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Posted on 25th July 2010 by admin in Articles
backup, cd-rom, collections, damage, data, data loss, drobo, external, images, photographs, photos, storage
 Whether you’ve grown your image collection into thousands of images or only have yourself a few hundred prized photographs and memories, just how securely backed up are those images of yours. Do you even have them backed up at all?
Everybody at some point in their life will experience the awful feeling of data loss. This normally happens on a day when you least expect it, when out of the blue your perfectly functioning computer system crashes and dies. You take the system to a technical person who then tells you the bad news, all your data is gone. What do you do other than nearly have a nervous breakdown?
First off there are data recovery labs that in many cases can get your data back, some of them are so good they can even take a hard drive that has been smashed into pieces and get data back bit by bit. This however is an extremely costly scenario, for the most part the charges are by the hour and it can literally run into hundreds of hours and there is no guarantee’s offered whatsoever.
“Oh why didn’t I backup my images” starts to play over and over in your head even haunting you in your dreams.
The answer is to avoid this scenario altogether, it’s not pleasant and I speak from experience. Once you’ve lost data once you spend the rest of your life making sure everything is securely backed up and sadly many people only learn this the hard way.
So what are your options for backing up your images?
Many people with a smaller image collection can get away using CD-roms for their backups.  They are one of the most affordable forms of media around and this allows you to make multiple copies to store in different locations. But how safe are CD-roms? Many people mistakenly assume that a CD-rom will last for ever. This is a picture painted into people’s minds in the early days when CD-roms first came onto the market, they were marketed as indestructable. Well quite simply they are not. Simply dropping a CD-rom from a desk can damage the disc badly if it contacts the ground wrong. A CD-rom is nothing more than a plastic disc with a microscopically thin layer of foil material which is the recording surface. If you took a sharp knife and ran it quickly over the recording surface you’d see silver flakes (and data) come flying off. In modern times CD-roms are in mass production and the materials used to manufacture them are cheaper resulting in lower quality products. You can buy CD-rom discs for less than a Rand a disc and you can buyCD-rom discs for a few Rand a disc and there is indeed quite a difference. Cheap no name brand discs will become your worst enemy, they seem fine and seem no different than their more expensive counterparts but there will come a time when you take data written onto a cheap disc, put it into your Cd-rom drive and discover your drive cannot read the disc. You try in a friend’s drive to find the same problem and you eventually discover that disc no longer works ….. what happened …. your data is GONE? “This can’t be happening” you say to yourself. Well uh yes it can. There is major differences in the price of CD-roms due to the quality of the foil recording surface. Cheap CD-roms may only last 1-5 years, more expensive ones may last 5-10 years and then you can get what we call medical grade CD-roms which have a “claimed” lifespan of 100 years. The price between them is remarkably different, the cheap discs can cost R1.00 a disc, the more expensive “name” brands could cost you about R2.50 per disc and medical grade discs could cost you abour R20-R25 each. So depending on just how important that data is, the choice is yours. If you choose to use cheap CD-roms then every year you will need to re-record them and discard the old ones. Trust me this ends up being a tedious process and once your image collection starts requiring several discs at a time it’s time to look at another solution.
 The next best solution which works very well is to use external hard drives to back up your image data. Having been personally involved in the high-tech industry for nearly 20 years I have been through just about every brand of hard drive and above all Seagate drives seem to have the longest lifespan and the least chance of failing. I have Seagate external hard drives that are nearly 5 years old and still functioning perfectly so I have standardised on Seagate as a trusted name. Seagate produces a variety of external hard drive solutions called FreeAgent ranging from 250GB drives upwards to 2TB. They also have a range called FreeAgent “Go” which are small enough to fit in your pocket. Using an external hard drive for your backups is quick and easy. You get yourself a program like Super Flexible File Synchroniser and set it up to mirror your images and other data and you can run it daily or once a week. Simply having one external backup is not enough. If you buy yourself one 500Gb external drive you actually need to purchase two and every time you do backups you do it onto both hard drives. One hard drive you can store in your safe (hopefully fire proof) and the other you should store off site at a friend or family member’s house, and preferably in their safe too. Having everything in triplicate stored in 3 different locations guarantees you that should trouble strike you have one totally safe backup. The cost of external hard drives have come down dramatically and they are by far the most cost effective form of storage around but you really need to refrain from saving yourself a few bucks considering cheaper external drives, stick with Seagate (no I do NOT work for them) do your backups in duplicate and store one off site and you’ll be good to go for many years.
