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I had to show this, recently an artist contacted me and asked if she could use a photo of mine as the inspiration for a piece of artwork. I was glad to help, and totally jazzed when I saw the result of her amazing work.

The photo in question was taken near the troll bridge in Seattle. I saw this homeless man sleeping in the grass and snuck a quick shot of it.

The resulting artwork dwarfs both the artistic quality and the feeling of the image, it’s just fantastic work.

I don’t even know the artist’s name, but you can follow her on flickr @ http://www.flickr.com/people/jgrabowski/

Enjoy!!

I haven’t done a photography post in awhile. I have been doing a little nerd bashing (not that I think I am not a nerd, more segmented nerd bashing) and I thought I would take a break for some positive and uplifting thoughts on photography.

If you don’t look at flickr regularly, you should. Their blog RSS feed is usually a highlight of my feed reading when it updates. I am an amateur photographer, although not nearly as motivated as I once was. These days I live my photography vicariously through my friends Scott, John and Steve. They all three use flickr as well as other communities to share their photographs, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. I do suggest you follow their links and check them out after you finish reading this…

Formal thoughts

Of course when I look at a photo, the first thing I am impacted by is the image, which I will talk about next. After I get an initial impression, I start to notice more subtle things like quality of focus, depth of field, color balance, the quality of the exposure, and the composition itself. All of these are ingredients that make up a fantastic photo. Of course there are no hard rules, if a soft focus is part of your idea, then hopefully it works. I know a lot of times I will intentionally under or over-expose a photograph for a specific effect. That being said, each of these ingredients should be considered and you should spend some time, if you are a newbie, getting familiar with the fine arts of exposure, focus, depth of field and last but not least truly understanding the mechanical and technical aspects of your camera.

Exposure Tutorial

Composition Tutorial

Camera Operation

Impact

Impact is what you feel when you first look at a photo. It could be something suggested from the photo or even an emotion or memory it stirs within you for some esoterically connected thought. It really doesn’t matter. The odds are that if the image in question stirs emotions in you, it will with some segment of the people who view it also.

That’s the beauty of photography. It’s really not something you can quantify either. A picture of a coffee cup, smashed on the ground near a gutter might be ugly to you. To someone else it could stir an emotion because they lost their job at a coffee house during the recession. The connections aren’t always obvious or even known to the photographer when the work is published. When you are out looking for that perfect image, leave the formal thoughts we discussed on a shelf at first, look at the world thought your view finder. When you see something that moves you, then carefully consider the options that you have, and construct a photograph.

The other advice I would give is do not only construct one. There are infinite angles, many choices that you can make technically that will eventually set the tone for the image. Capture all of those that you can. Don’t ever think, “I can just do that in Photoshop later.” If you want a shallow depth of field, shoot it that way. If you are dying for a solar flare, get one.

Art, Inspiration and Heart

That’s what it comes down to really. To make something truly artistic, it requires some thought and some diligence to explore all of the options that you have. I am terribly guilty of getting only a few shots of something, and I can tell you when I get home, and start looking through the images I captured that day, I am eventually disappointed that I didn’t change that one little thing.

Fern photo by Steve Handy, Bird photo by John M. Setzler

We have all seen these wonderful photos. There is a subject in very sharp focus, and everything else fades to this soft blur. In photography, this blur is called Bokeh, and the cause is something called Depth of Field. This article is targeted towards those of you with point and shoot cameras or perhaps a fancy new digital SLR that you haven’t quite learned to use yet.

Depth of Field is simply defined as the portion of the scene that appears in focus in the image. Two factors determine the size of depth of field. The distance between the camera and the subject, and the speed of the lens taking the photo. I’ll break down these separately so hopefully it all comes into focus (excuse the pun!)

