Spring 2010 MCLA World of Photos

Special Effects: Photo Filters

2010-05-03T11:00:00.012-04:00

This is our last Monday blog post for the semester – just a few ideas about photo filters, that you could use in your own image-making pursuits. Like Light Painting, the purpose of this post is simply to introduce some techniques that could be good to experiment with, and which, if you have time, I will again offer you 1-3 points extra credit if you create ten or so filtered photos and post them to a Picasa album.

There’s two basic kinds of filters: physical filters that you put in front of your lens, and software filters that you can use when processing the image. Physical Filters… most screw on to the front of a lens, but basically a filter could be anything that you place between the lens and your subject matter.

[photo courtesy TiffenFilters.com]

UV Filter: basically this is a piece of glass screwed on to the front of a lens. Its main function is to protect your lens from scratches, sand, water, etc. It doesn’t really change the colors or values of your images, but can save you a lot of trouble… much better to scratch a $50 filter than the actual glass surface of your expensive lens! If you’re using a digital SLR camera with interchangeable lenses, then this filter is a must-have safety device.

Polarizing Filter: Useful for cutting out glare and odd reflections.

Neutral Gradient Filter: mainly for landscape imaging. It’s quite difficult with certain types of scenes, such as an expansive view from the Hairpin Turn across the valley, to get a good exposure and detail in the land when the sky above is bright. Half of the filter is dark, half is clear -- you can set the dark part on the part of the scene that's too bright, thus altering your histogram's width, avoiding the dreaded blinkies.

Color Filters: any color of plastic or gel can be used to change the images you create. For example, many black-and-white photographer use a red filter to alter the contrast in their images. A sepia filter will make the images brownish, often quite lovely.

Home-made Crazy Filters: You can use any transparent or semi-transparent material to create your own filter… tape on plastic, soda bottle, sunglasses, Vaseline on a uv filter, paint on glass, plastic cling wrap, and so on. Here’s an example of a photo I made in NYC, using a homemade filter made of scotch tape and stringy packing tape placed on a piece of clear glass and then held in front of the lens to blur out the text in the menu above the waiting line:

Here’s another image, using scotch tape on glass to blur out some of the content

There is a look and a kind of visual detail that only physical filters can give you. But many appearances can also be created using software filters. Post-processing images can be useful and a lot of fun. And easy to over-do. If you’re in Photoshop or GIMP, then you have an entire menu of ‘filters’ which except for tools for blur and noise and sharpen, are in my oh-so-humble opinion truly ugly ways to ruin good photos. For example, there’s a filter called ‘watercolor’ that’s intended to mimic the look of a watercolor painting. If you apply it to a photo you’ll see quickly just how awful the results are, how it doesn’t at all look like watercolor paints, and so on. To show you the problem, here’s a delightful bunny photo I made, titled ‘Home’:

Here’s the bunny photo altered w/the watercolor filter:

And just to prove the point, here’s the same photo altered using the ‘brush daubs’ filter:

Yuck. But there are filters that are potentially useful. For example, here’s the Photoshop ‘Diffuse Glow’ filter, applied lightly:

That’s not that bad, and if applied more subtly could really alter the symbolism and mood of the resulting image.

Color Software Filters: two ways to make them – in Photoshop you can select Image -> Adjustments -> Photo Filters; or in GIMP or Photoshop you could create a new transparent layer, in which you paint a solid color and then set the transparency to what you want. Similarly, you can create the look of a neutral gradient filter: create a new layer, apply a ‘gradient fill’ of any color combination that you need, and then set transparency, luminosity etc. If you were a graphic designer charged with adding text to a photo, you might create a software gradient filter so that you could amplify some text.

Ultimately as artists we each find our own favorite ways to create images. Some of us will find it beautiful and interesting to heavily retouch, fiercely filter, and radically alter our images. Others of us will need to create minimally retouched or processed images. The same artist might also grow throughout a career, and in one phase of experimentation alter images a lot, where in another, the work is more minimal or straightforward. The choice is yours!

Halsman's JUMP

2010-05-02T09:06:00.000-04:00

After the photo shoot, artist Philippe Halsman always asked his subjects to jump, resulting in some of the funniest celebrity portraits in history. Here's the famous J. Fred Muggs:

[image courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery]

Halsman's work is on exhibit now at the Laurence Miller Gallery in NY, click here to see a lot more images including Salvador Dali, Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, Dick Clark and many more.

These photos bring up the portraitist's all important rule: getting your sitters to feel natural, relaxed, and human. Portraiture is social by nature -- person to person making images about the person. The photographer can smile, tell jokes, talk to and interact with the sitter -- make that camera less intimidating. In such situations staging the scene is all-important. If your lighting, your camera and the environment are all set ahead of time then you can concentrate on the person rather than fiddling with your camera!

"Imagine. Make. Create." opens Thursday 29th 5-7pm

2010-04-28T12:37:00.001-04:00

The annual student exhibit at Gallery 51 opens on Thursday evening. Congrats to all of the students who got work in the show!

Painting with Light

2010-04-26T07:22:00.002-04:00

To paint with a brush, you stick the brush in some pigment and then smush, smear, or gently caress a surface with the paintbrush – and viola! in time and with editing, a good image! With photography instead of a paintbrush you can grab a flashlight, set the camera on a tripod and at a long exposure, and then smush, smear or gently caress the scene with the light – and woot! in time and with editing, a good image! “Light Painting” is a technique in photography where the artist moves a light source while creating the photo, thus building images that have a wide array of light and shadow effects that cannot be accomplished any other way. The results can be spooky, sublime, dream-like and futuristic depending on the scene, the lighting you create, and the colors.

Probably the most famous example is this photo of Picasso quickly moving an ember to draw with light, by Yousef Karsh:

Besides burning sticks, you could use a flashlight, a laser pointer, a glow-stick, LED keychain – anything with a light. You’ll need longer time exposures to get the effects – experimentation helps. You could tie a flashlight to a string, and suspend it from a ceiling or swing it in the air. You could lash together fifty lights and sweep them through a room. You could take one powerful hand-held spotlight and illuminate the night, or use cardboard reflectors and the headlights of a parked car. The potential and possibilities to make images that are unusual seem endless: all you need is creative approaches to your scenery. (And don’t forget that you can alter your ‘white balance’ settings to amplify the color of the light in radical ways). Here’s some outstanding contemporary examples:

Jens Warnecke and Cenci Goepel of Lightmark created these surreal moments:

Kay Canavino of Adams, MA, has done a wide array of award-winning night scenes using light painting. For example:

To see more of Canavino’s work, click here: Night Portraits.

Chad Coombs – inventive, gritty, and lively photographs include this high-fashion, dream-like portrait:

In addition to his stunning fine art work, Patrick Rochon has used light painting for ads for Honda. He makes incredible, surreal imagery as solo and group portraits:

A hearty thank you to Kay, Chad, Jens and Cenci, and Patrick, who each kindly gave permission to allow their photos to be posted here. :)

Students: I dare you to try out some light painting. Not required as a project, but will give 1-3 points extra credit if you try light painting and post your results to Picasa. Otherwise, your assignment is to keep working on your final project images, about which I urge you to carefully consider each composition -- your framing, cropping, rotation, etc. Reshoot if needed, edit as always. Deadlines are getting close so be sure that you figure out which publisher to use, and start building your book.

Finally, please schedule time to go to this year’s student art show, “Make. Imagine. Create.” which opens Thursday evening at Gallery 51. I believe Alex, Signe, Kevin and Stephanie have photos in the show, along with the artworks of many other students!

Feature Artist: Anita Alvarez

2010-04-21T11:01:00.001-04:00

Artist Anita Alvarez created this thoughtful composition for our 100 Steps project:

In her bio Anita noted that "My passion for photography has grown over the years but really took a spike with my first nikon last year. I specifically love landscape & portraiture which some may say are complete opposites, but i love nature and people. My mother & I have done lots of traveling around the world & my passion for people, culture, & landscape most definitely arose from there."

Feature Artist: Walter Bouchard

2010-04-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

Here's a wild and inventive photo from Walter Bouchard, from his 10x100 project for our class:

Feature Artist: Stephanie Naffah

2010-04-21T10:55:00.000-04:00

Photographer and Arts Management Major Stephanie Naffah developed this image as part of her final project:

On her website Stephanie noted that she is "the secretary of Mass. College of Liberal arts Photography club. I work at MCLA Gallery 51. Since I can remember, I have been dramatically drawn to photography. When I looking at other works of art I get inspired. By observing other pieces of art, and have create new ideas for photo shoots and photos. Have practiced photography since 2003."

Feature Artist: Nicole Gelinas

2010-04-21T10:47:00.004-04:00

Artist Nicole Gelinas created these two photo as part of her in-depth final project for our class:

On her website Nicole noted a semi-secret truth, that "Art requires a special kind of madness to be pulled off correctly."

Feature Artist: Danielle Christensen

2010-04-21T10:45:00.000-04:00

Danielle Christensen uses her mad cartoon skillz to develop this photo series:

She said on her blog "My concentration in in illustration, and photography, and soon animation. Cartooning is my real passion and when there is a way that i can input some of that cartoon fun, i do it in a heart beat. "

Feature Artist: Alex Massar

2010-04-21T10:41:00.000-04:00

Alex Massar created this as part of his narrative, staged series for our class. This witty photo's title is 'Story Time':

On his website, Alex noted: "To tell you a little more about myself, I am a musician at heart and a photographer for fun, I love to do wierd and new things with my camera that people don't expect. My involvement with photography on campus is pretty heavy, as of now I have taken two thirds of the photography classes we have to offer here, and I am president of the photography club, which I have spent the last year modifying into a modern and exciting club to take part in."

Feature Artist: Kevin Mack

2010-04-21T10:37:00.001-04:00

Kevin Mack's narrative series of photos from our class included this gem:

Kevin also makes a lot of nature and adventure-related work, such as

Kevin wrote: "Kevin Mack is an Adventure Education major who runs weekly outdoor trips through the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts Outdoors Club. His weekly outdoor adventures are always captured through his camera lens." In fact the photo above was staged in the Outdoor Club's storage room.