 When your image collection grows beyond the confines of a 2TB external hard drive it may be time to start looking for a more serious back solution. For this photographers are turning to the Drobo system because of it’s great offerings. Drobo has essentially taken very expensive RAID technologies which were out of the reach of the average Joe for many years and brought out a fully redundant raid product with a more affordable price tag. A basic Drobo which can house 4 hard drives could cost you around R12-14000 or thereabouts. Then you could move onto a Drobo Pro system which is a lot more expensive but can house 8 drives, it all depends on how much cash you wish to part ways with and just how serious you are about your data. Again, having one Drobo storing all your data, even though it has full redundancy, is no guarantee your data is safe. I know of several people whose Drobo’s have crashed on them so essentially like above with external hard drives, if you buy one Drobo, you actually buy two and one gets locked away very safely, preferably off site.
When it comes to data backups you need to have a plan, something you’ve invested some thought into and you need to stick to it religiously. It’s no good storing a backup off site and never updating it. If you formulate a backup plan you will thank yourself one day when things do go wrong, you will rest assured knowing your data and images are securely backed up. I’ll revisit this topic again one day. For now, get backing up.
Posted on 24th July 2010 by admin in Articles
We’ve been spending some time revamping the look and feel of the site and we hope you enjoy the new look. We’ve made the site loading much faster and are still tweaking some elements to further improve your experience. We’re changing the scope of the site slightly from this point on and we will be bringing some new and insightful articles delving into many different aspects of photography whether it be a technique, an observation or simply some great images.
We’ll no longer be feeding articles from other sources into this site but if, like many of our subscribers, you’ve come to rely on this site as your one stop source of information on what’s going on in the photo world, do not fret. you can continue getting all that info at http://www.photography-blog.co.za
Behind the scenes there’s lots going on and we hope you enjoy what’s in store for you in the coming weeks and months. We welcome guest contributions so if you have something you’d like to share simply email it to us on submit@africanphotographyblog.com
Posted on 24th July 2010 by admin in HDR High Dynamic Range |Landscape
blending, challenge, exposure, filters, HDR, high dynamic range, highlights, image, Landscape, midtones, ND, neutral density, Photography, shadows, single
High Dynamic Range or HDR in it’s shortened form has opened up many new avenues for photography. HDR is a process of blending multiple exposures together to better reproduce the dynamic range of the scene and for the most part it’s a very useful tool indeed. I myself have done many experiments into HDR using bracketing of frames to produce multiple exposures which I can later blend BUT all that blending does take up a lot of time in post processing.
Just doing one image blend with 7 exposures with some fine tuning and manual blending included you can easily spend 1-2 hours to get the image perfect. In some cases it might be worth it to take a very special moment you captured on film and to spend that time working the image to perfection. While this can and does produce some very special effects within images I still find HDR, no matter how well executed, to lack something truly special, an ambience that only a single shot exposure carries.
 One exposure requires finding the perfect moment to capture the image. While some may argue that we’re now in the digital world and we must all move to new and wonderful ways of processing images I say yes and no to that argument. I will use HDR when I find it necessary and with many shoots I will bracket exposures regardless but my primary goal is always to get it right with one exposure. I find simply bracketing exposures on every shoot with the intention of later blending and “fixing” it in photoshop makes one a rather lazy photographer because you tend to find a recipe, set up, compose, bracket and go home to fix. Guilty as charged.
While this approach may be perfectly okay for some I enjoy photography because it challenges my mind. I myself got into a trap for a short while of merely relying on bracketed exposures for nearly all shoots. There were many days when I was too lazy to get out filters and do it properly so it was much easier to just bracket my exposures and do the hard work later in Photoshop.
In the end I was just finding HDR was totally lacking something very special, HDR just looked too perfect and NOT at all how the eye saw it. HDR fanatics (myself included) continually fool themselves into believing that the end product they produce through HDR and image blending is a faithful representation of what they saw, but of the many many photographers I know only a few ever take real notice of what the scene really looks like. The others have their eyes stuck permanently behind the viewfinder relying solely on the camera to capture all the necessary bits of information. I make a point of studying very carefully the scene’s I record and do my best to etch them in my mind, right down to the tiniest details and by doing so I manage to find some very special elements of an image that HDR tends to over-produce and in most cases actually ruin. Shadow areas of an image, for example, are crucial to the depth and feel of an image yet HDR fanatics tend to, what I call rape the shadow areas, lightening them up much more than they appeared to the human eye and it’s so easy to fall into this trap with HDR. Again .. guilty as charged 
In the last year I have slowly forced myself back to basics, getting exposures perfect with a single exposure, without filters and without bracketing. It’s not always easy depending on light conditions but actually a lot of the time it is and it all comes down to timing, planning and using all available and natural elements to control the flow of light into the camera.
