I always love a good photography exhibit, especially if it concerns old photographs from the mid-century (in the image above, please find an image of me in 1978).
I think that just about every other photograph taken of people from that era looks experimental, because it was an experimental time.
In the mid-century people were experimenting not only with sex, drugs and rock-in-roll, but also with fashion from hair to clothing.
Just look at the picture above and you'll see an Afro hairdo on a white person. If you saw that in the 40s, the person wearing it probably would have had to undergo electric shock therapy.
There's a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that emphasizes an old photography style, which I think can be referred to as experimental mid-century or photographing in an experimental era, an era when society was in flux. The review in the New York Times refers to this type of photography as the Diane Arbus school (Arbus photographed random subjects during the mid-century).
There are two rooms to the MOMA's exhibit, one in which the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White are presented, and another where the photographs of some new artists can be viewed. Much of the old photography is from the early part of the twentieth century.
While the Times dismisses the new photographers as a group who provide nothing fresh, they do point out one whose work is associated with the Arbus school. This work is from Tanyth Berkeley and the image they highlight is "Grace in Window."
I agree with the Times comparison of this artist's work with Diane Arbus. Arbus worked with very real (offbeat) subjects in a very real (odd) world. Berkeley works with similar subjects, but, as I see it, her subjects are less varied and the context in which she presents them less informative.
Arbus used some very interesting backgrounds and framed her subjects from a distance. Berkeley's art is limited in subject matter (mostly women) and there's almost no background as most of her images are close-ups.
The video here I made to help people learn how to use the clone stamp tool in Photoshop.
In the video I use an image of an old sign to illustrate how you use the clone stamp tool.
The main part of the sign's text reads: "Downtowner Motel." This part of the sign was probably constructed in the 1950s. The motel is in Missoula, Montana.
The sign also has a newer plastic addition that says "AAA Approved."
It is this part of the sign I seek to eliminate. I do so so that the image as a whole looks like it was taken in the 50s.
You can't help but meet many Amazon natives when you're traveling through the rain forest.
After arriving in Coca, Ecuador, you can travel many miles by boat and canoe to get to the Napo Wildlife Center. The Napo Wildlife Center is in the Yasunì National Park.
It's great that the Napo Wildlife Center is there as they've preserved over 52,000 acres of rain forest. Much of the rain forest has been under attack by the oil companies who want to drill for oil, thus destroying the land.
In the picture above you see some members of the Quichua indigenous community. When you stay at Napo learn about the families are educated about their daily activities.
The Napo guides also take you on a trip to the parrot lick.
I highly recommend a trip to Napo and a stay at the Napo Wildlife Center. A great description of the Napo Wildlife Center is here.
To learn about some techniques used to photograph wildlife go to this post.
* a year-by-year timeline of the history of photography that's fascinating. * a photo tour of George Eastman's house * Kodak music from the turn-of-the-last-century * biographies of inventors such as Thomas Edison and businessmen such as Henry Strong. * major photographic events such as public reactions to the first Kodak cameras
Here's a mini-timeline I wrote--
PHOTOGRAPHY HISTORY TIMELINE In 1827 camera obscura was invented, a process where by an image took 8 hours to expose.Isacc Newton discovers that white light can be divided into colors. In 1843, the fist advertisement with a photograph was made. In 1888, George Eastman invented film. In 1913, the first 35 mm camera was introduced. In 1935, Kodak introduced Kodachrome.film.In 1941, Kodak introduced negative film.In 1963, Kodak introduced instant color film In 1978, the first point-and-shoot auto focus camera introduced
Basically, the digital camera uses a mirror system first to reflect the light coming through the attached lens to the view finder. After the shutter release button is pressed, the mirror swings upward to reflect the image to the camera's sensor.
Let's give thanks to the people who lived in Mexico 7000 years ago. They developed corn.
What do you think was on the menu when the pilgrims and the Indians had their feast.
Not sweet potatoes, not cranberries, but corn, lots of corn.