Feature Artist: Barbara Lampron

2010-04-21T10:35:00.001-04:00

Our peer Barbara Lampron has created a great series of photos of youthful chickens. Here's one:

Barbara is an avid cyclist and kayaker. She noted in her bio that she is "Currently a non-traditional student at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts with an interest in dark room techniques to create botanical based photograms," and of course many experiments in digital photography too!

Feature Artist: Signe Kutzer

2010-04-21T10:30:00.000-04:00

Here's a delightful photo by our colleague Signe Kutzer, from her series of strong Farm Women of Vermont:

Signe notes: "I am currently a college student pursuing my passion of becoming a successful artist. Since I can remember, my world involved imaginative creations of what I observe. The satisfaction my mind and body receives when dive into a hands on project is purely euphoria. My eye is drawn to nature's organic shapes, textures, and colors. I am intrigued with what surrounds us, our environment, whether that be the trees or the structures that man has created. My photographs capture not only the moment and story of the content but record my emotional attachment to the subject. I strive for beauty and meaning within all of my photographs. They embody the mood of what is visible and what is not. I want viewers to experience not only what I did at that moment, but to have their own personally relationship.... their own story."

Photo Battle!

2010-04-16T17:32:00.001-04:00

Just for fun --

as a followup to the previous post regarding how you recognize the quality of your own photos...

There's a website where you can post a handful of your own photos and have them paired against other photos. The general public votes on which photo they like better! Trustworthy? Probably not. But it is very interesting and entertaining to see what photos people tend to like more than others, and a few enterprising punks like to post silly photos. :) Click the link to enjoy...

Photo Battle

Once you go there, try clicking on 'scoreboard' to see the current photos with the most positive votes.

How Do You Know if Your Photo's Good?

2010-04-12T16:00:00.027-04:00

Excellence. Excitement. Vision. Meaning. In addition to raw technical issues such as exposure, lighting, signal vs. noise, and focus -- when we're making art we're creating meaning. We're creating images that speak to us, that are interesting to look at, and fun to be around. How do you know if your photo has got it -- that special something that provokes people (including you the artist) to think about and consider the image?

For most artists, there's a point in one's technical practice when one is no longer struggling with specific craft issues, and instead, the technique occurs seamlessly and smoothly. This is called skill transcendence, when all of your skills and artistry come together and work as a group smoothly so that you feel in the zone, that things occur nearly automatically. A pianist who practices scales for a long time gains the dexterity and memory to play without thinking exactly where every finger ought to go -- instead, she can sight read the music, translate to another key, etc. If she had to think about every movement of each finger, she'd go too slow to play the tune. If you were learning skiing (or really any sport), you'd see how in the beginning your form was all over the place, skis angling and arms flailing and body wobbly, tentative. In contrast the expert skier appears smooth, efficient, with a quiet and focused form -- instead of concentrating on 'getting my back leg to weight and angle to make a turn down the fall line while punching my ski pole forwards and twisting at the waist' the expert feels and looks simpler and calmer like he is 'just skiing.' After much practice, you just don't have to think about every skill all the time. Your analytic mind is out of the way, and yet you feel wholly engaged. In photography, skills are exposure, focus, planning the camera's settings, and of course composing the image. Probably the creation of meaningful images happens mostly when skills are so strong that you don't need to always be thinking of them, and can instead focus on the imagery. Of course when something goes wrong, the highly skilled artist can step back from making images and analyze technical issues to adjust and revise the entire process.

The skills you are using to create a photo depend on what kinds of photography you create, which includes what kinds of meaning you wish to provoke audiences to consider. Photographers have spoken frequently about how they recognize quality in their own work, for example...

Ansel Adams emphasized the need to move beyond mere technique when he said: “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” He also centered in on realism, when he noted that photography is "a blazing poetry of the real" but hinted at emotion too: "A great photography is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed."

Alfred Eisenstadt connected skill transcendence with artistry: “I dream that someday the step between my mind and my finger will no longer be needed. And that simply by blinking my eyes, I shall make pictures. Then, I think, I shall really have become a photographer.”

Yousef Karsh emphasized the psychological impact of his portraiture: “Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” and “Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can.”

Man Ray preferred meanings: “Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson linked reason, skill and emotion: “To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.”

Diane Arbus emphasized the importance of her subject matter when she said: “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them” and “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

Dorothea Lange gave some advice about where artistic meaning comes from: “Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.”

So I have a question for you:

How do you recognize your own best work? What's different about it than artworks you've produced that just aren't quite so compelling? Does it look different than your mediocre or poor work? Does making your best work feel different than when you've made moderate work? Do your best images convey more or better meanings than otherwise? Which meanings? Why? What is your motivation to take pictures?

Use the comments to post your thoughts and ideas...

The Cascade

2010-04-07T07:08:00.002-04:00

The Cascade, 12"x30" digital archival print [iso100, f22, 1.3s]. I posted it here so that you could see how I revised this image. I was dissatisfied with the overall composition: felt like the gnarled roots in the middle popped up out of nowhere, that the balance of the waterfall with the rock walls was too harsh, the focus a bit off, etc. So I went back to the scene, reshot everything, rebuilt the panorama and arrived at this image:

This has a better sense of depth, a calmer balance from left to right, and a few spots of new interest -- the bokeh at the top middle due to moisture in the air, and a couple zones where ferns have some motion blur due to a breeze during the long time exposures needed to make the photo. The focus is also crisper throughout. Printed at full size 300dpi this would be 12" tall and 33" wide.

The Cascade is a wonderful place here in North Adams, MA… just a short hike from the trailhead, and nestled deep in the woods. Whenever I go there it feels otherworldly and intense, waterfalls thundering in the early Spring.

Professional Photo Websites for Free

2010-04-05T16:00:00.003-04:00

Digital art and digital photography can and should be placed online. Unfortunately professional design services and website management software could cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Ugh! But what if I told you that you didn’t need any special software, that making a website could be surprisingly easy, and free, or only ten dollars a year?

There’s two web services that I recommend you use for creating high quality websites that feature your work for free. The first is Weebly.com, the second is Wordpress.com.

I’ve created an example Weebly website at this link: http://gregscheckler.weebly.com

Weebly.com is shockingly easy to use, has some good clean templates, and nice photo gallery functions. You could definitely use it as a professional website if you keep the design straightforward and direct.

Currently my professional website is driven using Wordpress: http://www.gregscheckler.com I get about 55,000 visitors per year at this website – much broader exposure than any other marketing venue that I currently use. I use 1and1.net, at a cost of about $10 per year, to register and own the domain name gregscheckler.com, and then have the free Wordpress website (http://gregscheckler.wordpress.com) automatically routed to the name gregscheckler.com. Wordpress has a lot more functions than Weebly, and you should try it someday, but it's interface isn't as intuitive as Weebly's.

So here's what to do for today's online project... create a Weebly website:

1. Go to Weebly.com and sign up for a free Weebly account.

2. Choose a name and Create a free website.

a. the website name is probably best if it includes your name, since after all your name as an artist is the main way that people recognize you.

3. Select an exceptionally clean, simple Template

a.       don’t select complex, hyper, or overly colorful templates or themes… the purpose here is to keep your audience focused on you as an artist and your artworks.
b.    if you select a theme with a large header or photo, customize it w/your own art.
c.     don't select any of the add-ons or teasers (don't pay for anything).

4. Know that in Weebly, everything works basically by dragging and dropping design elements into the website.

a. Remember, the goal here is to feature your photography.

b. Click on 'Save' and on ‘Publish’ frequently to save your work

5. Create these pages:

a. Homepage

b. About the Artist

c. Announcements (use the ‘create new blog’ function for this one)

d. Photography

6. Make the ‘Homepage’ your front page and put a picture or slideshow on it.

7. Make ‘Announcements’ into the blog page; here you will post announcements such as when you are in a show, when you’ve taken an interesting photo, etc.

8. For now, write a sentence or two about yourself on the About the Artist page.

9. Place gallery of photos on the Photography page (select 5 to 10 of your best photos, upload them, and follow directions for making an album in Weebly via their ‘multimedia’ menu)

10. Click 'Publish' again, and then Post a link to your new website in the comments section of today's post here at gregscheckler.blogspot.com

One of the best parts about Wordpress and Weebly is that if you decide you don’t like the website, you can either change the template or theme and try a different design without losing any of the content that you’ve posted, or, you can easily delete the whole thing. It doesn’t cost anything but a little time to set it up, so you’ve lost no money.

The project is finished once you've posted your website to the comments. The next part of today's post is for reading (not doing...)

So then what do you do with your new website, if you choose to keep using it?

Here’s one thing that a website is really good for… testing your advertising. The fact is that advertising in magazines, newspapers etc. can cost a lot of money. Photographers sometimes make a lot of money w/a decent ad. But it’s hard to figure out what ads will work well. And if you’re like me then you don’t want to spend $1,000 on an ad that doesn’t work. So, how do you test the market before sinking thousands of dollars into advertising? You use a website.

For example, if you want to see what kinds of your photos people really respond to and might consider buying, link your website through to a printing service (such as Redbubble.com) so that there’s products such as matted or framed prints that people can buy. Then create some low-cost Google Adwords or Facebook Ads. In fact by clicking around Weebly you may have seen that it can automatically synch with Google and Facebook ads – but you’d use ads to get people to go visit your website (not to post ads on your own website). Simply read the directions for ads at Google or Facebook to set your own budget and to test what kinds of imagery and wording people click on when they see your art – it’d cost a couple hundred dollars to reach thousands of people who are likely interested in your work, which is far better than spending the same money buying an untested print ad distributed to a lot of people who may have no interest in your work. Once you’ve figured out what online ads are working well for you, and once you’ve made some money, then maybe it’s time to branch out and use your market testing to create some excellent print ads. I won’t fool you into thinking this is easy… it isn’t. It’s hard to come up with effective ads that sell the art. And you probably shouldn’t aggressively market your photos until you’re 100% confident that they are excellent quality or at least good enough that you’ll be proud to sell them. The main idea here is that you can use your website to test the markets for the artistic photos that you’ve created. In other words the well-designed, free or extremely low-cost website, becomes the centerpiece of your basic advertising campaign.

