we’ll be sharing film-related content on Fridays, including articles from our friends at 35mmc.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Out Of Limits: 15 Retro-Futuristic Soviet Town Welcome Signs

08 Jan

[ By Steve in Design & Graphics & Branding. ]

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In Soviet Russia, town welcome you… with retro-futuristic city limits signs that promised more than the blustery, blustering Cold War-era USSR could deliver.

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The welcome is, er, radiant in Pripyat, the now-abandoned city established in 1970 to house support staff and workers at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Pripyat’s population grew to almost 50,000 by 1986, plummeting to zero when the town was evacuated the day after the plant’s No.4 reactor exploded. Flickr user jesper karstensen snapped our lead image of Pripyat’s forward-looking sign on August 12th of 2013. Flickr user Stanislav (LieErr) captured a view of the sign from a disturbingly different angle five days later on August 17th.

Brave Nuked World

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The city of Chernobyl is often confused with Pripyat though the former’s history dates back to the year 1193. Situated just 9 miles from the nuclear power plant whose name it shares, the city was home to about 14,000 people before its evacuation in 1986 – only 704 live there today. The city’s sign was erected in the Soviet era and originally featured a prominent hammer-and-sickle logo as seen in the guide book image at top. Sometime after the fall of the USSR, the logo was covered by a roundel displaying the symbol of the MHC – the Ukrainian Ministry of Emergency Situations.

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Photographs taken after 2010-11 show a modified radioactivity symbol fitted in place of the MHC roundel, as seen in Flickr user Steve Messerer‘s images above. Several years later, perhaps due to the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, the radioactivity logo was removed revealing the original embossed soviet logo. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh comrades?

Welcome to Exclusion Zone

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The so-called Chernobyl Disaster spewed radioactive fallout over a wide swath of central Europe and led to the establishment of an Exclusion Zone that spread across the Ukraine’s northern border into neighboring Belarus. Flickr user Ilya Kuzniatsou (belarusian) snapped the above photo of a city sign welcoming visitors to an evacuated town. Call it passive-aggression, post-Soviet style.

You Are My Density

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“Asbest is my town and destiny”, proclaims the ominously prophetic welcome sign for the mining town of Asbest, founded in 1885. If you haven’t guessed yet, they extract asbestos there from a mine half the size of Manhattan and 1,000 feet deep – how about that, Todd Hoffman? Asbest‘s population has dropped from over 84,000 in 1989 to about 69,000 in 2010… we’re not sure why *cough*.

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Out Of Limits 15 Retro Futuristic Soviet Town Welcome Signs

[ By Steve in Design & Graphics & Branding. ]

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Posted in Creativity

Pushing the Limits to Overcome Photography Boredom

04 Dec

By Guest Contributor Matthias Weinberger

Pushing the Limits to Overcome Photography Boredom

In the beginning the most interesting part of photography for me was the element of surprise and discovery. I was never were sure if what I did would turn out to be a great picture. Like an athlete I was always looking for the next adrenaline kick.

Once you’ve been shooting for a couple of years that rush fades – because with the knowledge you have about lighting and composition you pretty much control everything in order for the final product to be perfect. Knowing the end result before a shoot is a must for a professional – but if you are doing it for fun it’s just not enough. That’s why I started to experiment with paint.

Liquids have a mind of their own so to speak – they behave according to rules you cannot control. All you can do is set up your lights, choose the right gear and hope for the best. In the following series of pictures you can see the evolution and the different colours and paints I have tried over the years. As always the end result is a surprise to me – and that keeps it fun and fresh and makes me want to come back for more.

Experimentation is part of the process of learning

I love Portraits. The human face with all it’s features is an endless source of inspiration, wonder and surprise. Faces can express so many different moods and emotions-it’s unbelievable.

Overcoming photography boredom 01

I also love to be surprised during my shoots. What does a face tell you when it’s partially hidden? How does the mood of a picture change when the subject is wearing sunglasses? Or even a gas mask? What does your brain interpret? What goes on inside your head when you look at it?

