The Perfect Hour

See that beautiful sky in the background. That's the sky of the perfect hour, the time about 20 minutes after the sun's gone down till the time the sky turns black. It's during that time that the sky moves to shades of midnight blue.

It's the perfect hour for photography.

Patina

Buildings made out of wood then painted make great subjects. Add the sun baking the painted wood day after day and you've got patina.

Patina is when an object changes over time due to the elements. Painted wood is one of the most favorable to get a beautiful patina. That's because the paint often fades, blending in the woods color and texture to create a new type and even prettier surface.

Other surfaces such as glass and steel don't offer a good patina because the surfaces don't really move onto other more attractive colors like painted wood does. Steel rusts and glass can turn into an ugly off white color.

f/4 vs f/22 Waterfall Photo

The waterfall shot at f/4 in Av mode (1/400 sec shutter speed)


The waterfall shot at f/22 in Av mode (1/15 sec shutter speed)

On a walk today past a wash in the desert, I found a small waterfall. I wanted to test an old lens I had found on my Canon 5D camera. The lens is a Sigma Aspherical IF 28-105mm. I originally used it on my Canon Rebel film camera a long time ago. Above you'll see the results. Not bad for a lens that cost

What is Creative Commons?

There's a great article posted on a blog today about creative commons.

Take a look at the little girl in the above picture. Then think about these questions.

1. Who owns the photo?
2. Who can use the photo?
3. Does Blogger (Google) have any interest in this photo?
4. What are the stipulations for use of this photo?
5. What would you have to do to protect the photo from others using it?

These are many questions that come to mind when you post a photo on blogger or on Flickr.

Flickr states: "Respect the copyright of others. This means don't steal photographs that other people have taken and pass them off as your own. (That’s what favorites are for.)"

What this implies is that you're free to link to other's photos but not free to borrow them if without linking back to his/her site/posting. But does this mean you should ask the person who took the photograph if you can use it? I say, absolutely!

Creative Commons sets guidelines for photographers to use with regard to the photos they post on the Internet.

"Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from 'All Rights Reserved' to 'Some Rights Reserved.'"

In other words they let you change the automatic* stipulation that any photographs you post are all-rights-reserved photos to other stipulations that you can choose from, "like some rights reserved."

*According to templetons.com, "all major nations follow the Berne copyright convention. For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not." This is known as the Berne Copyright Convention.

Moral of the Story: Read the fine print. Don't go posting on a site that lets them have your rights. And don't take others' photographs without asking!

Breaking the Rule of Thirds

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.

Palm Leaf

I find pictures like this incredibly boring, but the tribe adminstrators of the Spa casino here seem to like them as they are blown up and hung everywhere.

Maybe a little peace among the casino's clatter.

New Photography Class Online

It's here, the only one of its kind--
Photography for Writers and Bloggers
at Betterphoto.com

So come on now and spiff up the photos on your blog, giving them that WOW factor the visitors want to see. Take the course Photography for Writers and Bloggers.

Now that you've got a blog and are writing every day; learn how to get noticed by finding your best posts with photographs and rework them into pitches for articles so that you can submit them to publications.

Can't Get Better Than This

Paris, December, 2006

So that's why they always say to photograph at dusk and/or dawn!

Advantages of dawn or dusk photography

Don't have to use tripod.
You can point your camera into the sun.
You get a better depth of field (on a clear day).
The color, oh the color you'll get
Soft shadows.

Can you name more?

I'll take your questions...

This weekend only--I'll take your questions. Watch CBS 2 "Eye on the Desert " at 7 p.m. tonight and submit your questions about Palm Springs photography and the "Digital Art Photography for Dummies" here.

Submit in the comments section below.

No Dwelling on Rejection

As a writer and photographer, I know the feeling of rejection. Blogging can help alleviate that pain. I've tried a number of times to get these photographs in an architectural magazine. No dice and no sweat, I can just put them here.

Book Signing Promotion

I was ready, ready at the beginning of the week cause I'd done my book signing homework.

Two weeks prior to signing: I emailed a couple of television stations and newspapers about my signing, a fun email, really...including the humor about how I got started in photography.

One week prior to signing: Received an answer from City Beat and Fox 6, a heads up that they will publicize my book signing.

Two days before signing: Appear on television, goes well...I'm interviewed by an anchor who lets me know that it's her first day on the job.

Day before signing: Prepare what I'm going to bring...my cards, my framed image, my portfolio (12X16 samples of my work in black leather case)

Day of signing: Pick up local paper "San Diego City Beat" and find that my book signing is the "pick of the week." Get to signing and it's a full house (okay, about 20 people show up, filling up all the chairs that Borders has set up for the event. Pass out my strange 60s collage, giving people a little bit of a retro shock. People hang out, talk photography, share their work and listen to my tips.


My Roll-Top Desk

During the signing, I found myself referring to past experiences to form the foundations of ones photography. For me, this brought up my fascination with roll-top desks. I can remember being 11 years old and letting my mom know that I wanted one. Not one time, but so many times that it became a nagging experience for my mother.

She finally broke down and bought me one.

Hence if I see a roll-top desk, it's, without a doubt, gonna be a subject for my photography.

Shooting the Sun

Shooting the sun is a difficult proposition. I've done it a number of times--when it's low in the sky, under mostly cloudy conditions and when there's a halo around it.

During the day of this shoot from a cruise ship on the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California, I watched the sun for a perfect shot. I couldn't look at it too long, but after a while I found those spots in my eyes, an effect that told me to stop. But I didn't.

I just would shoot to the side of it, and keep shooting until it went down.

After playing around with f-stops, exposure compensations and shutter speeds, I came up with these numbers which seemed to give me a good effect (in terms of a clear-cut sun).
ISO 200, 1/1600, f/7.1 and shot at 271 mm with a Tamron 28-300 mm lens.