A few nice visual art images I found:
The Mango Tree of Psychedelic Terror
Image by Maki79
Visuals at a party in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. Made with Tagtool for iPad – www.tagtool.at
The Mango Tree of Psychedelic Terror
Image by Maki79
Visuals at a party in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. Made with Tagtool for iPad – www.tagtool.at
The Mango Tree of Psychedelic Terror
Image by Maki79
Visuals at a party in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. Made with Tagtool for iPad – www.tagtool.at
Austrian photography enthusiast Christopher Malin has produced a short film featuring time-lapse photography taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Captured with several Nikon D3S cameras, these sequences make for a unique and compelling view of the Earth and its surrounding environment. The film also includes a first hand account of the considerable challenges of photographing from space.
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
We’ve just posted an update to our preview of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH3, adding updated product photography (the camera we originally used had a non-final grip material) and three pages of studio comparison images, both JPEG and Raw. We’re working on the remaining studio tests, and intend to add at least four more pages to this preview in the next few days, with a samples gallery and more detailed impressions on the camera’s handling and performance. Look out for that towards the end of the week, but for now, click through to go to the updated preview.
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Photographer and imaging professional Jean Miele demonstrates how to combine images in Photoshop for seamless and natural-looking results. In this article he takes you through the basics of making Gradient tool adjustments to layer masks. Follow along with a simple tutorial that adds a dramatic sky to an interesting foreground.
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Some cool visual art images:
Lucile Blanch, American painter, 1895-1981
Image by Smithsonian Institution
Description: Lucile Blanch was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a WPA (Public Works of Art Program) artist commission. She was a key part of the revitalization of the Woodstock Art Colony in the 1920s as well. By the mid-1940s her style evolved from realism into abstraction.
Creator/Photographer: Peter A. Juley & Son
Medium: Black and white photographic print
Dimensions: 8 in x 10 in
Culture: American
Date: 1930
Persistent URL: http://photography.si.edu/SearchImage.aspx?id=5813
Repository: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Photograph Archives
Collection: Peter A. Juley & Son Collection – The Peter A. Juley & Son Collection is comprised of 127,000 black-and-white photographic negatives documenting the works of more than 11,000 American artists. Throughout its long history, from 1896 to 1975, the Juley firm served as the largest and most respected fine arts photography firm in New York. The Juley Collection, acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1975, constitutes a unique visual record of American art sometimes providing the only photographic documentation of altered, damaged, or lost works. Included in the collection are over 4,700 photographic portraits of artists.
Accession number: J0001215
Tim Durfee, Bruce Sterling, Fiona Raby, Anne Burdick
Image by G A R N E T
Art Center (Pasadena, California)
Exhibition: www.artcenter.edu/mdp/madeup/exhibition.html
Tim Durfee is organizer-curator-director of the events that comprise the MADE UP series. Tim became part of the core faculty at the MDP in 2009, after a two-year visiting Associate Professorship at Woodbury University. Before that, he taught for twelve years at SCI-Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture), where we was Director of Visual Studies. Tim’s independent and collaborative practices are diverse, but — resisting the term ‘multi-disciplinary’— attempt to operate in a way where the appropriate mode and medium for a given project emerges from a process of research and inquiry. Some of this work includes award-winning buildings, exhibitions, online exhibitions, sign systems, motion and sound.
Bruce Sterling is an Austin-based science fiction writer and Net critic, internationally recognized as a cyberspace theorist. He currently blogs at Beyond the Beyond for Wired Magazine.
Bruce’s most recent book-length essays question and promote how the future is shaping our concepts of self, time and space, including Shaping Things (2005), and Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002). Bruce was the founder of the Dead Media Project, an on-line reliquary of forgotten media technologies. He founded the Viridian Design Movement, an environmental aesthetic movement founded on the ideas of global citizenship, environmental design and techno-progressiveness. His writings have been very influential in the cyberpunk movement in literature, specifically the novels Heavy Weather (1994), Islands in the Net (1988), Schismatrix (1985), The Artificial Kid (1980), and Involution Ocean (1977). He co-authored, with William Gibson, The Difference Engine (1990), a novel that is part of the steampunk sub-genre.
Fiona Raby studied Architecture at the RCA before working for Kei’ichi Irie Architects in Tokyo. She also holds an MPhil in Computer Related Design from the RCA. She was a founding member of the CRD Research Studio where she worked as a Senior Research Fellow leading externally funded research projects. She taught in Architecture for over 10 years before teaching in Design Interactions. Fiona is also a partner in Dunne + Raby, a creative design partnership that use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies. She is co-author, with Anthony Dunne, of Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects.