I’ve enjoyed my journey with HDR and I do know I will still use HDR methods for certain work but with landscape, nature and some other forms of photography I’m finding the step back to basics to be producing very special images like none other and it’s made my photography all that more interesting and challenging again. The mental challenge has always been my driving force and it’s good to have that old friend back at my side.
MK
Posted on 23rd July 2010 by admin in Landscape
Africa, african, cape town, commercial, drakensberg, dramatic, endless, Fine-Art, Landscape, namibia, opportunities, Photographer, photographing, Photography, South Africa, Western Cape
Africa is by far one of the most diverse landscapes in the world and much of it is still undiscovered by the lens. Many photographers would trade a limb to have access to the African landscape yet a great majority of South African photographers seem intent on travelling around the world to photograph landscapes that have been well covered by other photographers, all the while a treasure chest of images lies right under their noses.
 "Mercury Down II" The sun sets and the mercury indicator starts to drop after a very hot day in Namibia - Copyright Mitchell Krog / Living Canvas Photography. All Rights Reserved.
For the budding and professional landscape photographer there is virtually endless landscape photographic opportunities in Africa and Southern Africa. South African photographer Mitchell Krog is no stranger to the African landscape and spends many months a year exploring, discovering and capturing breathtaking images of the beautiful African landscapes. Mitchell chooses to completely avoid re-capturing images which have been captured a million times or more, “I just don’t see the point in photographing things that have are captured 100 times a day when there is just so much that has NOT even been photographed yet” he says.
 "Drakensberg Sunrise" - The sun rises over the beautiful and majestic mountainous region of the Drakensberg of South Africa. Copyright Mitchell Krog / Living Canvas Photography. All Rights Reserved. The greatest parts of the undiscovered African landscape are only accessible via foot and often many kilometers of walking can be involved simply to capture one image. As Mitchell Krog says, “This is the game unfortunately and quite simply if you’re not willing to go the extra “mile”, excuse the pun, you will not return home with any new or unique images that have not been captured already. The Drakensberg region of South Africa, of which the greatest area lies within the province of Kwazulu Natal, is a good example. Photographers seeking to cover this area really need to go many extra miles to get to unique locations and in the Drakensberg there literally is endless locations on offer. The Drakensberg is so diverse and the landscape is ever changing, the light is so dramatic that you could sit and photograph the same scene every day for 365 days and not one image would be the same, it is for this very reason that I can say the landscape opportunities of the Drakensberg are endless.”
 "Table Mountain at Dusk" - One of the most photographed mountains in the world, Table Mountain. Copyright Mitchell Krog / Living Canvas Photography. All Rights Reserved. Similarly the Western Cape region of South Africa is also very mountainous and has some very dramatic landscapes. The Cape weather is rather unpredictable but this coupled with dramatic light seems to make for a good recipe for excellent landscape photography opportunities. The Cape is one of the most photographically covered regions of South Africa but this does ot mean that there is not still many landscape photography opportunities in store for the visiting photographer. No doubt South Africa will see many international photographers visiting our shores as the World Cup Soccer draws closer and it will be interesting to see how fresh eyes portray our beautiful landscapes.
Copyright – Living Canvas Photography / African Photography Blog – Duplication in part or whole is expressly forbidden. All images and photographs are copyright to Mitchell Krog & Living Canvas photography and may not be used without prior permissions. All images are available in limited and regular edition print series on archival quality papers and canvas through the web site www.livingcanvas.co.za – You may syndicate articles from this blog using our RSS feeds but all syndicated articles must link back to the original content on this site. Please see the Copyright page for more information.
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Posted on 23rd July 2010 by admin in Articles |Lightning |Photography |SA Photographers |South Africa
Africa, electric, forces, free energy, Lightning, nature, Photography, power, safety, south, Storms
Lightning Storms are one of the most incredible forces of nature. The sheer force of a lightning strike is enough to power a city for months on end but man has not yet learned to harness and store this incredible energy source provided free of charge by nature. As Summer approaches in South Africa, the first rains and electrical storms for the season are already brewing and we’ll soon see what kind of storm activity nature has in store for use this season. Acclaimed South African Lightning and Storm Photographer Mitchell Krog shares some of his images, views and experiences with lightning photography.
