charlesheckel

<p>My memory isn't what it was, so I use my camera to document my travels. I shoot artworks, architecture, and cathedral interiors for the most part, with a little casual street photography where it doesn't seem to be intrusive. In the Photoshopping and subsequent review you see all the little things you missed. Very satisfying.</p>

<p>Institutional interdiction of photography is in my opinion a failing philosophy, what with the prevalence of cell phone cameras. It's forbidden in the Sistine Chapel, for example, but the guards are much too busy keeping the herd of tourists moving to do much about it. The institutional copyright is already infringed by clandestine and semi-official photos all over the Internet, but they go on, hoping to stimulate sales of postcards. The Museo della Opera in Florence has a good solution: they sell photographer badges at the door for a euro apiece, and I bought one and happily snapped away.</p>

<p>At home, I take pictures of a variety of subjects, mostly portraits, and use them to produce works in a variety of media. People like them, and it keeps me occupied.</p>

<p>Expression is everything, and you did all right in your first photo and well in your second. One of the big distinctions between professionals and amateurs is proper attention to the background. Damon mentioned the bar through the kid's head in the second photo, and the strong horizontal and bright background with contrasting colors in the first is more of the same. When you've got good expression, you don't want other stuff interfering with it. Using a large aperture helps to put it out of focus, but you need to get in the habit of maneuvering to get a background that doesn't compete with your subject.<br>

In this regard, postprocessing helps. You can get Adobe Elements for around $100, if you're a student you can get the bells-and-whistles version (CS5) at a substantial educational discount, and there are several public domain image editors available for free. I don't see Damon's quick fix above so I took a flyer at it:</p><div></div>

<p>It's the old story: a naive viewer looks at a very good photograph and says "You must have a really good camera." People who see my travel snaps assume I took them with a DSLR, and can't believe I used an old point-and-shoot, which in fact I did. And on my travels, I see plenty of people with expensive DSLRs using them quite indiscriminately.<br /> A young chap was trying vainly to photograph the interior of Brunelleschi's dome in the Duomo in Florence with a nice DSLR and a backpack full of gear. He was hand holding in insufficient light and getting motion blur. I put my dinky little P&S pointing upward on the altar rail in front of us, shot with the self-timer, and showed him the results. He got it right away and did several closeups of the frescoes, angling his DSLR by wedging a lens cap underneath it. The next day I saw an old codger in the Accademia getting sharp shots of the ceiling frescoes there by putting his cell phone on the floor.<br>

<br /> I remember in the early days of digital I had a 3MP camera with a rather poor lens and used it for some flower pictures in very contrasty lighting. They were blown, of course, and incredibly noisy, but all the same I made quite large prints of some rather drastic croppings. Sold like hotcakes. They were so full of JPEG artifacts you could barely make out the flowers--but people found the artifacts interesting. <em>Chacun a son gout</em>, and all that.</p>

<p>The 4x6 format scales up to 5x7.5, which isn't too far from 5x7, and to 8x12, which I grant is a departure from 8x10. Your idea of incorporating a lot of empty space doesn't solve the formatting problem, which is to make good use of that format, filling it effectively and economically as you would a full frame--except for the bottom fifteenth, or the bottom fifth, whichever. If that very small area can be arbitrarily cropped, you're home free. If not, you may need to include a little more space at the top and shoot another frame, or zoom out just a little to give yourself more wiggle room. It's not that big a deal.</p>

<p>As you're new to portraiture, you might consider making cardboard frames in each format and use them to preview your subject. You won't need them for long, but it's an effective way to teach yourself to previsualize specific formats.</p>

<p>It's a contrast effect in both cases. The scooter looks sharp in contrast with the blurred background, and the red, chrome, and black pop against the natural colors. The little girl has been shot with window lighting and enough sidelight to pick up the texture in her hair and irises, and the contrast and saturation have been pumped up a bit--notice that her skin tones are quite high in value, enough so that they flatten out a bit. This gives a little more room for good tonal separation in the midvalues. And there's enough sharpening that the skin is right on the point of appearing crunchy, which the little girl tolerates better than Mommy and Daddy.</p>

<p>Technically, you should probably upres first and edit second, giving your edits more pixels to work on. In practice, the larger images take more time to edit unless you have the latest and greatest hardware and 64-bit software, and you probably won't notice any difference in quality anyway--try it and see.</p>

<p>And as you're really not clear about exactly what you want or what you want to do with it, a good site to explore is dpreview.com. It has a wealth of detail about the features of various models of digital cameras, including SLRs, includes sample shots taken with the various cameras. You'll probably find the learning curve quite steep, but stick with it--you'll be a much better informed prospective buyer.</p>

<p>I'd look into groups of people who have demonstrated an interest in appearance and creating effects: little theater organizations and so on. Another option is your local college or university--that $50 an hour you mentioned would sound interesting to a starving student. If it's a public university, you can probably go on campus and watch classes in theater, dance, and arts, and there is likely to be support for classes in art and photography for the public at large.<br>

Your problem is basically a matter of networking. Link into a branch, no matter how collateral, be clear about your interests, be prepared to show your work up front, and there will be people who know people and can put you in touch.</p>

 

<p>Another idea to run by your friend: painting on transparent media with transparent pigments. It becomes possible to shoot through the artwork to the model and the artist's face. Another possibility is to shoot the subject directly and then Photoshop the image to abstract it in the sorts of ways your friend is visualizing it: posterizing, sketch effects, and so on. The point would be to contrast a mechanical approach with the way in which a human brain selects relevant data.</p>