Ask yourself questions, learn from the answers.

Overcoming photography boredom 02

This is why I started to experiment with applying different colours in my portraits. After I found a model who was willing to try anything, I bought some body painting pens – they looked like a set of Crayons in six different colours.

We painted the models face and that was it. In this picture you can see the effect of these pens and sugar applied to his wet face, and a bit of red food colouring poured over his head.

Overcoming photography boredom 03

Take it up a level – get crazy

The next step was to add more “drama” fluids. At first it was milk, again, just observing what would happen. Milk is great: when you pour it on, it runs down the face in completely random patterns-some of them really interesting and fascinating. Sometimes reminds me of a satellite image of a river delta that comes out of the rainforest.

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After that we started to add food colouring-red, green, yellow and orange. Some E-bay sellers made a fortune off my purchases.

I found that food colouring alone didn’t give a good saturated look, the colours looked watered down. So I added tons of sugar and milk, making the mixture almost gel like. The added benefit was it also made it more viscous – so that when it ran down the face and started dripping there werea lot of single drops in the picture and also those long tendrils. Again, this is completely random and different from one picture to the next.

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While experimenting with these different recipes for what to pour on the model, I came upon finger painting colours for toddlers. Awesome stuff! Cheap, available in a great range of different colours, and easy to wash off.

I try to cover as much skin as possible with colour. Normal skin is a distraction in these kinds of pictures.

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I’ve tried a lot of different methods for “delivery” as well: syringes, bowls in different sizes, watering cans, etc. Right now I’m using a big sponge which works really well. I just wring it out above their heads and see what happens.

Overcoming photography boredom 08

Equipment

The equipment I use is:

a Nikon D600 (used to be a D700)
Lenses: either the 85mm 1.4 or the 24-70mm f/2.8 – both at f/7.1
Flashes: usually 3 Speedlights. One from above into a softbox, the other two on either side as rim lights
A California Sunbounce Mini Reflector with the Zebra side up. CLS works great indoors-so that’s how I trigger the flashes.

Tips for doing this kind of shoot:

Find a warm place, use warm water for mixing the food colouring and the sugar
Think about how you can clean up before the shoot!
Bring cleaning supplies, and don’t use a syringe to spray red water upwards. There will be hundreds of red dots on the white ceiling!!!

Make sure the Model knows that he or she will be covered in paint, that the “recipe” tastes awful (and yes-at some point it will get in their mouth and their eyes where it will sting quite badly). Have a clean bowl of water at the ready for when it runs into their eyes so that they quickly can wash them out. If you look at her eyes you can see that it got behind her contact lens.

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If you stand in the same spot for an hour or two your back will hurt-so we always stand on pieces of foam, much more comfortable!

Also since it’s very warm in the room we are shooting in, I’m wearing shorts too. And make sure to check your lens every so often, drops of the “recipe” will find their way to the lens also. Have a clean lens cloth ready.

Processing notes

I shoot RAW and post process my shots using Capture One 7. I increase saturation, tweak the levels with the curve tool, add sharpening, and play around with the colour balance and white balance. All in all, it doesn’t take me more than a minute to process a picture.

Summary and words of wisdom

As you can see, always keep pushing the envelope. If you have found a point in your work where you know what’s going to happen, move on. The brain likes novelty. Changing things keeps you on your toes, you learn something new and your photography is going to improve. If it doesn’t work out you can always come back to what you did before and try another approach.

Last and most of all: have fun doing it!

Matthias Weinberger is a “semi-professional button-pusher” according to his Flickr profile.

Find more of Matthias’ photos on Flickr
Visit his website
Find him on Facebook

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

Pushing the Limits to Overcome Photography Boredom

The post Pushing the Limits to Overcome Photography Boredom by Guest Contributor appeared first on Digital Photography School.

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Even the Best Photography Enthusiasts Have Their Limits

17 Sep

It doesn’t matter how much talent a photography enthusiast might have, what equipment they own or how comprehensive their technical skills, there are a number of jobs that they’re just never going to land. When it comes to the biggest, the most lucrative and the most demanding photography gigs, paying clients will always turn to a professional.