In the picture above you see flint corn, better known as Indian corn. I believe this is the most photogenic of the many kinds of corn.
The Close-Up
When you're photographing this year's Thanksgiving dinner, catch some close-ups of the turkey, not only just after it's cooked whole, but also the parts, the dark meant and the white meat.
Catch friend's and relative's faces close-up. Catch the dog close-up.
Come to think of it catch everything you see close-up.
Close-ups reveal texture and expression from the fine lines (come on there's character there) in people's faces to the color of the kernel's of Indian corn.
Flash
When you can, avoid using the flash. Instead of using your flash, use the natural light in the room. You want to catch that ambiance of the celebration.
Making Money from your Thanksgiving Photographs
To make money from your Thanksgiving photos go here.
Animals that aren't moving much are easy to photograph.
I'm going to start this post with a fact--if you're photographing wildlife at a zoo or at a place, say, like the Galapagos, where the animals are not moving much, photographing animals is a cinch.
A good photograph can be had with any camera, point-and-shoot or SLR.
All you have to do is step away a bit from the animal and zoom in on the whole animal or a body part and snap a photo. If you do this with your camera's zoom greater than 100 mm (35 mm equivalent), you'll get a nice blurred background with a clear animal in the foreground (if you didn't shake your camera).
In order to enhance the blur in the background set your camera's f-stop to the lowest it'll go, say, f/4.0 will do (large aperture; lens open wide) in Av (aperture priority mode). I\
If there's little light, like the light you would have on the floor of the Amazon jungle, set your ISO speed to the highest it will go, say, 1600.
In order not to get blur your shutter speed should be no more than the inverse of half the of the focal length you're using on your camera. For example if you're shooting an animal using a focal length of 100 mm, your shutter speed can be no more than 1/50th of a second.
Now if you're photographing fast moving animals, say a monkey in a tree, you'll need a really good lens such as the Canon EF 300/4L. The lens has a good zoom (to 300 mm), image stabilization and is reasonably fast (4L). It's also reasonably priced.
Now, when you're out in the field and you're zooming in on a moving animal, try and move your camera along with it. In that way, you're more likely to get a clearer image.
And if you're photographing an owl in a tree use a tripod with your zoom. You can use flash also, but I don't recommend it because it'll freak out the animal.
This is Fire Station No. 98 in Chicago's Water Tower district. It was built in 1904. All the department stores, Borders, etc... is in this neighborhood as well as a theater or two.
The Galapagos Islands, the land where Charles Darwin roamed, offers an opportunity to mingle with travelers from all around the world while tracing the steps of wildlife not seen anywhere else in the world.
One of the most popular ways to tour the islands is to take a cruise. Since most of the Galapagos Islands are part of a national park (of Ecuador), you have to have a guide to see them. There are a variety of tour packages—many of them, cruises—where guides are provided and that give you the option of visiting many islands in a trip.
My partner and I chose the biggest boat—the Galapagos Explorer II—decidedly the most comfortable (but most crowded) of all the options sailing around the islands. This boat offered a package with all meals and excursions included in one price, and the services provided were similar to those on the big ships that sail to the popular tourist spots around the globe.
After spending a few days in Quito Ecuador, we flew to Guayaquil on Ecuador’s coast to connect to the flight that goes directly to the Galapagos.
We landed at a desolate, barren island flooded with hundreds of tourists meeting the tour guides from the ships. The park staff took our entrance fee, a steep $200 for the both of us. At this point in the trip we had the same feeling you get at the entrance to Sea World, only way more expensive.
Moments later we waited with sleepy sea lions for small lifeboats to take us to the ship. The animals’ whiskers vibrated as they coughed, snorted and sneezed among the stiff breeze.
These would be the first of thousands of sea lions we would observe, step over, sit next to and photograph. I got kind of attached to some of them as they napped on the beaches, wanting to shake their fins and introduce myself. Not to bother though, because “ellos muerden,” the guides would warn.