<p>I think JC's idea of concealing the sun behind the subject's head is probably the way to the best pictures. Think it over and decide--do you really want to include the source in the picture, or do you want to portray your subject with the results of the backlighting, that is, by using the sun as a hairlight? I like to backlight with the sun, but leave it out of the picture entirely, cropping it out or hiding it behind another object in the background. For a theatrical effect--I was a theatrical photographer--I contrast that with a dark background. For fill, I use the sunlight reflected off a neutral stucco wall behind me. That way I can guarantee consistency of color temperature.</p>

<p>I second Howard M's response.</p>

<p>The short answer is that the context makes a statement about the function of the photograph in question. Within a journalistic context it documents an event and the presumption is that the image has not been substantially altered. In the context of a gallery or salon it is to be appreciated as a graphic object or artwork. In a magazine feature about celebrities it supports the reader's fantasy projecting an idealized (or demonized) of the celebrity in question. In an advertisement it sells product, either directly or by supporting some imagined change in self-concept or lifestyle resulting from the product. As the context changes, the standards for evaluating that photograph also change, therefore the context is a critical part of the contemplation of the object.</p>

<p>There are simple ways to do such things in Photoshop, and there are an assortment of photo editing programs to do similar things. To whiten skin:</p>

<p>Duplicate the original layer.<br>

Desaturate it.<br>

Set the blend mode to Screen.</p>

<p>It's a big change, and you may want to tone it down by reducing the opacity of your desaturated layer. It also affects everything--not just skin--so you may want to select only your skin tones using the tools provided (Quick Select, Lasso, Magic Wand) and put only the selected tones on their own layer with ctl-J.</p>

<p>If you've got your skin selected, possibly the whitening is too much for you and you'd prefer a smaller adjustment. Add a Curves adjustment layer and pull up the midpoint of your curve a bit.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>You may need cross lighting, in which the light on the left is directed at the right side of the group and the light on the right at the left side of the group. The idea is that the falloff from the bright center of each light is compensated by the reduced distance of the subjects illuminated. This setup is for two lights of equal intensity, not a mainlight and fill. If the walls are covered with mirrors, you may need to get your lights up high enough to keep them from reflecting in the mirrors, and this may produce a satisfactory modeling effect.</p>

<p>Alternative: cheat in Photoshop.</p><div></div>

<p>And more importantly, since this is a high school senior with possibly very strange tastes in makeup, do you want to remove what she may think is an iridescent gold shimmer if that's what she likes?</p>

<p>I think people are reacting to the flat gray area. You might try a duotone and see if it helps:</p><div></div>

<p>And just because you raised the question, it's possible to get persuasive 11x14 proportions by selecting the left side of your image, putting it on a new layer with control-J, and pulling the left edge of your selection with the Move tool. Better?</p><div></div>

<p>Millions of dollars? Hot ziggety. I'm going out to fling poo.</p>

<p>Actually, deriving new images from old works isn't at all uncommon--Andy Warhol did it all the time. You could obviously take your images from any source you wanted, as long as you didn't publish them, and for most of the Internet that's a matter of a right click and selecting "Copy." I do it routinely to illustrate alternative approaches as part of a critique.</p>

<p>However, you'll probably get bored very quickly with Photoshopping images of the resolution generally available online. There are a large number of very good photographs on this site, and in your place I'd email the photographer first and ask his or her permission, just as a courtesy. Some people will be flattered by your interest and might even be willing to email you a copy in higher resolution.</p>

<p>Nonetheless, you should consider taking your own pictures and Photoshopping them, simply because you're starting with an image that was taken with a particular PS effect in mind. It's a richer and more satisfying way to go.</p>

<p>There is no simple answer, and you'd probably have to post examples of your work to find out why they lack appeal. In order for an image to work as a graphic, the contours have to convey the relevant information that satisfies the viewer, and the shapes have to work not only as representations, but as abstractions that have an appropriate and pleasing character. Large undefined areas of black and white tend to appear void or bleak, so that the eye moves to the boundary between them. That boundary has to be very definite and very pleasing to the eye.</p>

<p>For a more complete answer to your question, I suggest you take up brush painting.</p>

<p>Or maybe she really wanted to contribute, but her Jrock strap was chafing her.</p>

<p>I know! I know! She's referring to the hair styles of people dressed in Jrock straps.</p>

<p>Probably a newcomer, as he's willing to work for people who can't spell.</p>

<p>The effect you were going for is called low key. One trick in shooting this sort of subject is to leave the window out of the picture. That way your meter is going to see the skin highlights as the highest values and give more exposure to keep a little detail in the shadows so they don't block up entirely. You'll have the dramatic shadows you want, but a full range of tones to bring the picture to life. A reflector to add a bit of fill will help, too.<br /> To pick up the brightest elements as Sheldon suggests, apply a Curves adjustment layer and pull up the midpoint. That'll do it. Your window light was quite cool, so I warmed things up by selecting the Red curve and pulling that up, too. Your adjustment layer will have a button you can click to edit your Curve manipulation, and a blank white frame to localize the effect. Click on the frame, brush black onto your image with a large soft brush and a very low flow rate, and you can remove your Curves adjustment in specific areas.<br /> The example I've posted is not all that great, but it shows the kind of change you can make. One tip: when shooting weddings, most brides prefer overexposure, blocked highlights, and flare to give a happy, bright effect. Too much low key is rather somber and funereal.</p><div></div>