They want to be able to deliver a brief to someone who understands it. They expect the photographer to arrive on time. And, most importantly, they want to know that they’re going to get back the images they need.

And they also want to work with someone they know. That’s more likely to be a professional who has the motivation and the time to build those connections. You might have a great eye and know exactly how to focus and play with light but paid jobs still go to the people who know something equally important: the people who hand out the commissions.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t pick up paid work that’s nearly as satisfying — even if it doesn’t pay quite as much. Here are five professional jobs that enthusiasts can’t land and the alternatives that they can.

1. Executive Portraits

When it comes to photographing the head of a corporation, giant firms won’t look at anyone less than an experienced professional. They’ll want a photographer who can give instruction to someone more used to giving orders than taking them and who’ll make the best use of the small amount of time available. Each time the board has to ask an executive on a multi-million dollar salary to stand and pose for twenty minutes, it costs the company thousands of dollars on top of the fee paid to the photographer. They won’t want to pay that fee twice, so they’ll always go for professional they can trust who can shoot fast and get the right images first time.

Enthusiast Job: Family and Pet Portraits

A non-professional might not be asked to create a portrait of Jeff Bezos, but he or she can certainly create other kinds of portraits. Build a portfolio of family photographs or offer pictures of pets and you might not get to spend time with the leaders of the corporate world but you will get to shoot and tell stories through faces — and you’ll get paid for it.

2. Fashion Shoots

Fashion shoots are complex. They might involve a designer and an art director, models and exotic locations. Hotels have to be booked, sites scouted, clothes delivered and make-up applied. The images that come out of a fashion shoot are the product of a team and every member of that team will be a professional, from the guy who drives the van to the person who arranges the flowers. Fashion companies will fly photographers to their shoots and pay them four-figure daily fees rather than run the risk of not getting the pictures they need.

Enthusiast Job: Street Fashion Photography

You have to be a professional before a fashion house will put its clothes in front of you, but anyone can photograph the fashion that’s already in front of them. Scott Schuman was a fashion professional before he took time out to look after his daughter and started a blog showing his own photographs of street fashion. The success of thesartorialist.com has turned him from fashion enthusiast to photography professional.

3. Photojournalism

Enthusiasts can certainly sell their images to the press, a process that has become easier in the age of Twitter and Instagram for people who happened to be in eventful places at the right time. But newspapers are unlikely to send a photographer who hasn’t undergone professional training to a dangerous spot. For news editors, it’s important not just that the pictures come back but that the photographer does too. Before they commission a story, they’ll check the photographer’s experience as well as his or her pictures.

Enthusiast Job: Crowdsourced Documentary Photography

You might struggle to persuade an editor to give you a commission but you can persuade friends, family and other enthusiasts to pay for your idea. Emphas.is is a crowdfunding site specializing in documentary photography. You’ll have to market your idea to bring in the funds, but it’s much easier than marketing to a skeptical photo editor.

4. Architecture Photography

It’s not that businesses don’t believe you can shoot their buildings or their interiors; it’s that they know that lots of professionals with full portfolios and rich portfolios can do it at least as well. They know some of those photographers and they trust them. So why should they turn to an amateur they don’t know?

Enthusiast Job: Crowdsourced Documentary Photography

The answer is if you have a style or approach that only you can produce. Businesses will still turn to professionals for the sort of standard shots needed by hotels and resorts but they might turn to an artist for a special look. And creating those artistic architectural images will be an enjoyable end in itself even if you have to work hard to persuade gallery owners to show them or art fair buyers to pay for them.

5. Industrial Shoots

Mines, factories and other industrial sites are all professional places, staffed by professionals and shot by professionals too. Their owners might need images to document the work that takes place in them but they’re going to need a very good reason to turn to someone who isn’t a professional to take those images.

