Ten reasons I still take photos
Posted by Andrew
Click on the image to see the original.
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Nine
Ten.
Compare and contrast
Posted by Andrew
I went to the beach with some of my classmates and last week’s speaker on Friday, and as always, I took my camera along. The sunset was gorgeous, and I took a few shots.
Those of you who follow my flickr stream will have noticed that a couple of those shots have already gone up, most notably the two featured in this post. I’m interested in what people think of both of them, because I’m not quite sure how I feel about them.
Originally, I just posted the image below, which is as untouched as most of my images come — straight from the camera (with auto white-balance, because I’m lazy) to Aperture (my photo-management software) and then straight to Flickr, through the handy dandy export plugin. I was pretty happy with the shot, but I wondered if I could do something with it in Aperture, because I didn’t feel like it really conveyed how things looked.
The results of a bit of twiddling in Aperture can be seen below. It’s pretty drastic, and really makes the whole scene a lot more dramatic. In all honesty, the actual image is probably between these two images, but of course, that is all in my memory. All I did in Aperture was mess a little with the contrast, push the blacks up a bit and compress the mid-tones a little, as well as pulling out the reds and darkening the blues.
My issue is, my photo now no longer represents either what I directly captured, or the original scene. Really, most people would be none the wiser, had I not posted both versions or written this post, but it raises an interesting question in my head.
What do you think? Knowing what you know, which image do you like more? Which is more genuine? Does it matter? Is my manipulation deceitful? Should I spend more time processing my photos to make them more dramatic?
Face Value
Posted by Andrew
Okay, so I’m loving the Flickr tag browsing I talked about previously. This has lead me to an idea for an interesting photographic challenge. Each week, I’ll post a mosaic of Flickr favourites, which are all based around a particular style or feel. Over that week, I’ll attempt to take a photo which emulates that style, and hopefully at the end of the week, I’ll post my attempt at emulating the style.
I realised that just admiring people’s Flickr creations was not going to make me a better photographer. I can appreciate the skill with which they execute their work, but trying to emulate it is something which takes real effort and is going to improve my own skills more than staring at their photos and saying “Isn’t that nice?” This is a way that I get to appreciate, and hopefully add to the cycle of goodness.
I’d be stoked if at least some of you guys played at home. It’s not so hard, each week I’ll set a photographic challenge for myself, and you can choose to take it up as well. People who participate will have the joy of participating, and also will probably get a link from me when they contribute. What could be better? At the end of this, I’ll probably also put together some sort of honour role for consistent contributors. I might even make a Flickr group just for the purpose.
This week, I was fascinated by self-portraiture. Close-up, tight crops around the face which highlight the expression and the features of the subject. I trawled Flickr for ages to come up with these 13 shots to model mine upon:
- stop...rewind?
- Light and Shadow
- Deep in thought of things to come.
- Me
- Untitled
- D for Denial
- Untitled
- Untitled
- IMG_0112
- Everybody knows you cried last night
- Truth
- ... i'll speak to your eyes ...
- A lack of color.
So, enjoy. Participate, or just sit back and watch me fail miserably. I’ll be posting on Thursday next week with my results, and on Friday with my new challenge.
Defining terms (more flickr favs)
Posted by Andrew
I’ve found recently that trawling Flickr for gems is really fun. It sort of reminds me of the old days when I spent hours browsing DeviantArt for cool pictures to print out and stick on my wall. The problem with Flickr, which is a problem which will plague any site where users contribute content of any kind, is signal to noise ration. The amount of good shots one finds on Flickr is massively outweighed by the amount of crap you find. I don’t even think that that’s me being snobbish.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think people should have to do a course in photography before being allowed to use Flickr. I’m just noting a problem I’ve seen. I don’t believe there is any real solution. The explore pages on Flickr are nice, but they lead to some really great shots being missed, and I’ll be honest, I love finding a great shot before it makes explore. I have, however found one way of browsing Flickr which tends to find me shots I’ll like more often, and that is searching by tag.
Now, folksonomy (or free tagging) isn’t a new concept, but I had never really thought of it as a good way to browse Flickr. My traditional approach has always been to browse the latest photos, hoping to find a gem. Foolish, I know. Anyhow, by searching for certain tags, I’ve found a considerably improved Signal to Noise Ration (or SNR). I’ve found that people who are more serious about their photos are more likely to tag with technical or artistic terms. While I did have issues when searching for candid, searching for DOF, Contrast, gritty, even using a tag cluster for people improved my results. Of course, there will always be noise, and that’s what irritates me.
When you tag something with contrast, you are suggesting that you have used contrast for artistic effect, not that the highlights of the photo are so blown out (white) that the photo has lost all detail. Similarly, DOF (which stands for depth of field, which describes the size of the area of the shot which is in focus) is not a tag for photos when you missed the focal point… Yes, you did have problems with the DOF, but you didn’t use it to create artistic effect. Finally, gritty does not mean enough grain in the photo to feed a small African nation.
So my one ask is that if you do free-tag things, that you think about what the tags you are using actually mean. It’s not too hard :)
And now, after that unpleasantness, enjoy 13 more Flickr favourites:
Image-tastic.
Posted by Andrew
Just a quick note if anyone’s interested. I just set up a portfolio page for a couple of applications I’m planning on making over the next couple of weeks. Check it out.
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