Anne Burdick is a regular participant in the international dialogue regarding the future of graduate education and research in design. In addition, she designs experimental text projects in diverse media, for which she has garnered recognition, from the prestigious Leipzig Award for book design to I.D. Magazine’s Interactive Design Review for her work with interactive texts. Burdick has designed books of literary/media criticism by authors such as Marshall McLuhan and N. Katherine Hayles and she is currently developing electronic corpora with the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Burdick’s writing and design can be found in the Los Angeles Times, Eye Magazine and Electronic Book Review, among others, and her work is held in the permanent collections of both SFMOMA and MoMA. Burdick studied graphic design at both Art Center College of Design and San Diego State University prior to receiving a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in graphic design at California Institute of the Arts.
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]
Context – that is the key to taking the ordinary and making it amazing in this series of displaced homes soaring up from forgotten streets of Paris. The results float like an intentionally mundane version of Pixar’s UP, or a modern-day urban Wizard of Oz Tale.
Laurent Chehere picks a range of dwellings, but most are dilapidated and seem perhaps sad in their crowded urban environment. She takes photographs of local buildings, tents and trailers, then photoshops their surroundings into something radically new.
Some are slathered in graffiti – others shown with clotheslines in everyday use. To this, she adds a few whimsical gestures – power lines, strings of lights, earthward ladders and other odds and ends to tie down each piece like a balloon and keep it from floating away.
One consequence of ripping these from the ground and setting them in the sky is simply an enhanced focus on an otherwise-connected building. In these isolating images, townhouses become standalone works, and we start to see them differently.
Architectural light graffiti, or projection bombing, falls somewhere curiously in between.
Click Here to Read More »»
Wonderfully creative urban street art. These photographs, taken around town in London and even shown in galleries, are just a small portion of his “little people” collection.
Click Here to Read More »»
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]
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A dispute between Canadian pro photographer, Barbara Ann and Ottawa radio station HOT 89.9 illustrates the problematic climate in which companies often turn to the Internet for free photographic images. Someone at the radio station found, via a Google search, a wedding photo that was then used as part of a Keynote slide presentation made to potential advertisers. When contacted by the photographer, the station removed the image but the two parties remain far apart on an agreement over compensation. (via PetaPixel)
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Nikon has posted a gallery of ten images and a video of the new Coolpix A DX-format compact camera. The camera features a 16MP APS-C sensor with no optical low-pass filter and a 28mm equivalent F2.8 prime lens. The images that Nikon has posted are taken by documentary photographer Doug Menuez in JPEG Fine (8-bit) mode. Click through for some images and a link to the full gallery.
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]
Context – that is the key to taking the ordinary and making it amazing in this series of displaced homes soaring up from forgotten streets of Paris. The results float like an intentionally mundane version of Pixar’s UP, or a modern-day urban Wizard of Oz Tale.
Laurent Chehere picks a range of dwellings, but most are dilapidated and seem perhaps sad in their crowded urban environment. She takes photographs of local buildings, tents and trailers, then photoshops their surroundings into something radically new.
Some are slathered in graffiti – others shown with clotheslines in everyday use. To this, she adds a few whimsical gestures – power lines, strings of lights, earthward ladders and other odds and ends to tie down each piece like a balloon and keep it from floating away.
One consequence of ripping these from the ground and setting them in the sky is simply an enhanced focus on an otherwise-connected building. In these isolating images, townhouses become standalone works, and we start to see them differently.
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An important element of photography is getting sharp, crisp images. You may be struggling with focus, especially if you are fairly new to DSLR photography. It is extremely frustrating to go out shooting, assuming you’ve got nice clear, sharp images, only to get home to find out they aren’t quite as sharp, or even in focus, as you had hoped.
There are several things you can do to improve your chances of getting sharper images. Here are a few to get you started, if you have other tips please share them in the comments below.
On most SLRs, and some of the mirrorless or four thirds cameras, there is an option of selecting what point it uses to focus. Meaning, when you look through the camera and see some flashing dots or squares (or something similar to the image on the right), those are your focus zones or spots. Make sure it is NOT set for the camera selecting which of those spots are targeted for focusing. When the camera chooses where to focus it can often pick the wrong thing. If you have a subject that is behind something in the foreground the camera will usually pick the closest object, which is not your intention, and you’ll end up with the wrong thing in focus.
Find the setting that allows you to adjust which target focus zone the camera uses to focus. Depending on the camera make and model, that can usually be adjusted with a dial or joy stick on the back of the camera, while you are looking through the view finder. This frees you to choose the most appropriate zone or spot for your subject or scene.
Most cameras have a few different types of focus modes. On Canon you’ll see them as Single (One Shot), AI (stands for Artificial Intelligence) Focus and AI Servo. On Nikon the modes are AF-S, AF-C and AF-A. Choose the one that bests fits for the subject you’re photographing.