 Danger Written In The Sky. Multiple Lightning Strikes Light Up The Summer Night Sky. If Only Man Could Learn To Harness This Energy. From Mitchell Krog's Lightning Photography Collections. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved) For many years SA photographer Mitchell Krog has watched and studied electrical storms and to this day still stands in utter amazement at this incredible force of nature. In recent years he acquired the equipment and skills to finally capture them on film and he has produced an endless array of breathtaking images. For Mitchell it is not about simply capturing a lightning strike on film but more importantly capturing the entire scene and telling a story through his images. “With any form of photography if you can captivate a viewers attention, draw them into an image, tell them a story and have them study it for more than just a few seconds you have imprinted an ever lasting memory” says Mitchell. Lightning photography can be a very lonely passtime, only those with enough dedication, patience and endurance to be out at strange hours of the night will stand a chance of capturing unique, sometimes once in a lifetime images.
 The Big Detour. A passenger aircraft destined for Lanseria airport bypasses a massive storm cell. Missing dinner and spending many lonesome hours outside comes with the job of photographing lightning storms. From Mitchell Krog's Lightning Photography Portfolio. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved) As with any form of photography, timing is of the essence. If you are unprepared, unwilling or unable to drop whatever you are doing at a moments notice you will miss opportunities. “I cannot tell you how many evenings I have rushed out of the house just minutes before dinner was ready only to return home several hours later, but nature waits for no man and if you are quick to seize the opportunity you will reap the rewards” says Mitchell. Mitchell’s Fire and Ice series, capturing a grassland fire which was started by lightning strikes was one such occasion. He explains – “I was cooking dinner when I heard thunder approaching, I took a quick look outside and saw the sky glowing red from a grass fire, I dropped everything, rushed outside and managed to capture a few frames of this scene before the storm extinguished the fire it had started. This entire window of opportunity lasted a mere 20-30 minutes and was at it’s best stage for around 5-10 minutes.”
 Fire and Ice. An early Spring lightning storm starts a grass fire and is captured here with strikes falling around and into the fire. Minutes later the storm extinguishes the fire it started and the moment is gone. From Mitchell Krog's Fire and Ice Lightning Photography Series. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved) Safety is an important part of watching and photographing lightning storms. Finding a safe location with a good view is of the essence, you need to be able to see the storm approaching and be able to determine if you are in any way in the path of danger. “If your view is in any way blocked a storm can sneak up right behind you so a 360 degree view is preferrable, you also need somewhere safe to escape to. I’ve often been watching a storm in one direction when right behind me another one is brewing, so I always keep a watch all around me. Standing outside with a metal tripod and an electrically charged camera when strikes are falling too close is asking for trouble” says Mitchell. Mitchell insists that climbing on the roof of your house or any metal structure is a big no-no and could quickly cost you your life and he always promotes safe lightning photography. “There is just no image worth losing your life over” he adds.
 Killer Storm. On the 23rd of November 2007 this mammoth supercell emitting lightning strikes up and out of it's core was captured by Mitchell Krog. The strikes emanating from the centre of this storm cell were kilometres in length and streaked across the night sky. This same evening several massive storm cells circulated through Gauteng and claimed lives in their path. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved) More articles and images in this series on Lightning Photography will follow in the coming months.
Posted on 21st July 2010 by admin in Software
123di, digital, learning, Photography, Software, tutorials
So you’re more than just a budding photographer now. You’ve been getting great feedback about your photos and you just love doing what you’re doing. Well now it’s time to take things to the next level with the 123 of Digital Photography. This program has become renowned as the defacto learning guide and you can purchase, download and start improving your photos right now.
So what are you waiting for? Click here to see what else 123di can do for you. You’ll thank yourself and hopefully you’ll come back and thank me too.
Happy Clicking.
Posted on 8th June 2010 by admin in Software
3, download, final, lightroom
Good news for Lightroom users. Adobe has released final code of version 3 of the product.