Lens speed is determined by the maximum aperture that the lens will allow you to use. Although it’s somewhat confusing, in lens ratings, the maximum aperture is actually the smaller number. The lenses are rated in what is called an f-stop. The f-stop is a rating that determines how much light the lens let’s through it’s aperture. The smaller the number, the larger the hole. The larger the number the smaller the whole. The subject of f-stops goes much deeper, but for the purpose of this topic, the important thing to know is that the larger the whole (smaller the f-number) the shallower the depth of field becomes. It’s pretty common for consumer point and shoot zoom cameras to have a maximum aperture of f2.8, which is actually really fast. These cameras also decrease the maximum available aperture as you zoom in, so you may find that when you zoom all of the way in on a subject, your maximum aperture could decrease to say f5.6 which in terms of relative speed, lets in dramatically less light and also has a much wider distance of what would be considered in focus.

That’s enough confusing information about f-stops and apertures, just remember that the more light your lens is letting in, the short the slice of distance that will appear in focus is. This is the effect creates these striking images that really isolate the subject in focus from the background around it.

The second factor that determines the portion of the image in focus is the distance you are from the subject itself. The closer you are to a subject, the less of the image will appear in focus. Try this example. Go outside in bright day light. Find a flower, and start about 8’ from the flower. Take a photo of the flower. Without touching the zoom on your camera, take a step forward, and take another photo, take another step, another photo. Keep moving forward until your camera is unable to focus. (all cameras have a minimum focus distance)

Open these photos up on your PC and you will find that the closer you get to the flower in question, the less detailed the image around the flower becomes. This is the effect that distance has on the image. If you want that fancy lens blur, get as close as possible.

For a more in-depth technical lesson, I recommend http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm

Check out some of my photography on Flickr.

If you are shopping for a digital camera you know it can be very confusing standing at the counter. I have compiled some information and tips for the snap shooter to the amature photographer to get you in the know for buying your first camera.

Show Links:

DP Challenge
DP Review
Flickr
Pbase

I have been into digital photography since 2003. I first started messing with RAW then using Phase One’s Capture One software. At the time I was shooting with one of the original Canon Digital Rebels and printing large prints. The ability to tweak the RAW photos in Capture One was an obvious advantage, but the need to still use Photoshop to remove dust spots, fix blemishes and the like meant that my workflow was take photos, download card, open photos in Capture One, edit white balance, contrast, exposure, export all photos, open up photos in Photoshop, correct issues with photo, save, select photos for prints, reopen, resize to output, save.

I had been teetering between Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture for awhile and a friend offering to sell me Aperture 2 for $100 tipped the scales of economics towards that direction and I picked it up.

Now I can point you to plenty of articles about all of the features, and I will at the end of this post, but the real value here is not the editing tools themselves, but the way they change your workflow. This Sunday, I shoot 186 photos, all in RAW. Here is a little peek into the process of how I managed them.

When I got home, I plugged my CF card into the card reader and it began to download photos. Even as it is downloading photos, ones that have already imported are available. I started rating photos right away. The view that shows a large photo and thumbnails at the bottom is fantastic for this.

By rating photos there were usable 2-3, and photos that were fantastic a 4 (I don’t rate anything 5, I am pretty critical of my work), and skipping over 1 in the favor of 9 (discard), I had whittled the 186 photos down to 54, 9 of which were 4s, the rest twos and threes. I then re-sorted my photos in reverse order, highest ranking first, and looked through the twos and threes for a photo I remembered wanting to place on Flickr.

At this point, I went through the photos one by one, adding cropping when needed, adjusting the exposure on most of them to punch it up a bit, then finally a sharpening to make things look just so.

Then I selected my 10 photos, exported the "Versions," which are Aperture’s edits, to jpg and gave it a resize to have no edge longer than 1,024 pixels wide.

I uploaded my photos to Flickr and I was done. 10-15 minutes, 20 tops.That’s some serious time saving for going through nearly 200 photos.

Today I learned that there is even a plugin to export your photos directly to Flickr!

If you shoot raw, or think you want to, this software is a serious time saver.