Copyright Basics

2010-03-29T16:01:00.003-04:00

How do you protect your artwork from theft? How do you make sure that you get paid for it and someone else doesn’t? What do you do with your copyright once you have copyrighted art?

Digital photography, and other digital art forms, can be reproduced online and by most any computer millions of times, perfectly. This is both one of the great capacities of digital arts, and one of their drawbacks. Once digitized, your work can be published and seen with greater ease than any other art form. But once online, it could be difficult if not impossible to know if someone has copied your work and sold or repackaged it without your permission.

Advice#1: relax.

There’s so many millions of photographers in the world that until you’re famous or publishing a lot, it’s quite unlikely that someone will steal and then use your artwork. It’s probably more likely that you’ll be hit by lightning or win the lottery. That much said, a little information goes a long way. And the more professional you become, the more important it is to know these basics.

When is your work copyrighted?

The moment you make the artwork it is copyrighted. It’s yours. Copyright is automatic.

Quite simply you don’t have to do anything for your work to be copyrighted. Nothing. Just do all the usual things such as backing up your files and you really don’t have to worry about it much. But if you ever need to prove your copyright in a court of law, then you need a public record of your copyright. This is extremely easy to do online. You can go to the government copyright website and for a fee you can submit pictures online for full registration. The website for all things copyright is http://www.copyright.gov There you’ll find full directions for copyright and the online center for copyright submissions at http://www.copyright.gov/eco/

But I hope you don’t copyright each photo one by one. You could do that, but it’d cost you $35 per registration – 20 of your best photos would cost $700. Ugh!

Here’s how to copyright a hundred photos for less than $100: batch together an entire body of artworks as a large project. So for example, you could take a set of 100 related photos, and compress them into one large ZIP file using a compressing utility like PKZip (http://www.pkware.com/software-pkzip/file-compression) PKZip is shareware – it has a free demo but then eventually you’d need to buy software (around $50) or find some other compressing utility. Then you upload the zip file of your entire set of photos to the US Government Copyright office, fill out a form online, and pay the online copyright fee ($35). In eight or nine months the government sends confirmation that your set of works is fully registered for copyright. Easy!!

Of course if you really aren’t publishing your photos anywhere, then it’s unnecessary to register your copyright – everything’s copyrighted the moment you make it, automatically. You should really only bother to register and pay for copyright online if you’re going to be publishing the work widely where people might see it and steal it.

For a while it used to be that the artist had to sign the artwork and put the year and the copyright symbol on it, for example "Gregory Scheckler © 2010." Many artists still do this although it is no longer necessary, thank goodness, because such signatures and symbols are dreadfully ugly on top of carefully composed photos!

The issues surrounding theft of images. copyright, fair use and artworks does imply a few other things:

- As an artist, as a professional, you should create your own artworks and not steal anyone else’s artworks. Not only is it best for your creativity to make your own work, it's best legally.

- Give credit where credit is due, cite sources.

- If you have a website you can decide how you post images, so they can be copied or so that they can’t (many pro photographers use a ‘Flash’ photo album that prevents copying of images).

As I said before theft of images is rare. But it does happen. It’s worst when it’s from artist to artist. For example, the painter Shephard Fairey is being sued by the Associate Press for stealing a photo of President Obama, which Fairey illegally used to create his famous ‘Hope’ poster. (click the link to get a series of articles about Fairey and the case at BoingBoing.net. I’m not a fan of Fairey’s work, but the issues are complex indeed). Artist Jeff Koons got skewered in the courts for having stole a photo of puppies which was a violation of the ‘fair use’ clause. Probably the main reason that both Fairey and Koons got sued is that they’re both rich. And they stole art from artists or organizations who had intended to profit from the artworks – in other words, varying levels of profit and serious money were involved in each case. After all ownership and money are at the core of copyright, because ... what do you do with your copyright?

You sell it.

To be more precise, you sell the versions of the artwork along with variations of the rights to copy the art.
When you agree to publish your photos somewhere, you are allowing the publisher to buy the rights to use the photo. Doing so is often called 'licensing.' Artists often sell

- Limited Non-Exclusive Reproduction Rights

- Unlimited Non-Exclusive Reproduction Rights

- Exclusive Reproduction Rights

So for example suppose you had a nice set of landscape photos that a publisher would like to use for a set of greeting cards. You would arrange and negotiate the kind of reproduction rights that meets your needs. In most cases, you would only sell limited, non-exclusive rights (sometimes called ‘one time publication rights’) for a simple fee – say $1,000 for the publisher to have the right to use five photos for the greeting cards for one run of the cards. Non-exclusive rights means that you can still sell the image to other venues, in galleries, etc. Exclusive rights means only the publisher can use the image – I’d encourage you to never sell exclusive rights. Well, unless you getting a ton of money for them. Similarly you would only sell unlimited rights for big money, because without limitations the publisher can make millions of copies of the artwork for any purpose. Every artist must of course decide what the pro’s and con’s of each situation are depending on the job and your own need for pay.

All of this brings up basic copyright and licensing Advice#2: if you have a contract and you don’t understand it, hire an arts lawyer to help you.

And advice #3: have a contract.

You can find many examples of licensing and rights agreements online by googling ‘photograph license agreement’ Here's a random sampling: fairly straightforward by Andrew Stottsan; detailed by Carl Schneider; less formal by Marilyn Coey. You might notice from these examples that when the photographer sells a photo, she is not necessarily selling the entire copyright. Also to illustrate what this looks like, here’s the actual text of a licensing contract from a small job I once did for a record company for an album cover. Note how despite the apparent global terms, this contract specifies ‘non-exclusive’ except for my agreement not to sell the image for any other sound recordings. This is a standard boilerplate contract:

=============== start contract ===============================

From: (Company address removed)

June 30, 2009

To: Gregory Scheckler

(address removed)

RE: (product removed) / Gregory Scheckler Artwork Agreement (1510.09-ART)

Dear Gregory,

The following, when signed by you and by us ("company"), will confirm our agreement

with you:

1. You hereby represent and warrant that you are the sole author and owner of ONE (1)

piece of art, a copy of which is attached to this agreement as Exhibit "A" and by this reference made

a part of this agreement (the "Material"). You hereby grant to COMPANY a worldwide, perpetual,

irrevocable license to exploit the Material in packaging, promotion, publicity, marketing materials,

and merchandising including merchandise for sale for the COMPANY artist professionally

known as “ARTIST” (“Artist”), including the non-exclusive right to reproduce, distribute,

display publicly, and make derivative works of, the Material, and including the non-exclusive

worldwide publication rights and the non-exclusive rights to use the Material in connection with the

Artist for any purpose and in any medium, now known or devised in the future, perpetually and

throughout the world. As between you and COMPANY, you shall be the owner of the copyright in the

Material, subject to COMPANY's non-exclusive rights to use the Material as described herein and the

restrictions on your use of the Material as described herein, and provided that notwithstanding the

foregoing COMPANY shall be the owner of the compilation copyright in the Artist's records and

related materials embodying the Material. You hereby irrevocably authorize, empower, and appoint

COMPANY your true and lawful attorney (a) to initiate and compromise any valid claim or action

against infringers of COMPANY's rights with respect to the Material; and (b) to execute in your name

any and all documents and/or instruments necessary or desirable to accomplish the foregoing.

COMPANYwill give you ten (10) days notice before signing any such document in your name.

COMPANY may dispense with that waiting period when necessary, in COMPANY's judgment, to

protect or enforce its rights, but COMPANY will notify you in each instance when it has done so. The

power of attorney granted under this paragraph 1 is coupled with an interest and is irrevocable.

2. As full consideration for all rights granted herein in and to the Material and your

representations and warranties contained herein, COMPANY will pay you (inclusive of any sales, use

or other applicable taxes)

(a) (fee stated here)

3. You hereby represent and warrant that you have not and will not use and/or license

or otherwise dispose of rights in the Material to any other third party in connection with the

exploitation of, the marketing advertising and promotion of sound recordings.

4. You warrant and represent that (a) you have the right and power to enter into and

fully perform this agreement; (b) no use of the Material by COMPANY or its licensees for any

purpose authorized hereunder will violate any law or infringe any rights of others; (c) you have not

done or permitted and will not do or permit any act or thing which shall or may impair in any

manner the rights herein granted; (d) there is no litigation, dispute, claim or action in connection

with the Material; (e) COMPANY will not be required to make any payments in connection with the

Material or its use, except as provided in paragraph 2 above; and (f) you will execute such further

instruments as COMPANY may require to effectuate the purpose and intent of this agreement. You

will indemnify COMPANY and any licensee of COMPANY against all claims, damages, liabilities, and

expenses (including reasonable counsel fees and legal expenses) arising out of any breach of your

representations and warranties.

5. This agreement contains the entire understanding of the parties and will be governed

by the laws of the State of California applicable to contracts entered into in California and entirely

performed there. No change of this agreement will be binding upon COMPANY unless made by an

instrument signed by an authorized signatory of COMPANY. Company may assign its rights under

this agreement in whole or in part. You will perform under this agreement as an independent

contractor and not as Company's agent or employee.

Exhibit A (artwork attached)

======================= (end contract) ==============================

More difficult than any of these legal issues, of course, is finding people and publishers who will pay for your artwork. For that you’ll need to contact galleries, publishers, artists and editors for advice, basic business connections, etc. Probably the easiest way to get a lot of addresses and phone numbers in one place is to get a hold of the most recent version of Photographer’s Market. Then start sending out your best photos or other artworks, and keep at it. Once you have 6,000 rejections in a row you can give up. Until then, keep seeking paid work.

Lighting Diagrams and Recipes

2010-03-29T16:00:00.001-04:00

This new blog post looks to contain hundreds of ideas about lighting for the staged photo:

20 Resources That Will Get You Lit

I'm not much of a portraitist, but if you'd like to learn more about studio lighting for portraits, Stefan Tell has some very clear blog posts about portrait lighting.