Single (or AF-S) means that the camera will focus and lock on a single object and will not refocus until you release your finger from the shutter button. AI Servo (AF-C) is for continuous focusing when you have a moving subject. In this mode when you depress the shutter button half way, the camera will continue to focus on the subject as it moves away or towards you. It does not lock focus until you press the button down fully and take the photo. In AI Focus (AF-C) the camera will choose between the previous two based on whether the subject is moving or not.
There is much debate about this subject in terms of how slow is too slow for hand holding your camera. Some instructors will say 1/60th of a second, I tend to use another rule of thumb which is 1 over the focal length of your lens. So if you are shooting with a 200mm lens, then 1/200 is how fast you need to be shooting to get rid of blur caused by camera shake. The longer lens you select, the more amplified any movement will become. If you are shooting with a cropped sensor camera, remember that 200mm is now acting like a 350mm so that changes your minimum shutter speed to 1/400. If you use a lens that has image stabilization then you can often stretch it a little bit more, say one or two stops, depending on how steady your hands are. You also want to make sure you are holding your camera in the most stable position with your left hand UNDER the body and lens (sort of cupping it) and both elbows in tight to your body. Then, hold your breath and shoot!
Another much debated topic is whether or not to use the back button focusing option now available on most DSLRs. I’m not here to get into that debate, if you want to know more about it you can read 3 Reasons Why You Should Switch to Back Button Focus by James Brandon. The basic idea is that instead of using your shutter button to focus, you separate the focus function to a button on the back of the camera, that you press with your thumb.
Taken using back-button focus
I use it for many things including; portraits where I want the subjects off centre and don’t want to do “focus, lock, recompose” for every frame, any time I want to focus on a moving target (you have a better chance of getting it sharp this way than with the shutter button focus), for HDR photography when I’m bracketing and don’t want the focus to shift accidentally between shots, for night photography when I focus with the assistance of a flashlight and don’t want it to move afterwards (other option is switch to manual focus every time but it’s too easy to forget to focus at all then).
It does take a little getting use to, but after a friend of mine that shoots sports for the local newspaper showed me how to use it properly I never looked back. So when she says it’s better for action focus on critical, fast moving subjects, I listen cause she knows what she’s talking about!
Tri-pod = three legs. Three is better than two right? In some the case of photography – yes! The tripod is your friend.
I think you know what they are and what they’re for, but not many photographers own one or use it. Placing your camera on a tripod will help you get sharper images, if you’re doing it right. Get a good sturdy one, don’t cheap out on a $ 49 tripod on sale at the big box store and put your $ 2000 SLR on it. Do you put cheap tires on your high end sports car – I think not! A flimsy tripod won’t do you any good if it can’t hold the weight of your camera and is constantly slipping or loosening. Worse case scenario has your whole rig crashing to the ground, not good. Invest in a good one, do some research, make sure it is made for still photos not video, and it can hold the weight of your camera. A lightweight one made of carbon fibre is a good option, but expect to pay more for that option.
In addition to a tripod I also suggest getting a remove trigger or shutter release. They come in a few varieties including ones that attach directly to the camera, wireless ones, and even fancy programmable ones for doing timed exposures and auto exposure brackets. Like anything, the more fancy shmancy features you want, the more $ $ $ you will pay. But do get one, because it allows you to fire the camera without touching it, thus reducing any possible vibrations during the exposure. I also tell my students to turn of the IS (or VR) on their lens once the camera is on tripod. This is because the IS/VR runs a little motor inside the lens that vibrates it to help compensate for camera shake. On tripod you do NOT want your lens vibrating, even a tiny bit. The camera manufacturers would like us to believe that their cameras are smart enough to know when that’s happened and turn off the IS automatically. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t. I like to take no chances, so I just turn it off.
Me playing with a view camera at a mock western town in AZ. The guy posing as the photographer let me have a look through it, for old times sake.
When I started photography school (technical college) the first camera they allowed us to use was a 4×5″ view camera. If you’ve ever seen one you’ll know it’s not possible to use it without a tripod. In hindsight, some 25 years later, I think those photo school instructors were actually pretty smart! At the time I just thought they wanted us to suffer hauling all this heavy gear around. By putting the camera on a tripod you will instantly slow down and put more time into setting up your shot. With the advent of digital and the popularity of SLRs and now even micro four thirds and mirror-less cameras, it’s become so easy to just grab the camera and fire off a few images. So besides the obvious benefit of stabilizing your camera so you can shoot at slower shutter speeds then we discussed in #3 above (if you want to do night photography it’s essential), using a tripod also forces you to put a little more time and effort into it. I find when that happens it often results in a better image aesthetically as well as technically.
Well this was a longer tip than I expected to write, whew! To sum up, if you are having trouble with blurry images, try these tips out for yourself. I’m pretty sure you’ll have a bit more success.
So give it a go, and let me know how it’s working for you!
Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.
Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.
5 Tips to for Getting Sharper Images
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