365 Reasons to Shoot
You know where I’m going with this, right? I know it’s dead simple. Pick up the camera everyday. Creating a365 album on Flickr or your favorite photo sharing site is a great way to keep you shooting. Take something - anything - everyday. These aren’t meant to be masterpieces, just sketches. Don’t judge the shots, just post and wait. Do it from a camera phone if you don’t want to pick up your main camera everyday. You’ll be surprised at what you see when you look back in a few months.
Portraits by Paolo Pellegrin
Brilliant set of work with some of Hollywood’s A-listers by Paolo Pellegrin. NY Times link here. Few things of note.
Use of very hard light, just off camera. Likely nothing more than a Speedlight, but getting it off direct camera access makes it so much more palatable. You’ll also get the sense he’s using predominantly one portable source for many of these on set snaps. So well done.
Second note, Paolo seems to love breaking - no, crushing - the ‘rule of thirds’. You’ll find a lot of faces placed dead center of the photo - and it works. Probably not a great rule to promote breaking, but the shots are so well composed that they do work, and it creates wonderful and interesting tension in number of the picts.
Third note, Paolo seems to love to shoot through stuff. Mostly car windshields. Brilliantly done and it adds a great layer of light, color and effects. Great stuff.
Gregory Crewdson on Creating His Images
Two great video interviews with photographer Gregory Crewdson. Incredible narratives and elaborate productions.
Interiors of Richard Powers
Very cool interior work. A lot of it Asian with a distinctly modern flair that is right in line with my tastes. http://www.richardpowers.co.uk/
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Don’t Believe Everything You See
Ah, the magic of photoshop – you can’t believe everything you see. Sure, we expect stuff like Maxim and GQ to be heavily photoshopped, but you’d be surprised what else gets doctored. Here a very good run down of the history of ‘retouching’ that dates way back before the days of photoshop. Many of the examples are quite well known photographs that’d you’d expect to be doctored up, other are surprising.
Simple Inspiration
After a very long creative drought I feel inspired again. A large brush fire 40 miles to the west has provided some impressive late days skies. A few quick, but successful snaps and I feel re-energized. Sometimes it just takes working through the dry spots, going through your routine. You never know what inspiration lies around the next corner, or at the next sunset.
Rolleiflex MiniDigi
When I first say this picture of this (above) I was super excited. I miss the days of shooting twinlens stuff. What could be better, a twin lens digital camera from Rollei. Complete with popup waist level finder and real ‘crank action’. Awesome, right? Well, then I started to read the specs - 5MP interpolated. Strike one. Then I saw the picture below, strike 2 and 3. It’s tiny! It’s practically a toy. The banner shot should probably be considered macro photography.
I guess the ‘mini‘ in the name - Minidigi AF 5.0 - should have given it away. Damn. It does look pretty cool. Not cheap for only 5 ‘interpolate’ megapixels - $329.00. Full size, and a real 6MP and I might have paid twice the prize, but for this, no way. Get it here.
Just how small is the Rolleiflex MiniDigi Camera?
Alamy Keywords, Descriptions and Sales
Despite not adding any new images to my Alamy account in well over a year (maybe two, yikes), I have managed to get several sales over the last six month. Twice for the same image. But I’ve also realized that Alamy migrated to a new keyword / description system sometime back and I have never updated my catalog. I’ve finally gotten started, but what a task. I have no doubt it will be of huge help, but I’m also very curious as to how their algorithms work. Need to so do some forum research on what the best strategy might be for their tiered keyword scenario.