Upon first inspection, I found the ship to be a bit tattered from wear, but it more than met our needs. Every room on the boat was a suite making the cruising all that more comfortable. The first of our landings took a couple of hours after we set sail.
Chinese Hat Island came into view as we cruised on a calm sea. Inflatable lifeboats took us to a “wet landing”, that is, one where your feet get wet (and sometimes more than that) as you jump off onto the beach.
It was on this island where Darwin’s spirit reined, an island covered with sea birds, sea lions, and big, ugly iguanas. I spent the afternoon peering at the groups of iguanas scattered both on the sand and on top of black boulders. Evidently these creatures came about from natural selection—meaning these are one of the few animals that have adapted to the dry (there’s little rain on the Galapagos) ocean side environment.
Darwin described this scene in his writings: “The black lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2-3 ft) most disgusting clumsy lizards.”
I’ll certainly agree, only to add that some of them had large maroon spots that covered more than half their body, and others a crusty rock-like surface that coated their heads. My favorite part of the animal, though, was the spikes that ran up and down its back, so primitive. Most of the iguanas just lied there, but toward the end of our hike one got up and went for a swim. No wonder scientists gave them the name “marine iguana.”
The next day we found ourselves shelping among the rocks on Espanola, an island that hosts the blue-footed boobie. This bird is a must-see of the Galapagos, with its webbed feet a baby blue. It’s a look fashionable either when they are standing on them or when they flip them up as they fly.
As we hobbled among the rocky trail, the guide pointed out a freak, unexplainable occurrence that was going on with the boobie offspring, beautiful animals not yet endowed with feathers, but a white fur coat instead. We found out that they soon will die. For the past few years, most of them have. Seems as if the species lay their eggs from which the young emerge, and then they die off mysteriously not reaching adulthood. Of course after that information was dispensed a chat about global warming occurred.
After the trekking on isolated islands, the boat took us to two Galapagos towns--Puerto Ayora and Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. It was refreshing to see civilization. Animals and flowers that I hadn’t seen on the other islands warranted dozens of stops on a long walk around the town. Also, just about every human I passed offered a smile.
As I traveled with my partner, we found ourselves among a diverse crowd. We met a young couple with a child and an elderly gay couple (must have been in their 90s), both of whom toured with us on the excursions. We spent much time with them discussing many things from the sex life of sea lions (the males are polygamous and dominant) to the food and service on the boat.
The Galapagos lie very close to the equator so that one would not think it would be a late summer respite from our sizzling temperatures. Similar weather conditions that exist on our coasts in summer appear on the islands, offering a cool escape from Palm Springs.
This is the type of place that spurs scientific interest in the natural world. I, for one, tripped up in scientific thought just about the whole time I was there. From natural selection to cool South Pacific ocean currents, a trip to the Galapagos opened my eyes to a wide host of issues, spurring my awareness that might even turn my next vacation another void of city lights.
Chicago's skyline in color before using the Channel Mixer in Photoshop.
Chicago's skyline after using the Channel Mixer in Photoshop.
When there are too few colors in your photo and/or boring colors, switch it to black and white.
How do you do that?
You could just desaturate (Image>Adjustments>Desaturate). But a better way, I think, is to do this:
1. In Photoshop use Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Channel Mixer 2. Click okay in the New Layer dialog box. 3. Click on Monochrome in the Channel Mixer dialog box. 4. Tweak the slider bars till you get good contrast. 5. Use Layer>Flatten Image
See the video below that I made and it'll take you through the process of changing color photographs to black and white.
Usually you want to take a picture using the rule of thirds. This picture is cropped using the rule of thirds.
If you drew a vertical line across every third of this frame, you'd find that the first vertical line would go right through the elephant. I planned it that way. I placed the elephant following the Rule of Thirds.
The Rule of Thirds is a great way to plan your shots. Take for example, a landscape of the countryside just outside your city or town. You'd want to frame the picture so that the bottom two-thirds of your frame would be land and the top third sky. In this case the lines you drew across the frame to divide it into thirds would have been horizontal.