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 Adobe Lightroom 3 Final Released
Posted on 29th May 2010 by admin in Tutorials
bad, blending, digital, exposure, filters, HDR, highlights, imagery, manipulation, midtones, Photography, photos, purism, rescuing, shadows
Since the advent of digital photography and digital editing software, it has become far too easy for photographers to take really badly exposed images and correct them in post processing. While the end result yields a better image than what was captured, sadly this is NOT really photography, yet as we progress more into the digital age, such image manipulations are being passed off as professional photography and even worse as “fine art”.
In this tutorial I will show you examples of what I mean and how I can take what I consider a really shoddy image (yes even pro’s take shit shots from time to time) and how I can turn that image into a much better looking image, but is it photography? Personally I say not really as what I am about to show you crosses the line from photography into the world of digital manipulation and the resulting image is a digital image but I personally don’t consider it to be an actual true photograph any longer.
We start out with our RAW image straight from the camera. The image was captured against the setting sun which causes the camera to hit all sorts of obstacles when trying to expose this scene. We don’t want to lose the lovely orange glow of the sky and as a result we capture that but all the shadow areas are completely blacked out. The starting image below shows the resulting situation many a photographer is faced with. We captured that lovely glow of the sky but there is no detail in the shadow or midtone areas, at least that’s what we think.
 Our starting RAW image, unedited straight out of the camera. This is how the camera interpreted the exposure and had you been shooting with film this is pretty much what you would be stuck with. So now how do we go ahead and rescue this photograph? First of all I open this RAW image in my favourite RAW processing application and the manipulation begins. I first introduce “Fill Light” so I crank that slider from 0 to about 85. I then play with the tone curve profile of the image (highlights, lights, shadows and darks). I drag my shadow slider up to about +45, I’ll take the Darks slider to +25, I’ll take the Lights slider to -25 and finally I’ll push the Highlights slider to +10. I am now left with the following image but I’m not quite done yet. Amazing to see how much information the camera really captured in the shadow but the manipulations carried out thus far already exceed the actual exposure.
 We've done some minor adjustments in our RAW editing programme, manipulating the shadow and midtone areas. Suddenly we start to see something peering out of what was previously total darkness. Okay so things are looking a little better now and as it stands above is a marked improvement from the original but I’m now going to push it even more. I should stop with the changes I made above which to me look better than what I am about to do but now I’m going to go to insane extremes to further illustrate the kind of work I am seeing in many places on the web. Messing with all those sliders has revealed detail in what was previously just black but by doing these adjustments I’ve introduced a lot of noise and artifacts into the image. Okay so I’ll just do some noise removal … easy peasy. I now take my image into my image editing software and after doing some noise removal I also want to bring a little more detail into the image. So after I’ve done my noise removal I am going to mess some more with the highlights, shadows and midtones and I’ll do this in my image editing program by doing some manipulation on highlights, shadows and midtones contrasts, I call this “raping the shadows”. Each image editing programme has the above adjustments, some programmes call them by sligthly different names. Okay so I messed around for less than a minute and now I have the following image.
 Okay so after some more manipulation of the image it's actually starting to look like something but we can still play with this some more. Now I want to adjust the colours a little and make it look even “better” so I now mess some more with my contrasts, brightness, levels, curves and I add some more warmth using a photo warming filter and at the same time I want to try and get the sky closer to the original colour captured. Each time I’m doing changes I’m introducing noise and artifacts into the image but I can fix that in my final steps with some more noise removal. My final image which I “could” spend another hour messing with would look a whole lot better, in fact I could make make it look much much better but for the point of this tutorial I’ll stop processing now to give you an indication of what can be done with some very quick manipulation and how a really poorly exposed photograph has been turned into something better or perhaps worse looking.
 The once ugly duckling now starts to actually look like something (or does it), but is it still a photograph? To the untrained eye, a quick glance and people will saw “ooh it looks nice” but the image is filled with imperfections now, because I pushed it past certain limits I have introduced many things that need to be fixed now. However, because I am displaying these images to you on the web at a mere 400 pixels in size it’s even easier for me to hide the MANY imperfections that have been introduced as a result of the manipulation I have done, this is another factor that bad photographers rely on, the fact that at a small resolution on the web they can make a poor image actually look ok. I’ve however over exaggerated the imperfections in these examples.
I know if I spent another hour working on this image I could make it absolutely perfect and you would hardly notice a single imperfection but …. you know what …. I’m going no further with it, this was merely to demonstrate something and personally an image like this will never make it into any of my collections nor will I even try to pass it off as a photograph and least of all as fine art. I simply keep images like to demonstrate things like this and normally anything that came out like this would end up deleted on the spot. I will rather re-shoot the scene using the proper methods to capture the scene correctly in a single frame that requires only very slight corrections which are considered acceptable.