Enthusiast job: none

There are some jobs for which enthusiasts have no equivalent. While you’re out photographing landscapes or cashing in your emphas.is funds, professional will be at industrial sites, shooting workers and trying to make giant bits of machinery look good.

They might be getting paid, but you’ll probably be having more fun — and that’s always the best reward for any enthusiast.

Photopreneur – Make Money Selling Your Photos

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Posted in Equipment

Expression Over Perfection – Living With Limits

16 Nov

Subject First, Technique Second

I have been taking pictures on a serious basis for approximately three years now, and I would say that about two years of this have been consumed with learning about gear and technique. So much of the material you will read and be exposed to revolves around the need to get the right equipment and learn the right techniques. This is certainly a great place to start and pretty fundamental in being able to take decent pictures. There is however a point at which it comes time to put away the camera catalogs and start thinking about the mental tools and techniques needed to really take things to the next level.

“Pixel Peepers” will utterly hate the whole concept of a quality photo being dependent on something which cannot be assessed in terms of its physical performance, but I guarantee that an image which perfectly captures the moment will out shine a technically perfect shot which doesn’t. In essence a great image is not absolutely dependent on gear and to illustrate I’d like to share with you a picture and a story.

Taking the Shot

This is a photo from a friends wedding which I took of the bride and groom as they left at the end of the night. In truth I wasn’t planning on taking any pictures that day, however the father of the bride asked if I would, how could I possibly say no? Having left all the ‘right’ gear at home and having no idea as to what would be happening or when, I have to say I was slightly stressed as I didn’t want to disappoint but was pretty sure I would struggle.

The end of the party came and the happy couple started to make their way out of the venue. It was hopelessly dark and I knew that a decent exposure would be difficult. The only light available was from the sparklers and to make matters worse the lack of direct lighting meant that the autofocus was hit or miss. I quickly decided to shoot to the limits of the situation by shooting in aperture priority and dialing in a F stop which I knew would give me a reasonably forgiving depth of field without being too restrictive. I cranked up the ISO to 2000 (as high as I dared go) and flicked on the high-speed continuous shooting mode. The result was a shutter speed of about 1/30 which I know from experience I can just about hand hold.

I knew that I needed to shoot low as I wanted to frame the couple against the reception venue. I also needed time to get focused whilst doing all I could to ensure sure I had a clear shot. The action lasted less than a minute and I have to say I was fairly pushy with anyone straying into my line of sight. I would completely believe it if more than a few people wondered who the guy with the camera thought he was. Never the less I clicked away taking as many shots as I possibly could.

Straight out of the camera the images were grainy because of the high ISO and slightly out of focus because of the poor light. I have to say that when I first got the files off the camera my heart sank but on closer inspection, the bride has a fantastic expression and looks fabulous in her dress. The fact that groom is not completely in focus doesn’t detract from the story of the image and in fact adds to the sense of drama. With a little effort in post I thought it might be possible to get something decent. I won’t go into the full details but processing mainly consisted of correcting the basics (white balance, exposure and cropping) plus conversion to mono using Lightroom before using Photoshop to apply some curve corrections before finally adding a blurry vignette for additional focus. The image below shows the RAW image plus the major steps.

Crappy Shot, Beautiful Photo

Expression Trumps Perfection

I’ll leave it to you to decide if this is successful shot or not. When I showed this to the bride, she loved it but that said maybe she was being polite.

Personally I think that the mono conversion helps to compliment the noise and grittiness of the exposure and that the story combined with the beautiful expression on the brides face overcomes the technical shortcomings of the final image. The experience of taking this picture underlines the importance of “Expression over Perfection”, by shooting to the limits of the situation I was able to concentrate on the other more important aspects of composition, timing and telling the story of the moment.

Next time you are struggling with the technical aspects of a shoot or if you find yourself in a situation which is less than ideal, remember this saying, set your camera to the best possible settings and if it all goes really wrong .. there’s always Photoshop!

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

Expression Over Perfection – Living With Limits

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Posts Tagged ‘Limits’

Film Fridays: pushing the functional limits of a cheap point and shoot