So much for the rule of thirds. Sometimes you can throw it out as in the picture above. If you've got a knock-off-your-socks photograph of a sunset that looks like fire, capture as much as you can in the frame. All the land you'll need is a bit more than an eighth of a frame so viewers will have a land reference with respect to the sky.
So What is Raw Format? Well, for starters it's not an acronym. It means "raw."
Shoot in Raw and you can go back and reset your exposure and other settings just as if you were back out in the field.
Here's what you can tweak in the Raw dialog box after you've uploaded your photos from your camera to your computer. (Best to have Photoshop, if you're going to work in Raw format, cause the program will automatically take your photo and put it in a Raw dialog box so you can manipulate it.)
There's more too. Try clicking on the tabs in the dialog box. The most useful item, I think, is in the Lens tab. You can control the vignetting (that black halo you sometimes get around the frame of your photo).
On the way back from BlogExpo, I stopped in Kelso, CA to photograph some abandoned properties. Noone was around and there was easy access to the property because it was right off the road.
One usually photographs only the outside of such properties, but the real action is in the inside.
What do you think? Have you ever photographed an abandoned building or house?
Day one of BlogWorld Expo is over and I'm better educated about--
1. How to get more hits on my blog. 2. Where to place ads so they get more clicks. 3. Where to go to get my blog syndicated. 4. How to get people to sign up for my RSS feed.
I still don't know it all though.
Wondering around the convention floor I encountered many people and blogging businesses--
1. Peter L. Singer of FIX8, a company that "animates a new world of user-generated content by allowing users to change their look, their face, their world, all in real-time. 2. Blogi360, a company that does all that extra blog work to get more hits and to make your blog stand out from the others. 3. Center for Threat Awareness--threatswatch.org, a think tank that address terrorism, national security, defense, foreign policy/governance and other issues by enhancing awareness. 4. Crisp Ads, a blog advertising networks (kind of like Google's Adsense) 5. Townhall.com, a conservative opinion with the likes of a group of people who annoy me: Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter and so on. 6. Newstex, a blog syndicate and a company that I think can do the most in helping me money from this beast.
7. Blogcatalog, which is, well, a place to catalog your blog.
According to a book by John Silber sunlight glinting off the sharply angled steel curves of Gehry's Walt Disney Music Hall raises the temperature of neighbors' houses by 15 degrees.
What's a rainbow of colors, oodles of camp, and so very gay? Answer: The Palm Springs pride parade. This year's Palm Springs pride parade features some heavy-duty campaigning for city council streets as well as the usual--drag, shirtless guys, lesbians for equal rights, cheerleaders (professional ones that do flips) and representatives from almost every organization in the city of Palm Springs.
There were some out-of-towners, including LA cops looking around for a few good gay recruits.
These "sisters" are indulgent at the Palm Springs pride parade.
Does this guy have a hair accessory or not at the Palm Springs pride parade?
National Organization for Women is a 60s throwback.
"Pinkie" in living color at the Palm Springs pride parade.
Color was the name of the game at the Palm Springs pride parade.
Everywhere at the Palm Springs pride parade you could see a Miss That or a Mr. This.
Here's McGruff taking a bite out of crime at the Palm Springs pride parade.
How about a little Brokeback Mountain with this gay cowboy?
Palm Springs High School marching band plays some great tunes at the Palm Springs pride parade.
Hmmm, I shot this sign of the Bow and Arrow Motel some four years ago. I shot it in front of the motel and the motel was still open.
Now I see someone else has shot a picture of the Bow and Arrow Motel, and she says that it's now part of the Neon Museum, Las Vegas' outside gallery display of retro signs at the Freemont Experience downtown.
2 ... 2 ...
I always love a good photography exhibit, especially if it concerns old photographs from the mid-century (in the image above, please find an image of me in 1978).