Curves

2010-03-26T16:03:00.001-04:00

Bonus blog post...

Basically, we haven't discussed it much yet but the Curves adjustment tool is a great way to adjust tone and color (and therefore exposure) ranges throughout a photo all in one convenient place. Very useful. See Photoshop menu Image --> Adjustments --> Curves or for similar processes in GIMP try menu Colors --> Curves.

There's an extremely clear and understandable tutorial about how to use Curves over at Tutorial9.net

Curves can be overdone with great ease... but they can also be a convenient way to tweak a lot of color and value settings all at once. And if you want very subtle control using layers options like 'lighten' or 'darken' or 'luminosity' or 'hue' with some transparencies too, try using Curves in a new Layer, or Adjustment Layer. (actually the same is true with any of the processing controls we've tried throughout this class).

Visual example of the differences... using curves to fix the tonal range in the shadows and midtones...

Snapshot versus Fine Art, Part 2

2010-03-22T16:02:00.003-04:00

Part 2: Intersections with Photojournalism

Similar to the snapshot is a strictly photojournalistic approach, in that snapshots and photojournalism tend to rely on unretouched photography. But photojournalism unlike the snapshot can be quite intentional.

The photojournalist's documentary photo is intended as evidence to tell or support the news. With photojournalism, realism is necessary and the photographer aims to tell a story that’s consistent with what’s really happening in the world. For that reason, retouching of the image is forbidden. In contrast, the fine art photo includes much of the artist creating the image in such a way as to draw out expressions, images, and content that the artist finds most important – not merely what’s there to be photographed, but rather, what’s there to be richly emphasized, even altered if needed. The fine art photo could be (but doesn’t need to be) heavily altered and retouched, whereas the photojournalistic photo must not be retouched, and the snapshot photo too is normally little retouched. But unlike the documentary photo's need for realism, the snapshot is not retouched for a different reason... it’s just too casual to bother with much redesigning and retouching.

Our expectations are that fine art photos don’t have to be but could be retouched, redesigned, and altered for aesthetic or symbolic effect, whereas the snapshot probably isn’t altered and the photojournalist or documentary photo had better not be. We expect some photos to be truthful representations, even evidence in a court of law, whereas we expect other photos to be expressive or even wholly fictional.

But at a certain level no photo is entirely truthful, since the photographer must always adapt camera settings, lens settings, and composing to the imagery that she intends to record, thus altering what can be recorded every step of the way.

On the intersections and problems among the differences between careful editorial photojournalism, strange retouching issues, truthfulness versus misleads in photography, there is no better writer than Errol Morris (who made the academy-award winning documentary, The Fog of War). I recommend reading these two sets of his online essays:

It Was All Started by a Mouse (Part 1, and Part 2) – detailing the problems of how to title and caption a ‘truthful’ photojournalism.

Photography As a Weapon (linked here at the NYTimes Blogs) – regarding the unusual retouching and captioning that happens in photos such as the missiles shown here, which is widely recognized as a fake, although it was published by numerous newspapers:

[photo credit: New York Times / Errol Morris]

All of this begs the question... can you really trust any photo? Responding to this question requires being very familiar with the intentions of the photographer, the apparent uses of the camera and its settings, and looking for tell-tale clues in the photo that something may have been manipulated. How do you recognize the fakes? In addition to Morris’s articles, here’s a great sidebar discussion at Scientific American, Digital Forensics: 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo.

If you’d like much more detailed information about photo fakes and image forensics, then you should check out the research and writings of Hany Farid, who leads the Image Science Group at Dartmouth.

Sometimes, of course, finding the fakery is delightfully easy. You'll see lots of humorous examples (and some fakes of fakes), at PhotoshopDisasters. Enjoy!

Snapshot versus Fine Art, Part 1

2010-03-22T16:00:00.003-04:00

We’ve looked at and worked with the differences between ‘found image’ photography and ‘staged scene’ photography – you are currently working on a series of staged scenes as a narrative.

Another major distinction among types of photography is the snapshot versus the fine art photo, or more simply snapshot versus photograph. One common critique question, heard in art schools everywhere: “Is this photo a snapshot or a photograph?”

What are the differences between a snapshot photo and a fine art photo? A snapshot, of course, is casual, quick, and sort of documentary. It is the speedy photo of kids during a party. The snapshot is informal and spontaneous. A photograph (or fine art photo), on the other hand, is carefully composed and exposed for artistic reasons, printed with special care, and thoughtfully made at every level of the creative process. A fine art photo is considered and planned.

Here’s a couple of photos that have the classic ‘snapshot’ look:

Here is a step-up from raw snapshot, a 'snapshot-sketch' of a landscape (Warren Falls, VT)

This photo shows promise... I used it to test exposures and croppings while at the scene considering how to represent and express the richness and depth of the varying water, evergreen, and rock textures. And here is my fine art photo of the same location:

The sketch was impulsive, just a rough test of the scene. I used it to help get to the fine art photo (hence the term ‘snapshot-sketch’). The second was purposeful. It was composed, cropped, toned, refined, and revised. The second one is headed straight for my b/w landscape portfolio.

You could, of course, for artistic reasons create a series of photos that take on the casual, unretouched appeal of a snapshot. But if you’re doing so on purpose, then you are thinking through the images and designing them for artistic reasons. It’s only when you don’t think it through and do no planning that you really truly have a set of casual, quick snapshots.

And you might also find that there is such a thing as a great, beautiful snapshot – that lucky moment when everything falls together and you get a surprise, an excellent image. And there is also the horrible fine art photo, where the image, its meanings or symbolism, or technical flaws all add up to create yuck. Just because a photo is fine art doesn’t mean it’s good, and just because a snapshot wasn’t intentional doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Meanwhile we all like photography because taking photos is fun, often speedy (compared to an oil painting anyway!) and often memorable. If you’re like me then even while making ‘fine art’ photos you are taking thousands of snapshots… at parties, on vacation, etc. Additionally, with software tools like Photoshop and GIMP, it’s very easy to crop, compose, retouch, alter and adjust almost every aspect of any photo. Many snapshots can be turned into fine art photos. So we must be careful not to think of snapshots as polar opposites of fine art photos. It’s more like subtle degrees of difference from a fairly casual photo to a very planned one.

As a painter, I like to compare snapshots with rough sketches, whereas the fine art photo – wholly composed and considered – is more like the finished oil painting. One leads to the other, and sometimes, the finished paintings create a storm of ideas that become sketches and turn into another artwork later on. These feedback cycles among snapshots and fine art photos produce a lot of the creativity of photography today.

Clarifying the conundrums… a look at the camera settings and processes that yield the look of a snapshot versus the look of an art photo:

Camera Settings for…	Snapshot aka ‘Casual’	Fine Art aka ‘Planned’
note:	‘often accidental’ and ‘relies on other’s engineering’	‘often purposeful’ and ‘relies on artist’s choices’
Exposure	Auto	Measured and selected
Signal to Noise	Somewhat Noisy, medium to poor signal	High signal, sharp and smooth when needed
Lighting	Found and/or Direct Flash	Found, Directional Flash (bounced, reflected, etc.), Controlled or Added Light, or waited for the best natural light.
White Balance	Auto	Custom, or Selected Specific WB
Focus	Auto = averaged, a little soft	Pin Sharp if needed
Shutter Speed	Auto	Selected as needed for action, motion blur, time lapse
F-Stop	Auto or does not apply (snapshot fixed lens camera)	Selected for specific depth of field.
ISO	400, 800 or greater	Usually lower than 400

Here’s a slightly different way of thinking about this, full of value judgments but you get the idea…

Type of Photo	Results for Snapshot Settings	Results for Fine Art Setting
Portrait	- One light source, harsh - Red Eye - Focus not on eyes - Odd microexpressions (shutter speed too fast) - Tones and skin colors feel too orange or too green-yellow (auto WB) - Harsh edge or rim shadows (direct flash) - Background cluttered - Person looks worse in photo than in real life	- Great light = mood, beauty, expression - Eye highlights add lively feeling - Focus crisp on eyes - ‘Human’ expressions - Colors feel natural - Softened shadows or reflections (bounced light) - Background composed - Person probably looks better in photo than in real life.
Landscape	- Harsh or Midday Lighting - Odd crops, no composition - Found view with extreme ease of access (anyone could find this location) - Unretouched - Bland tones or colors, photo doesn’t remind of the scene - Narrow d.o.f. - Clouds have blinkies, or shadows have crunges. - Horizon Crooked - Image is boring to look at; I’d rather go for a hike and see the world on my own.	- Magic Hour lighting (dawn or dusk) - Patient, composed scene, no visual distractions - Scoped out the best location and waited for the light (more unusual or original view) - Color retouched or saturated. - High f-stop = long depth of field, a lot in focus. - Widest color and tonal ranges (WB) - Horizon is level (tripod). - Photo is rich and interesting to look at, I’m happy spending time with it.

And finally there’s subject matter: the fine art photo can have any subject matter, but it’s my experience that the snapshot photo tends to be familiar scenes, and people that you know – the purpose of the snapshot is usually to celebrate and remind you of these scenes or people. For example, a photo of children during a birthday party, or a group of friends at the top of a mountain peak after a long hike. In both cases, the photo’s purpose is mainly ‘remember this? This was a special event that we shared.’ We assume that such snapshots are mostly accurate representations of the scene, event, or people. We don’t make the same assumption about the fine art photo, where we expect the artist to manipulate the imagery to create meaning.

Extra Credit Project: Create two photos of the same scene, but make one of the photos look like a casual snapshot or snapshot sketch, and make the other appear to be a fine art photo. One should be casual and unplanned, where the other should seem planned, purposeful, and thoughtful. Place the two images together in one digital file, and submit it to our shared Picasa album. NOTE: This project is optional. Extra credit will be provided to those who complete this project.

Example:

Mini-Portfolio: Staged Scene with Narrative

2010-03-08T16:25:00.004-05:00

Here's the full description of your next big homework project...

