Etikettarkiv: Post-Process

Learning from the masters

Bia and Bosse the SnakeA little while ago I found this excellent blog on Nikonians by Martin Turner. He writes about how the classic potratit painters worked and how we can improved our portrait photography by learning from these masters. He has written several very interesting blog posts on this subjects and I felt like commenting on them myself.

BellaIn his first post also titled ”Learning about portraits from the masters” he discusses the context of the portrait more than the actual technique to pain or photograph. A portrait is supposed to say something about the person being portrayed and therefore it is important to not lose context and pay some attention to the surroundings of the person, the positioning of the subject, any other props or objects in the picture should have meaning and add to the portrait and not detract from the person being potrayed. I think this is an important lesson and something that is easily forgotten.

DanielIn his second post he speaks about differential focus something that has been used by painters for a long time and photographers using a telephoto lens, wide open aperture and focusing as close as possible to re-create. Of course post processing can also be used to achive this and there are more than one way of doing nice differential focussing on a subject.

For a portrait we want the eyes to be sharp, then the mouth and the hair are also important — putting too much fuzziness on the hair makes things look strange and the eyes and mouth are what we as humans focus mostly on when we are viewing a portrait of someone else. An excellent example about this is the painting of a Genoese nobleman painted by Bernardo Strozzi in oil on canvas.

DSC_7002 The EyeAnother thing that he notices are also that backgrounds in paintins are almost always very dark. Almost to the point of being black but never completely black there is always some texture to them but in a very subtle way and the idea of isolating the person from the background is very evident.

Today in photography we often use light backgrounds, even white overexposed so called high key shots which usually means you put 4 times as much light on the background as you do on the subject. Makes it easy to cut out in photoshop and re-arrange in a different background but I get a feeling there is a reason that portrait painters never used such backgrounds.

DSC_1334He also talkes a lot about skin details and softening of the skin in portrait. This was done by painters also using selective focussing techniques when painting but this is also likely down to that our minds generally don’t remember much skin details, we focus on the areas around the eyes and mouth and we tent not to remember too much on other details.

The rest of the posts are also interesting but his number 2 post was the best one so far in my opinion.

You can find Martin Turners Nikonian blog here if you want to read more, and I hope you will because it is very interesting to read his articles!

Alien Life

BWP green

This was one of my first creative photos where I did lots of post-processing in order to get the effect I was looking for. The phot was taken a cold winter night, the structure you can see are the branches of a tree. The black mist is the smoke from me exhaling in front of the camera just as the photo was taken.

In post-process I have colorized it green then inverted the dark areas for the bright ones. The smoke and branches are therefore brightly lit by the flash in the original picture but turned dark in post-process. Fortsätt läsa Alien Life

Three Gringos

Three Gringos
Three Gringos, A Study in Friendship

I just got an email and with it I got the result back from my friends, they have now made a poste of the shoot we did earlier that I wrote about here and the result was great.

Additional artistic work by Patrik Freij <farbrorfreij@tele2.se>, photograph by me!

I think the first poster is the best one really, I was never a hundred percent on the lower part of the table and so by putting the logos on top of a brown background like that is perfect. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, and it was great fun!

You can see the original photograph and the painting we set this scene up after here.

Here is a variation of the same poster:

Vänner Affischbild
"Vänner" means "Friends"

I believe I will go there soon to shoot the repetion of their play!

I was using a 50mm f/1.8 lens when shooting this, it was the perfect focal length (even on my DX camera) and the sharpness and definition of the 50mm is almost scary sometimes. Post-Processing was done on the original photograph with Adobe Lightroom, The GIMP and Photoshop CS3. The main actions was to mask the actors and darken the background a bit further than what we managed to do in the photo.

[Swedish] Ni hittar all information om teatergruppen på http://www.varieteteatern.se/.

Geotag your photographs

This is going to be a rather lengthy post again but bear with me. It will also be a bit technical so I will have to explain some of the basic technical points before we start on the really nifty things here. But in the end you will learn how to use your GPS receiver to track your movments when shooting outdoor, you will learn how to download this information and use it to geocode your pictures so that when they are uploaded on sites such as Flickr your photographs will automatically appear on the map in the correct location.

The resons for geotagging

It is a way of organising your photographs that is pretty new actually. Never before has it been so easy to know where a certain photograph was taken and it is a great way of finding other people’s photographs from a certain location.

Hacking in the tent
My good friend Torbjörn hacking in the tent

It also means that if you use your GPSr when you are on holiday you know exactly on which spot you were when you took that picture and it is a great way of sharing information about good photographic spots, not to mention that it sort of becomes a photographic diary, tracking your movements around with your camera and GPSr.

There many be also personal reasons for geotagging, for me it started because I am a map freak. I love maps in all sorts of ways and I spend half a fortune on them. These days I mostly use electronic maps because they are more versatile but when I go hiking I always have a paper map as a backup – you never know when electronic will fail you.

There are two kinds of photographers, those who has experienced equipment failure and those who will.

This is very true.
Fortsätt läsa Geotag your photographs