Now when I say “acceptable” what do I mean? Well if I shoot the scene correctly using filters to hold back the exposure on the sky while getting my foreground exposed, I can do this in a single frame, I can do very minor RAW adjustments which do not involve dragging any slider more than 5-10 steps from its original setting and do not involve manipulating the image beyond what you can actually see straight out of camera. I will be able to enter the image in any leading competition (not this image of course) and when my original RAW image is requested for authentication I will not feel any worry or resistance sending the original to the judges. This is the big difference between photography and digital imaging. What I have produced above is a digital image and quite honestly no longer a photograph. I would not feel comfortable nor would I dare entering it into a competition (it’s a crap shot for a starter) nor would I try to pass it off or sell it or anything produced in a similar fashion to somebody as photography or fine art. Some competitions allow digitally manipulated images but they are few and far between.
Sadly though I see more and more photographers starting as beginners who learn to digitally rescue their bad photos and within a year they are calling themselves professionals and actually marketing and selling images produced using similar techniques as above. What’s even more worrying is that these photographers actually believe they are really good and instead of learning to take better photos they rely on snapping anything knowing they can fix it later. It’s a really bad approach to photography and does not further the art of photography and instead in my personal opinion it hurts the artform immensely. By all means there is a time and place for slightly enhancing shadow areas in an image but doing such agressive manipulations as above is not “slight” by any means.
Photography forums all over the place are filled with photographers preaching and teaching these techniques and misleading other beginners into following such methods, all this does is produce many more bad photographers who again in a very short time are trying to market and sell this nonsense as photographic art. Too many of these “photographers” have their friends, family and facebook fans telling them how wonderful their photographs are but they are also not being told the whole story of how the person “created” the image and to the untrained eyes it looks perfect but it’s so easy to spot manipulated images and the more you know about photography the easier you will spot manipulated imagery. Unfortunately once these photographers get caught in this trap of digital manipulation they seem to know it all and will simply not take criticism from a professional photographer but would rather remain blinded by the “wow” and “awesome” comments they receive from their friends and fans and as a result they will never really progress.
While they may remain blinded by the truth, I say to such photographers please don’t think that it is not possible to spot these manipulations from a mile away, it’s damn easy to spot a) when you actually know a lot about photography and b) when you have a trained eye. Stop fooling yourself that this is photography, stop relying on photoshop to fix your bad photography and actually learn to take better photos.
Posted on 5th May 2010 by admin in Software
123di, better photos, demo, digital, download, guide, imaging, learning, Photography, training, tutor, tutorial
The 123 of Digital Imaging has been around, well … almost as long as Digital Camera’s have been around and has come to be known as the authoritive guide to digital photography. 123di has helped photographers from beginners to intermediate to advanced to improve their digital photograph skills.
- Learn digital photography through a highly visual and interactive guide containing thousands of graphics and animations.
- How to use the right camera settings and composition techniques to capture stunning images.
- Discover secrets to shooting award-winning pictures.
The 123di guide is available for purchase online with immediate download by clicking here, you could be learning and improving your photography within the hour.
Posted on 4th May 2010 by admin in Quotes
best, favourites, photographic, Photography, quotable, Quotes
Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter. ~Ansel Adams
No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. ~Robert Adams
It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours. ~James Lalropui Keivom
When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls! ~Ted Grant
Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts. ~Minor White
A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into. ~Ansel Adams
The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera. ~W. Eugene Smith
Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. ~Ansel Adams
Most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive ~ Walter Colton
I think a photography class should be a requirement in all educational programs because it makes you see the world rather than just look at it. ~Author Unknown
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. ~Ansel Adams
Every time someone tells me how sharp my photos are, I assume that it isn’t a very interesting photograph. If it were, they would have more to say. ~Author Unknown
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. ~Ansel Adams
There will be times when you will be in the field without a camera. And, you will see the most glorious sunset or the most beautiful scene that you have ever witnessed. Don’t be bitter because you can’t record it. Sit down, drink it in, and enjoy it for what it is! ~DeGriff
Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop. ~Usman B. Asif
You don’t take a photograph, you make it. ~Ansel Adams
Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner. ~Author Unknown
I just think it’s important to be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul. ~Mary Ellen Mark
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. ~Henri Cartier-Bresson
Everyone has a photographic memory, but not everyone has film. ~Author Unknown
One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photo out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photo out of focus are a style. ~Author Unknown
Posted on 22nd April 2010 by admin in Software
123, 123di, advance, beginner, better, buy, digital, download, free, imaging, learning, Photography, photos, Software, trial, tutorial
Posted on 21st April 2010 by admin in Software
123, 123di, advance, beginner, better, buy, digital, download, free, imaging, learning, Photography, photos, Software, trial, tutorial
Posted on 19th April 2010 by admin in Competitions
Africa, antarctica, book, competition, contest, michael poliza, Photography, photos, poliza
 Win a Michael Poliza Book Photographer Michael Poliza has been around the world providing us with breath taking aerial views above multiple fascinating continents.