Mini-Portfolio: Staged Image Narrative

due date: Monday March 29^th

Description: in contrast to the 10x100 series of found images where you semi-randomly found an image and then adapted your camera settings to it, in this series you will create a set of staged images, where you arrange, set-up, organize and light all qualities of the photo according to your artistic vision. In other words, you’ll adapt the world to your artistry. Furthermore, across the entire staged series, your photos should reveal a narrative. This series requires a set of at least ten photos, staged, that together tell a story. The most successful series will work well together as a group, even though each photo will also work well on its own. This project is not a technical exercise... it will be graded on originality, artistry, and good use of technique to meet the needs of your artistry.

What’s a narrative? A narrative is a sequence of images that reveal a story. It could be a complex plot with many variables, or, a simple progression of an abstract design idea.

How do you stage the photo? Some considerations and questions...

Main subject matter. What or who is your single most important character in the scenes that you’re creating? Is it the same character in each of the ten images that you create, or does the main character change from image to image?

Supporting cast members. A prop is a symbol. Everything in your image helps create the meanings and communications of the picture. How do the supporting cast members contribute to the scene? Do any detract from the scene (if so, remove them).

Background imagery. How complex or how simple should you make the background? Should it be in focus, or outside the depth of field and out of focus? Should it be many, a few, or only one single pattern? Should it be a block of one color, a gradation of one color, or mixtures of many colors?

The space. Should the scene's space be tight and claustrophic, or wide and open?

The Lighting. Where is the lighting? What kind of light sources are present? Can you alter the light sources? Can you or should you add or remove any light sources? Should you use direct light, or a combination of direct and reflected light? Adding light: there’s many options, from lighting a candle to bouncing light off a ceiling using a desk lamp, to using a flashlight, to flooding a room with theatre spot lights or specialty photo lights. Additionally, each light could be a gentle or specific color – why not add a piece of blue mylar between the light and your subject? Removing light: you can block a window with a dark piece of fabric, shade, or shutters. You could have a friend hold a piece of cardboard in the way of a light, to set its direction to a new angle. Reflected light: you can soften a lot of shadows by bouncing some light into the scene using a piece of white poster board, a colored piece of fabric, or a mirror

Special Effects. Will you need multiple exposures, color manipulations, or significant retouching? Use your recipe list to keep track of the operations you perform on each image.

The Overall Style. Each of the ten images should look similar enough that they can work together as a series, but different enough that each image stands well on its own.

Here are some examples of narrative series from professional photographers:

Exactitudes: composite portraits by Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek

The Veil Project: staged portraits of women with veils, by Erin Mulvehill

Exploded. composites by Adam Voorhes

Works by Matthew Albanese. Talk about creating complex staged scenes!!!!! Click on the gallery on the right of the screen.

Gregory Crewdson. click on the pics on the right for more images.

Time to start brainstorming! You have this week and the week after Spring Break plus a few more days to create your project.

Know Your Lighting

2010-03-08T16:25:00.002-05:00

Now there's a nice rainbow! (As seen last June, from Williamstown, looking towards Mt. Greylock.) As a landscape painter and when doing nature photography, my teachers often said you’ll get a great image if the sun is at your back – in other words, when light spreads out and illuminates the landscape in front of you. This tactic works for many scenes, but of course, not for every landscape – if you did a sunset image, probably the sun is in front of you. At sunset did you turn around and look behind you to see the orange-pink glow on the world? That glow is often referred to by artists as ‘Magic Hour’ since it only occurs for a short time during dusk, and dawn. And what about rainbows, when the light must be far in front of you? Really the point of this kind of advice is this: it always helps to be aware of when, where, and what kind of lighting you are using. Know your lighting.

Some things to know about your lighting...

Color Temperature: this you already know, via our white balance exercise.

Location: Where are the Light Sources? Light can come from any direction. In art we tend to group it simply as scenes that are front lit, side lit, silhouette, rim lit, flash (direct), flash (bounced).

What kind of light: Light can also be direct, meaning from an obvious light source. Sometimes a light source is bounced from one place to another, such as beamed into a mirror and then onto your subject matter, and sometimes light is bent through a material like water. These situations are called Direct Light (common), Reflected Light (uncommon), Refracted Light (rare, like rainbows)

Today’s exercise: create a still-life scene with one direct light source, and some simple subject matter. Then take a series of ten photos of the scene where you systematically move the lighting and add reflections, thus demonstrating and experiencing each main type of lighting. Put the photos together to create one composite image wherein you can easily compare the differences of one lighting scenario to the next.
        Hints: You’ll need to set this up so that you can easily adjust the lighting. You will need a light, such as a desklamp or clip lamp. Use only that light. Turn off all other lights. You'll also need a reflector such as a mirror or piece of white posterboard or paper. To create reflections, hold or place the reflector opposite the light source and angled towards the still life... experiment to see if you can soften the shadows. It helps to put the camera on a tripod, if you have one. Use the same scene throughout, but alter the lighting for each photo. You may need to adjust the exposure to avoid blinkies and crunges. Make sure of course that you’ve set your white balance for the best result for your scene.
      Create the following directions of light: silhouette (the light is behind the subject matter, pointing towards your camera), silhouette with an additional reflected light (I used a mirror for the examples above), side lit right, side lit right w/reflection added, side lit left, side lit left + reflected light, 3/4 lit (light is in front, somewhat above and somewhat to the side), 3/4 lit + reflection, bottom lit (lit comes from below, the 'spooky campfire' look), and bottom-lit + reflected light. It's not required but if you'd like to do light from above (Top Lit), you could add it in and it's top lit + reflection version too. Be sure you note what kind of light you use, and then label each direction of light source that you use.
      Your final result should be similar in format to this image (although you might choose to use color)...

Understanding Color: Part 3, Color Space and Color Profiles

2010-03-01T18:08:00.000-05:00

So by now you know that you can adjust the color with some basic software controls such as Hue/Saturation, and Color Balance. Hopefully you also played around and found Photo Filter, Curves, and Channel Mixer. And you also saw that you could adjust the color depending on your camera’s White Balance settings related to your light source, matching the light source to get as close as possible to what you see, versus mixing the WB and the light source up on purpose for artistic effect.

I urge you to use any of these controls with artistry, with some subtlety related to the intent of your image-making. It's frighteningly easy to overdo with such powerful camera and software color controls, making an image that appears incredibly unnatural.

Meanwhile, we want color to be consistent across our entire photography process – in other words, it’s great when the colors in your photograph look excellent on the computer screen, and look like the same excellence when you print the photo or submit it to a website. Unfortunately often the photo looks different from camera, to screen, to printer. If this happens to you a lot, then you are probably experiencing a color management problem.

There’s no easy way to solve color management problems. And to solve them, you’ll need some more detailed technical information. And actually technical information regarding color for computers, software, and equipment like monitors and scanners and printers is a time-consuming task at best, and at worst, a total mess. There’s no simple international standard for color management, and there’s many different ways that software programs and hardware devices define and use color, and literally thousands of different products to negotiate. There’s a lot of kinds of math involved to get your software to reproduce and mimic various kinds of color – an immense amount of engineering between taking the digital photo and printing it. Thus a most important rule is this:

READ YOUR OUTPUT. READ YOUR PRINT. READ YOUR MONITOR.

See what the photo looks like, i.e., ‘Read’ the photo. If you intend to put the image up on a screen, website, or social network, then test the image by putting it on the website (you can always delete it if it looks crummy). It can be a little costly, but it also can really pay off to make a test print with your printer. But don’t just leave it online or on your desk, look at it. First, is it too grainy or sharp enough? Is the exposure correct? Third, are the colors comparable to what you have on your screen on your computer, when you're looking at the picture in your image-processing software?

If it looks the same and looks great, then leave it alone, change no settings, and move on. But if it doesn’t appear the same in your image-processing software and then online, or onscreen versus in print, then you can be sure that some odd color management translations are happening between the Color Space, and the Color Profiles. What you need to do to resolve the problem color changes is called Color Management and Color Calibration.

To get to Color Management you need to know some basic jargon:

Color SPACE (often called Working Space, or Reference Space) this is generally independent of your equipment. Color Spaces can be big or small. The bigger they are, the more color definitions they can include, and thus the bigger the range of colors you get to work with. The smaller they are, then the smaller the range of colors you can use. So, if you have a photo set to a big color space with lots of colors, you may encounter problems when a printer or website has to get rid of data and translate it to their smaller color space. Color space today comes in three main types: sRGB, a smaller color space; Adobe RGB, basically a medium-sized color space; and PhotoPro RGB, quite large. You won’t see the difference between sRGB and PhotoProRGB if you don’t have a computer monitor that can handle the wide range of colors of the PhotoProRGB definitions.

You can check the color space when you have the photo open, you can check the color Mode (in Photoshop it’s under menu Image – Mode). Simply select RGB. When you save a photo with Photoshop, you can also select the color space of the photo. Here’s what this would look like – look for the checkbox marked sRGB:

See the checkbox that says ICC Profile: sRGB? Just make sure it is checked.

You can also change the color space in Photoshop using the Edit --> Color Settings menu. A dialog menu will come up like this:

The color space here should be the same as when you save the file... make sure it says 'preserve embedded profile' for each of the three color management policies too. [GIMP users... I'm not sure where this kind of control is in GIMP... have you found it? If yes please specify in your comment.]

Feel free to click on the drop-down menus and see what the choices are. For instance under RGB you'll find sRGB, ProPhoto, etc. My advice to you is this: always use sRGB as your main color space. Anything other than sRGB is way out of range for most compact digital cameras today. Also, sRGB’s by far the most common color space used online and in print today. If you want or need a much bigger color space, then go with ProPhoto RGB… if and only if you have access to a ten-thousand dollar printer, specialty inks, an excellent digital SLR camera, and a fancy computer monitor, and archival printer paper. You might get to that level of investment if you work in print media, or work as a professional art photographer. Otherwise, for color management you really only need to make sure your photos and your software are set to sRGB color space.

Now, to make matters more complex...

Color PROFILE (ICC profiles for each piece of equipment that you’re using) Each piece of equipment that you use, such as your camera, your monitor, and your printer, has its own color profile. The Color Profile tells your computer how each piece of equipment can work in or out of the range of colors defined in your Color Space. If you have a monitor, a printer, a camera, and a scanner, you may be dealing with at least four different color profiles that all relate differently to the color space.

Color Management tells your computer how to negotiate all of the color profiles of your equipment within the color space that you’re using. Color CALIBRATION is when you match the settings of your camera or scanner to your monitor and printer, website, or other output. When they all match as closely as possible, then your system is calibrated, and usually your photo looks the same on screen as it does when printed.

This is a lot more difficult than it seems like it should be… Windows is a bit different than Mac OSX, for how to set the color space of your monitor. Fortunately you can use an automatic device to calibrate and test your monitor. For example, here’s my "XRite EyeOne" color calibrator on my laptop’s computer screen:

It’s basically automatic, and makes sure that your monitor is all in order. It plugs in with a USB cable, and syncs up with it's own software, and then sets the ICC Color Profile. A calibrator like this is really the only way to make sure that what you see on screen is true to what other people using their own calibrated screens would see. Besides EyeOne, other affordable brands are Pantone Huey, and ColorVision Spyder. Both are mouse-sized doodads with a tiny visual sensor in them that responds to the light emitted by your monitor. If you're serious about making sure that graphic designers, publishers, and printers get the colors in your images just right, then it is a wise idea to spend $100 on a decent color calibrator.

Another Pro Tip: If you’re sending your images away for someone else to print – then ask them what color settings you should use to get the most consistent results. A good printer will tell you what settings are best for their printing equipment. Same with a good website that needs photos. Ask them what color space or color profiles they need, and then DO WHAT THEY SAY. Color is a complicated set of balances, and when any printer has a specific series of settings that make pictures look their best, then just follow their directions. Even if you have your images set to sRGB, if they say they need ProPhoto or they send you their own ICC profile, then use their method, not your own personal favorite.

Understanding Color: Part 2, Light Sources and White Balance

2010-03-01T17:03:00.000-05:00

We photographers depend on the presence and absence of light to create our images.

But all light is not the same.Every light source has an average color range. Moonlight is a different color than sunlight. Incandescent light bulbs are warmer than most fluorescent light bulbs. Light from a candle is significantly yellower than light from most LED flashlights, which are often kind of bluish.

You can respond to and control your relationship with the light by adjusting the White Balance of your camera. Selecting a correct White Balance will leave the neutrals neutral. In other words, the photo will look a lot like what you see with your own two eyes. This is usually our goal: match the white balance settings of our cameras to the color temperature that we really see in the world. To say that what you’ve photographed looks like what you see with your eyes, that the white balance is matched, is to say that the photo is ‘color accurate’ or 'color correct.'

If you haven’t set your White Balance controls for the lighting you’re using for your photo, then you may end up with neutral areas of a photo appearing too vivid or unusually colorful. This is often an accident, but you could adjust the White Balance for artistic effects… if the colors are more vivid than what you can see, then you must be being an expressive artist – same if they are highly desaturated, or mainly grayscale (which isn’t like what we see in the world but can be very beautiful). Selecting the right White Balance for your artistic needs is the first step towards being more artistic with your use of Light, and being able to select the kind of artistry that you’d like to be rather than making images by default of whatever automatic settings are used by your camera.

How light is defined: Light is defined by it’s Color Temperature. For example, bright daylight is defined as 5500k, whereas the flash of your camera may have a temperature of 5400k, an incandescent light bulb 3,000k, a Fluorescent light bulb at 4200k, a cloudy day might be 6,000k and in shade, perhaps 7,000k or even 8,000k if it’s foggy. The ‘k’ stands for the Kelvin Temperature Range (if you want to read all about using the Kelvin to measure color temperatures, black-body radiators, etc., then click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature). It used to be that you had to select a particular kind of film to match the color temperature, for example, using a Tungsten film if you had hot halogen lighting in the studio, or Fujichrome film if you wanted vivid outdoor action photos. Instead of having to swap out the film to match the lighting, today’s digital cameras have a button. The button alters a series of settings that you can use to match your White Balance with the lighting in the world around you.

In a Nikon digital SLR, there’s just a little button on the top of the camera, marked WB, and you can scroll through some settings easily.With many non-SLR cameras, you may find a menu screen full of 'scenes' such as Snow, Candle, Sunlight, Landscape, Portrait, Cloudy, etc. Each of these is likely changing the white balance to compensate for the typical color temperatures found in each kind of scene.

So here’s your mini-assignment: take a set of pictures of the same object or person, but using different white balance settings. It's easiest to see the differences if you use an object that is light in value. Then cut and paste the pictures to make a composition like this one:

Use the text tool so that to label what kind of light source you’re using, and then label each image for how you changed the white balance in your camera. As a result you now have a composite Reference Photo that you can rely on to compare and contrast with while you make images – do you need to make an image feel warmer, when using an indoors fluorescent light source? Then shift the white balance to Daylight or Flash. Do you need it cooler and more mysterious? Then shift the wb to Incandescent... and so on.

Label and submit your composite image to our shared Picasa album.

Understanding Color: Part 1 Basic Terms and Concepts

2010-03-01T16:37:00.000-05:00

Color terms: Hue Saturation Value

Hue: the name of the color (or in digital photo, the numbers) Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet

Saturation: the brightness or chroma of the color, how much grey versus how much pure hue. Especially vivid colors tend to be highly saturated.

Value: the lightness and darkness of the hue. A black-and-white photo uses no hue, and only relies on value.

Warm vs. Cool Colors: a Warm Color is in the red-orange-yellow range, such as fire. a Cool Color is in the blue-green-black range. For example, the right block is said to be cooler than the left warm gray:

RGB and CMYK. Cameras and printers rely mainly on RGB (Red Green Blue) systems to describe color, and sometimes on CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black). RGB refers to what happens when you mix Red, Green, and Blue lights together. If you look closely at the pixels on your computer monitor, you’ll see that they are tiny groups of red green and blue dots. CMYK is mainly used as a color model for printing colors, and is increasingly uncommon.

RGB Color and How to Number the Colors. Each range of Hue in this model is assigned a number, usually from 0-255. So, zero Red and zero Green and zero Blue combined – no color at all – equals black, where 255 Red and 255 Green and 255 Blue is white. All the other colors are a range between these extremes. Check out the numbers within this menu box, which is the 'Color Picker' (the little eyedropper tool), from Photoshop:

You can of course move the slider arrows up and down, and see how the numbers move along with you through the spectrum. If you click on 'only web colors' then you'd see a chunky chart showing a more limited range of colors. In GIMP these controls are similar.[if you'd like to learn a lot more about RGB color, then click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model ]

Here is probably the easiest way to change all of the colors in your photo at one time: the Hue/Saturation control (under Photoshop menu Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation)

The image unchanged, from a photo of a sun dog:

The image altered severely with the H/S controls, same photo:

This is now extremely saturated, the Hue was shifted down, and the image was darkened. For almost all photos, I find that I rarely alter the Hue, and tend to use the LEVELS controls for lightness/darkness. Thus this control is used mainly for saturation, about which I find that increasing the saturation above the number 18 is just way too much for naturalism, and becomes expressionistic instead.

Another basic color control is the Color Balance menu. (in Photoshop it's under Image --> Adjustments --> Color Balance). It looks like this:

Here I simply slid the balance far more into the red, making the entire image a lot pinker. If you're curious, here is the photo I was toying with to show you these color controls. I hope you'll agree that it's a pretty picture:

Watch for sun dogs like this in the Berkshires... they happen here all the time thanks to the mountains, the moisture in the air, and the angle of the sun at sunrise and sunset.

As far as thinking about color goes, I think it's good to keep in mind the variables involved. Some basic Color Design Questions can be

- (Value) Should this image, or part of it, be Lighter or Darker?

- (Hue) Should this image or part of it be Warmer or Cooler?

- (Saturation) Should this image or part of it be More Vivid or More Grey?

Some Simple Ways to Alter Color Relationships:

- Levels (you already know about this... and maybe you also found the Color Histogram)

- Hue/Saturation control (the best!!)

- Color Balance control
- Apply Color Photo Filter (easy)

- Create a new Layer, Paint it with a color, and then set the Layer to mainly transparent (fun)

HDR and Layering updates

2010-02-25T12:22:00.001-05:00

For those of you looking for more information about creating Layers to make an HDR image, I came across this tutorial and thought it was pretty clear -- w/a little effort you can translate the main ideas (layer masks) to GIMP if needed.

http://digital-photography-school.com/hdr-style-results-using-layers-in-photoshop

Enjoy!

MCLA Snow Day, and Building Your Own Recipe for Success

2010-02-24T18:44:00.000-05:00

Students, I hope you've enjoyed the snow day and had a chance for some r&r or maybe catching up on things. Did anyone make a snowman? It's the perfect snow for it! I shovelled a lot. And went skiing, a lot. And then shovelled much, much more. Here's a collaborative photo: pics taken by my wife Laura, and then processed by me into the double-exposure that you see here... yup, that's me skiing the trees early this morning in the middle of the storm.

It was some seriously fantastic skiing this morning. 18" of fresh powder will do that!

I said if we had a snow day I'd post something here for you. It's about building your own recipe for success.

You'll need to check your gmail documents. You'll find a new shared pdf document there, which is really just a chart. The top lists the five or six software processes that I find myself doing with almost every photo, in order. Then there's a bunch of blank spots -- here you'd record what you've done to a photo, as you work on it. The idea is to be able to keep track of what you do as you process a picture. In other words, write out your own recipe for processing each photo.

As you've seen, once we start using Layers and altering colors and so on, it gets difficult to remember what you've just done to an image, or even why. So it's a great idea to write down what you do as you do it. Seriously, it helps immensely. You don't have to be absolutely detailed (don't record every click of the mouse -- just the important major steps along the way).