From Africa to Antarctica he has never escaped a chance to share his view of the world with all of us.
Now you have the chance to interact with this multi-faceted photographer. Exclusive, never before seen pictures have just been released TODAY on his new microsite. View his new site here:
http://www.teneues.com/poliza
There you can enter his Twitter contest to win one of his books. Just capture what one of his photos means to you in a tweet, and win your very own Poliza book at http://teneues.com/poliza/contest
Posted on 19th April 2010 by admin in Software
123, 123di, advance, beginner, better, buy, digital, download, free, imaging, learning, Photography, photos, Software, trial, tutorial
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Giving and Getting Meaningful Critique on Photography Forums
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Posted on 10th August 2010 by admin in Photography Forums
comments, contrasts, critique, forumites, forums, halo, horizon, hotspot, light, natural, photographers, Photography
Having spent many years on Photography forums, I’ve delivered my fair share of critique to budding photographers and received an equal amount myself. I’ve personally always taken extensive time out when critiquing an image to make my critique meaningful to the photographer and doing my utmost best to not break their spirit but instead to boost them to try even harder. Giving critique on images is not an easy job by any means and formulating your words so as not to cause offence is a skill that only a few possess. Quite simply, if you do not have the time to deliver a meaningful critique then rather say nothing at all.
I’ve seen so many photographers with oodles of potential sign up on a photography forum and have their spirits broken by people who do not know how to say things nicely or in some cases say things to deliberately break someone’s spirit. There are so many great photographers out there on forums who are more than eager to give of their time and help someone grow and improve, but there are also (quite sadly) some not so nice people who cannot stand the slightest hint of competition and will dig into their toolboxes of nasty comments to try and break someone’s progress.
You need some thick skin to be a photographer and to display your work online but not everybody possesses this. You need to be able to take a meaningful comment and use it to improve yourself and you need to know when someone is simply trying to get under your skin and simply delete their comment or just ignore it.
Now when I say meaningful critique, I mean a lot more than what I call the 3-H-Salute (Three H Salute). The three H salute is simply Halo – Hotspot – Horizon. This is a common tool in the arsenal of forumites who live, eat and breathe forum life, mostly on their employer’s time. Seldom do these type of critiquers ever deliver meaningful comment other than pointing out the blatantly obvious stuff like a) your horizon is slightly off level b) you have a hot spot in the sky or c) you have a halo in your image caused by oversharpening the image or something else that caused a halo effect. Make no mistake, these 3 elements of a photograph are essential to and often unseen by beginners as it is easy to miss these problems in an image when you’re just starting out. But these are not the be-all and end-all of a great image. In fact most great images have some type of flaw in them and most people would never notice that your horizon is slightly off level when there is enough wow factor in the image to keep your eyes peeled elsewhere. Some of the greatest photographers in history could post their work online today and have their work ripped to shreds by intermediate photographers.
Horizon:
Having a level horizon in an image is an important factor especially with seascapes where your horizon is actually a straight line. When it comes to landscapes in the interior of a country however, horizons are often not level by any means and only those who do a lot of photography away from the seaside will know this. Most camera’s today have levelling devices built in or photographers with older digital camera’s can purchase a hot-shoe
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bubble level which will help them level the camera. That said, when it comes to shooting around mountain ranges you may have your camera perfectly level but the image horizon looks off-level due to the way the land is shaped.
Posting such images online will always attract a comment about your horizon and you trying to explain it to the person commenting on it is often just futile because the next image you post will have the same person saying the exact same thing. So, for those starting out, learn to level your camera and trust it regardless of what others are saying. Some forumites go to extreme, often insane levels to prove your horizon is off-level, they’ll take your image into photoshop and draw a level horizontal line and then come back with comments that your horizon is 0.2 degrees off level, do yourself a favour and ignore ignoramuses like this.