And if you really mess up an image, with a good recipe list you can track where you messed it up. Then you can go back to the original image file, redo the steps that worked, and edit out the ones that didn't (because you do have the original image file, right? You did save a copy of the file right away as the "working" file, the one you process, didn't you?)

Another benefit is that if you find a series of steps that typically works for you, by keeping track of them, you can apply them to a different image, or even automate the editing process across a batch of images all at once. For example if you need to reduce any noise, it's important to do so BEFORE sharpening anything in the image -- otherwise you're just sharpening a bunch of the noise. You'll recognize these kinds of tricks if you keep track of what you do. And anyway, if you have to create a series of thirty or more images all at the same proportion and file size, say for a final book project for a photo class taught by a skier, then you're prepared by keeping organized as you work. (hint!)

Reminder: have you backed up your images this week?

Blinkies, Crunges, the Histogram and HDR

2010-02-22T15:58:00.000-05:00

Winking is cute. Winking is sassy. Winking is fun. If you wink with both eyes it’s called a double-barreled wink, or blink. Blinking your eyes takes about 1/100^th of a second – the same time that makes one skier a gold medalist and another only a blink behind, a loser, mere hundredths of a second. And in photography, a recurring case of the blinkies usually isn’t cute, isn’t sassy, and isn’t fun. It’s a blindspot. A blinkie is a highlight that’s just way too bright and washes everything else out. It is a flat bright spot, that ruins the illusion of sculptural form, the subtle tonality needed to create the sense of roundness.

The reverse of a blinkie is what I call the crunge: a super-dark and big shadow region in which there is just dank darkness, no detail, no form. It’s a problem because if you try to print a photo that has a serious crunge then you use up all your printer ink extremely fast, and that burns money. And anyway, it looks like a big flat dark area, kind of boring. Crunges suck. Blinkies suck. Neither one provides you with a wide range of delicate values and hues between absolute white and darkest dark.

In most cases, photos are better when they include a full range of luminosity from very dark to very bright w/many thousands of subtle values between them – the full range is the gold standard of exposure control. To describe it, photographers also use the jargon ‘low key’ (a mainly dark composition), ‘middle key’, and ‘high key’ (a mainly light composition). In each case we don’t want blown-out highlights or shadows. So, how do you avoid the blinkies and the crunges?

First some examples. Maybe you’ve taken a photo like this:

This has serious blinkies. The snow is washed out, and the sky in the upper right is totally gone.

And here’s the dreaded crunge:

Oof! That hurts my pocketbook just looking at it and thinking about printing it! Here’s the correctly exposed version that has a nice deep dark range and serious, lovely details – a good low-key image:

(If you clicked on the Mt. greylock image you'll see a big problem... wind made my tripod shiver!) (But the exposure is correct and not full of crunge.)

The secret to knowing what to do about blinkies and crunges is first to make sure that you can see them while you’re shooting. To do this, if your camera has a highlight warning function, then turn it on. It’s usually in the camera’s playback menu, or a submenu of the playback menu. So now we’re going to break a cardinal rule and edit on the basis of our image in the camera’s LCD screen. We’re not editing for sharpness, just for over-exposure. If the warning’s on then when you view your image in the camera’s LCD screen, your camera will let you know if any highlights are washed out by blinking sections of the image that are blown-out highlights. It looks like this on the back of my camera:

The screen will blink the highlights from the negative image on the top to the image below – sort of like a strobe light – so that the display shows an immediate exposure problem in a lot of the lights in the image. Thus the highlight alert or highlight warning function can save you a lot of trouble. Use it if you have it.

If you see blinkies then the easiest thing to do is to reshoot the scene, underexposing the image enough that the highlights aren’t too hot – use the +/- button and scroll wheel to adjust the exposure (or whatever controls are available to you to adjust the exposure). You can also experiment and see if you get more blinkies by purposely overexposing the image. Here is the overexposed version of the landscape shown in the LCD screen above (left), next to the stopped-down version (right) which is a very close representation of the snowy, cloudy day at North Pond in Savoy State Forest:

And yes, I took these photos to demonstrate the blinkies for you. Blinkies happen a lot in winter, because exposures are very hard to do when there’s snow. When they sense a lot of light grey tones, most digital cameras try to overcompensate the lights when they are set for automatic exposures (some cameras now have a ‘snow’ or ‘winter’ setting). In this case – a cloudy moment in the middle of a light snowfall, the visual mood was soft and sort of dark, definitely what’s called a ‘middle key’ scene. In real life it didn’t have any bright highlights. The overexposed image almost looks like a bright sunny day in comparison!

But if you have no manual exposure control – no +/- button to mess around with – then what do you do? Try reshooting the scene from a slightly different angle, turning every so slightly away from the highlight. Sometimes this works great. If your camera has spot metering, set it to spot meter so that you can select the exact point where the light meter reads the scene, instead of letting the camera automatically meter an average of the entire scene. You might also be dealing with the kind of camera that has a variety of settings for ‘scenes’ or ‘camera modes.’ Try selecting a different camera mode, for example, using the portrait setting even if you’re making a landscape photo.

Using software you can analyze your photos in many ways, first among them is using your Histogram (gesundheit!) Sounds like a weird allergy medicine doesn’t it? Have a bad case of the blinkies, or a serious bout of crunge? Then take one Histogram and call me in the morning. Some cameras will allow you to check an image’s histogram on the LCD screen. Some cameras won’t. But most image processing software will show you the histogram.

Here’s what the histogram of the good exposure of the scene above looks like in Photoshop:

In GIMP it looks quite similar (see menu Windows -> Dockable Dialogs -> Histogram).

The Histogram is a chart. It shows you how many pixels in your image are at each level of luminance – in other words, how much light and grey and dark you have in your image. It represents the darkest values on the left, and midtones in the middle, and the lightest values (highlights) on the far right. If you have a full tonal range, then you’ll see some pixels across the entire histogram. This chart shows an o.k. distribution, with no bright highlights, and a lot of middle light gray values. Here’s a comparison:

The histogram changes depending on the distribution of luminosity, which is sometimes called value or brightness. The histogram also shows you clues about how you’ve organized your composition – what value and color ranges your image includes. A primarily dark image (called ‘low key’) will have most of the histogram grouped to the left, whereas a mainly light image (called ‘high key’) will have most of the graph grouped to the right. A good distribution in either case will have some height across most of the entire graph.

Now for the fun part: Suppose you have an image that needs a little exposure adjustment – maybe it’s just a tad too light or too dark.

To fix this, use the LEVELS adjustment (In Photoshop, it’s under menu Image -> Adjustments -> Levels; in GIMP it’s menu Colors -> Levels). Here’s what the Levels Control looks like in Photoshop:

See the histogram? You’ll find that you can stretch or compress the histogram by adjusting the input and output levels. Normally I leave the left and right inputs at 0 and 255, and for many landscape images, adjust the centerpoint to somewhere between 0.95 and 0.88 – try it out on one of your own images and you’ll see how your exposures change. If you’d like full details about how this works, then read the HELP file for Photoshop or GIMP. The main point is that you can, if you need to, make exposure adjustments by using the Levels control. As with all adjustments, try to be subtle not crass.

[If you don't need to see a histogram, then in Photoshop you could instead alter the exposure using the menu Image --> Adjustments --> Exposure. This will give you the ability to 'gamma correct' in addition to altering the overall exposure. ]

Of course if you’re starting with a good exposure, you’ll only need a very small adjustment, perhaps no adjustment at all. Finding the best exposures requires that you read the image, on your computer screen and then if you’re going to print it, in the print. Often what looks great onscreen looks too light or too dark in print, even if your screen, file and printer are all calibrated together. So, don’t just look at the histogram… read the image and compare/contrast with the histogram.

(Exposure Hint: since you know about using Layers, why not make a duplicate layer of your photo, adjust the LEVELS in it, and then use the layer blending options to make subtle adjustments? You could also combine a moderate exposure and an overexposed image to get more detail in the middle grey ranges.)

Finally, there’s one more strategy that can help you avoid the blinkies and the crunges: if possible, always take a set of bracketed exposure of every image. It won’t always be possible… some images are fleeting, moving by far too quickly. But many scenes are relatively still. If you can set your camera to take what it thinks is a good exposure, take it, and then set it to take a few progressively under-exposed and over-exposed images. Then when you’re back at the computer you can upload all five or six exposures, combine the best ones using Layers. You can get many effects by altering the layer controls for opacity/transparency, and blending style (instead of ‘Normal’ try ‘Lighten’ and ‘Darken’). It’s a bit complex but using layers and a variety of bracketed exposures you can build a histogram that shows a wide and full range of luminosity across the entire gamut of light to dark. This is something that you can do with digital photography that’s extremely difficult with wet photography.

And yes, you can do this in an automated way if you want to – it’s called tone-mapping, or, the High Dynamic Range (HDR) image. Wink! Here’s a set of links you can read to learn how to make an HDR image, and why it’s useful:

The ultimate guide to HDR Photography, at Photocritic Blog – probably the best post on the topic, with lots of good links.

Some great HDR images, such as this one of a cathedral, at HDR Crème

Flickr How-to HDR group

That's it! Now go test and find out if you're camera has a highlight warning function, check out the histograms of some of your photos to find some that have great luminosity distributions, and maybe try to make a couple of HDR images... it'll take some practice, but the results can give you a wide array of values across the entire histogram. Here's an example from me: a still life, 'Fantasia'

Check out the dark orange shadows underneath Medusa's head -- that's pure, subtle HDR at work.

Multiple Exposures Online

2010-02-22T14:23:00.000-05:00

Just as a followup to our in-class project... some examples of multiple exposure photography online.

You can see what each of you submitted to our online folder at
http://picasaweb.google.com/Studio.Gregory/MCLAPhoto2010SubmitFolder?feat=directlink
A few of you have made comments... good work all, many delightful images.

I liked this set of tips and tricks -- similar to Alex's photo of himself -- Seven Steps to Taking Clone Photographs by Michael Zhang.

There's also many multiple exposure images throughout this online set, from a variety of different photographers on the time-worn theme of The One Who Got Away at Pictory Magazine.

Wintery Weather

2010-02-10T17:38:00.000-05:00

Hundreds of Great Photo Tips from Pro Photographers

2010-02-10T17:20:00.000-05:00

There's a lot of really great ideas at this blog post:

225 Tips to Inspire You

Do these photographers' ideas apply to the kinds of photo you'd like to do?

What tips did you find that seemed helpful to you?

Improve Signal, Reduce Noise

2010-02-08T15:26:00.000-05:00

Grainy versus Smooth: How to Reduce Noise in Digital Photos

Noise is Horror

[image courtesy of Poltergeist, a Spielberg Production, 1982]

Poor Carol Anne, the little girl sucked into the static of a demon-possessed tv... it is the worst of image noise, the kind we digital photographers would like to avoid.

A Brief Personal History of Static

Many years ago, before cell-phones and before iPods, while driving across Wyoming I stopped at a wayside for a much-needed break. And promptly locked my keys in the car. This wouldn’t’ve been such a horrible problem if Wyoming weren’t so darned big! I called the state police: they were many hours away and had a policy of not helping locked-out drivers (‘Too bad you had your windows closed’ said the operator, and ‘well, here in Wyoming you might just have to break in.’) I called the nearest town service station – 130 miles away. The earliest they could arrive would be four hours. I walked around and waited, and waited, and waited. I tried listening to my Walkman’s radio, but I was so far away from the civilized world that it too was out of the range of radio stations. This meant I could listen to a symphony of static.

Static is caused by many things – loss of radio signal, occasional solar flares, or just poor electrical equipment. If you ever have the chance to listen to some static, about ten percent of the noise is caused by the world around us, and another percent is caused by the radio itself. A tiny portion of radio static is in fact one of the great scientific discoveries of the 20^th Century. Radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at first thought the noise they experienced in their radio telescope was residual interference from nearby New York City. It wasn’t. They checked their equipment, and after much testing, figured out that a small slice of the noise was the universe itself – what today is known as ‘cosmic microwave background radiation’ (CMBR). Its existence is evidence that the universe is billions of years old and resulted from the Big Bang – a tiny bit of the static is waves and ripples streaming through space, caused by a great and distant explosion. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for figuring out how to precisely measure CMBR, figuring out exactly what was the universe making noise, what was their radio equipment. Since then, radio telescopes have been greatly refined and have extremely fine sensitivity and very high signal-to-noise ratios, so that they can discern the most distant sources of radio waves in the universe. So, sitting in Wyoming, all was not lost and I could try to imagine what portion of my Walkman’s static was not merely static, but instead a faint signal from the universe 13.7 billion years ago. Finally the tow truck arrived, the service man jimmied my car open, I paid him a hefty fee, and have forever kept a spare car key in my wallet.

It turns out that just like a radio signal received by a Walkman, all electronic equipment is subject to some noise. Digital cameras are no exception to this rule. When you search for a radio station that you can listen to, you are searching for a strong signal – strong enough that the small amount of noise caused by your radio equipment is overwhelmed and thus, not noticeable. If you take a photo in low-light settings, when you have a hard time getting a clear visual signal, then you’re camera will record a noisy, grainy image. It’s static at it’s finest. Noise is the opposite of Signal. What’s Signal? It is the information, the data, that your camera’s light sensor records – the light that moves through the lens and hits the camera’s sensor. In any electrical device we talk about the “Signal-to-Noise Ratio.” In other words, to get a digital photo that is less noisy (and thus sharper, smoother, and less grainy), we need to figure out how to increase the Signal.

Noise is increased whenever you lose the Signal. In digital photography, you can lose the signal in many ways, such as leaving the lens cap on (no light), to selecting the wrong exposure for a low-light setting. A low-signal digital photo will look noisy like this:

This is a photo of Luna, who was being very patient with me. And this is a crummy photo full of colorful static – noise. My camera tried really hard to make a good image, my model was very forgiving and willing to sit still, but there just wasn’t enough signal. There’s nothing that can be done to rescue this dismal photo.

Here’s a much, much, much better photo that was made from a very clear signal:

The lighting was good, the camera settings were correct, and thus sharpness and focus were good. And as always Luna got a little tired of me fiddling around with camera settings – she fell asleep. The fact remains that this is a good photo, and with image processing software, you can do just about anything with it.

Some artists use graininess on purpose. I think you’re better off shooting a smooth, sharp photo and then using an ‘add noise’ filter if you would like a grainy look. The problem is that it’s darned difficult to remove noise from an image, in the same way that it’s impossible to sharpen a poorly focused image and make it focused. So, we start with low noise and perfect focus, and then alter the noisiness and blurring in an image editing program if needed.

How to Reduce the Noise in Your Images

- Start with a good Signal.

o Great photos begin with good lighting matched to your camera’s settings and capabilities. Some cameras are just more noisy than others – most cameras have a couple of settings where everything works well to produce low-noise, high-signal images. Experiment to find out what kinds of images produce good signal for your camera.

- Check Your ISO Settings.

o an ISO setting of 100 is usually the best. For digital photography, ISO is a ratio of how sensitive your camera is to light – set it higher and higher and the ratio changes. The higher the ISO, the more sensitive to light, and the more overwhelming the noise becomes. Even the best digital SLR cameras at ISO settings about 1600 produce a lot of noise.

o Some scenes require higher ISO settings. Aim for 100, but alter it up to 400, 800, or 1000 if you know you need to because you are working in lower-light settings, etc.

- Know Your Lighting

o Where is the light source? Is there a lot of light or are you in a low-light setting?

o If you’re in a low-light setting, can you add some light? (use a reflector, flashlight, or flash?)

- Use the ‘reduce noise’ filter in an image processing program. Try it out and see what happens – but be warned that too much of the filter will make your photo blurry.

o In Photoshop, it’s under menu Filter:Noise:Reduce Noise

o In GIMP, it’s under menu Filters: Enhance: Despeckle

o In Photoscape, Filter: Noise Reduction (Clear Skin): select High, medium, low.

o Consider trying ‘Noise Ninja’ – this is not a free program – but it is awesomely useful. You could get it as a standalone program or a Photoshop plug-in at http://www.picturecode.com/index.htm You can download a free trial version that will show you what it can do, but won’t let you save images. At the very least you can read the company’s description of noise in digital imaging at http://www.picturecode.com/noise.htm

- Reshoot. It’s possible to take a variety of photos of the same scene, and then combine them to reduce noise. This is an advanced topic that we’ll look at later.

For more information, read this link: http://digital-photography-school.com/photography-1017-iso

Bonus: Artists Tom Moody and Ray Rapp have made photos of static into fine art: http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/photoinst/statphotos/

Top 10 Mistakes of Beginning Photographers – PictureCorrect

2010-01-24T14:54:00.000-05:00

I'd say this article is pretty much right on!

Top 10 Mistakes of Beginning Photographers – PictureCorrect

What Kinds of Pictures Do You Want to Take?

2010-01-20T14:40:00.001-05:00

There's a wonderful post over at Digital Photography School called "My Photography Bucket List" by Jennifer Jacobs / Darren Rowse (click here to read it)

A bucket list is simply a collection of ideas for images that you could make – whenever you run out of ideas you can just reach down into the bucket and pull out something from the list. Sometimes another photographer makes a great image and so you might like to try to make a similar one, and sometimes you might come up with a few of your own ideas.

Here's a few subjects or actions that I'd like to photograph someday:

A saw-whet owl in flight.
A panoramic view of a glacier field in Alaska.
A picture of me skiing that makes me look impressive :)
A high speed photo of a bullet going through an apple. I know, it's stupid and it's been done before. But think of the timing!!
A magnified image of the Orion Nebula. All I need is to make or get a motorized equatorial mount.
Robots in a car factory. I don't know why. It seems cool.

That's just a few. So I'm curious: what kinds of pictures would you like to make?

Take a few minutes to brainstorm a list of 5-10 images that you haven't made yet but that you'd like to create – what would they look like? How would you make them?

Then post a few of your favorite ideas here, as a comment...

Need ideas? take a look at the comments at the article linked above.

Welcome to the Class and Online Project #1: Acquire Digital Services

2010-01-20T14:14:00.002-05:00

First Assignment: Acquire Online Services

Due Date: complete these organizational tasks by Friday Jan. 22^nd

1. Sign-up for a free Google account at Google.com, and set-up a Gmail account.

2. Email me at (gmail address given in class) with your gmail account name.

3. Create three file folders on your computer:

a. MCLA Photo In-Class Projects. This will be where you store copies of work projects we do for this class.

b. MCLA Photo Miscellaneous. This is where you store any images that you may use for this class.

c. MCLA Photo Portfolio. This is where you’ll store your finished artworks.

4. Add one or two of your best photos to each folder that you just created.

5. Take a look at http://picasaweb.google.com/Studio.Gregory

a. Prove that you looked around: comment on one of the images in the MCLA folders.

6. Sign-up for and install Picasa on your computer.

a. You can allow Picasa to locate all of the photos on your computer, or only the file folders that you assign it to investigate – at minimum make sure the 3 file folders in step (3) are included.

b. Set these three folders to synchronize automatically online.

c. Set In-Class Projects and Portfolio as ‘public’ and set your miscellaneous folder as ‘UNLISTED’

d. You should be able to see your three folders online through your Google account (click on ‘More’ and then ‘Photos’) even when you are not running Picasa as a software application on your computer.

7. Email me at (gmail given in class) and tell me what is the website address of your Picasa album.

a. I will be able to view your two public albums, and will comment on the photos your posted.

8. If you have Photoshop CS3 or CS4 skip this step. If you need Image Processing Software, acquire both:

a. GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) (http://www.gimp.org/) and Paint.net (http://www.getpaint.net/).

b. Play around with the software.

9. Go to http://gregscheckler.blogspot.com and look through the blog, links, etc. Read the post labeled ‘Welcome to the Class’ and do any reading or assignments.

10. You are now prepared for the next part of this course.

11. Come to B204 to meet in-person for Monday’s class.