Not all horizon's are level. This image shot from a perfectly levelled camera, this is the way the scene appears to the natural eye. Also notice the hot spot which is also perfectly natural. This image would attract numerous horizon and hot spot comments on a forum. Click image for a larger view.
Hot spots occur naturally even to the human eye. There are times when the sun is naturally illuminating clouds so much that they lose all detail. Put your camera down and look at such scenes with your naked eye and you will see for yourself.
Hotspot’s:
A hot spot, normally in the sky section of an image, happens mostly with sunset and sunrise images when you are trying to expose your foreground more and as a result you overexpose the brighter sky section. This causes areas of the sky to lose all detail and have a very noticeable white or “hot” spot. Using filters to control exposure of the sky can eliminate hot spots but there really is far too much fuss about hot spots on forums. Many images from the world’s leading photographers will contain hot spots, I know because I’ve seen it repeatedly. I’ve even seen images that would be ripped apart of a photography forum, take first place in an international photographic competition. Clearly judges who are trained and experienced enough in judging photography can see an image for what it is and do not spend that much time looking for tiny technical flaws in an image. If an image comes in front of a judge and his immediate reaction is “WOW,I wish it were mine”, your image will progress further in the competition without the judges sitting there trying to discredit you on something like a hot spot. Hot spots in all reality are natural occurences that exist to the human eye. Those preaching HDR photography techniques, seem to have convinced themselves that hot spots are foopah and do not exist in real life but seldom do I ever see HDR fanatics ever spending time WITHOUT a camera truly surveying scenes with their eyes, noting down all the tiniest details. If they did, they would notice that even to human eye hot spots DO exist. As I say, those with enough experience like judges of photography competitions, seem to know this and will not kick your image out due to it having a hot spot. So by all means be aware of hot spots, try to expose as best as you can but don’t beat yourself up when you post an image on a forum and you get 15 parrot comments about a hot-spot.
Halo’s:
Extreme Over-Sharpening can cause very visible halo effects on your image. Some halo effects however are natural occurences. This image has been deliberately over-sharpened to illustrate the effect.
Halo’s are a tricky issue. Some halo’s in an image occur naturally due to the way light is bouncing around your scene, other’s are however introduced while processing the image often when sharpening the image. Learn to identify what a halo is, whether it occurred naturally or whether you created it in your post processing. When you receive comments about halo’s in your image, go back to your original frame and look carefully at that section of the image and decipher if you are the one that created the halo or whether it exists in your original frame. If you introduced it, go back to step 1 of your processing and figure out at what stage you introduced a halo. If the halo exists naturally, which it quite often does, due to the way light was bouncing around, simply ignore the comments or if you feel up to it try explaining it to the commenter’s but don’t think they won’t be back saying the same thing about other images from the same shoot where this same anomaly exists.
Forumites will often comment on this as a halo, it's NOT. It's a natural effect caused by contrasting light conditions. This is an unedited image, straight from camera.
While the above 3 elements are important aspects to pay attention to, they are NOT the be-all and end-all of photography. There are much more important factors of an image that go completely ignored because forumites get fixated on the 3-H’s. Critiques on aspects like composition, colour accuracy, tonal range, shadow detail and a host of other things are often in short supply on forums. Mostly it’s because those who like to comment all day long have a fixation with clocking up their post count to make themselves appear as major contributors to the forum, this often results in them trying to comment too much on a daily basis and they literally do not even LOOK at an image but instead just look for the 3 H factors mentioned above.
By all means if you are a budding photographer, eager to improve your game, make no mistake that a forum is a place where you will learn the quickest and the knowledge you will gain from other photographers is invaluable. So don’t think I am knocking photography forums. I am trying to help you not get fixated, upset or have your spirit broken by people who only seem to concentrate on the 3-H’s and never actually look at your image for what it is.
You will learn quickly enough who are the troublemakers on a forum and who are the ones who never have anything good to say. If you find yourself being constantly harassed by someone, report it to the moderators of that forum or just ignore the person or block them from commenting if the forum you are on permits that functionality. Search out the members of the forum who do take time to deliver meaningful critique and send them a private message asking them to comment on your work, you’ll be surprised how many of them will be more than eager to assist you in growing as a photographer and always remember your good manners by saying thank you to those who take the time to help you and give credit where credit is due.