The Minimalist Photographer

A Change of Venue

Longer Version

A couple of days ago I put up a very short post stating that this blog was being discontinued. This will be a slightly more filled out version of that announcement.

The Minimalist Photographer blog will continue on at http://theminimalistphotographer.com/blog albeit in a slightly different way. The posts will be more text oriented and more like ‘traditional’ blog posts if there is such a thing. By that I mean that rather than just an image or an image and a couple of sentences these will be more like short essays geared to help others. I am looking to post once or twice a week as opposed to multiple times a day.

This brings us on to images and this is where it gets good – at least in my opinion. My biggest problem with this current site was the inability to display images well – I never found a solution that I liked. The click on the small image to get a bigger image on a plain white background was always a bad compromise. Well, that problem has now been solved spectacularly on the new site – images are displayed in all of their glory with large slideshows, big thumbnails, darkened backgrounds etc. If you have seen something on a photography site that you’ve liked this site probably does it.

Just in case anyone is interested the new site is hosted by Zenfolio who specialize in photography and image sites. I spent a lot of time looking at what Zenfolio, and the other big player in the niche, Smugmug had to offer. I cannot speak to Smugmug but I am very pleased that I made the choice I did. I wanted a solution that most importantly, displayed images beautifully but also came with a full shopping cart and the ability to offer both prints and electronic downloads and that didn’t carry obvious third party branding. Being able to use my own domain name was also very important. I was expecting and willing to pay several hundred dollars a year to do this right – the Zenfolio solution is costing me $120 a year. If you are a photographer looking for a web presence this could be the way to go. This code: RAP-TS9-3FG will save you 10% on the price of any package from Zenfolio. They offer different packages from around $30 for portfolio without shop up to a top one $250. I looked into the $250 one but it didn’t offer anything that I wanted that the $120 one didn’t.  www.zenfolio.com

As I just touched on I wanted to be able to sell online – doing everything by email is a lot of extra work both for myself and for the buyer. I wanted a shop that was professional looking and that functioned flawlessly. Also, and this is really important, I didn’t want the shop side to spoil the experience of just browsing the photographs. You will never find a watermark on my images for this reason. I think the new site delivers this.

The other big thing that I needed to do was to consolidate my web presence. I was running the blog on this site along with a separate site promoting my book which is due for release in a couple of months. This was clunky and confusing. The new site now houses both the blog and the stuff about the new book. It also has the same URL as the book title which really tidies things up a lot.

So that is about it as far as my reasons for moving – I really hope that you’ll try out the new site theminimalistphotographer.com

Just a quick note about this site (minimalistphotography101.com) it won’t be updated but it isn’t going anywhere. I will host it and keep up the domain payments indefinitely. There are well over a thousand posts here and it would be a pity to just blitz them.

Finally, I post about four or five times a day to my account at Google+  that is where most of my day to day/social  interaction on the web takes place.

See you on the other side

Steve.

 

 

Fine Art America

I am currently in the process of setting up a few gallery type sites. My main site is still The Minimalist Photographer (theminimalistphotographer.com) which is where I am blogging but I am attempting to set up a few sites on established portfolio/gallery networks. The first of these is on the Fine Art America servers and can be found here; Art by Steve Johnson

First impressions? – for $30 a year it is not bad at all and seems to have a friendly community. The $30 was so that I could point my own domain name at the site but if I didn’t want to do that the free version would have suited me fine.

A quick note about email delivery

As I’m sure you have gathered, The Minimalist Blogger has moved. This means that if you want to carry on receiving the post in your email inbox you’ll have to sign up again on the new website – it’ll only take about 20 seconds – Page with signup box

To be honest I could have just ported the email addresses into the new site myself but that seemed a little unethical. – anyway, apologies for the inconvenience caused and I really hope that you’ll join us on the other side :)

Steve

Announcing a Change of Venue

As of the 21st Jan 2013 this blog will no longer be maintained. It isn’t going anywhere – I’ll keep it online indefinitely.
I have started a new, more comprehensive site that incorporates a blog, an online shop, information about my book and much bigger images. I will write a post here with a more detailed explanation of my decision over the next day or so. In the meantime the new home can be found here http://theminimalistphotographer.com  . (If you are just interested in the images they can all be found in the photography gallery). Go have a look – I’ll be honest – I am really pleased with the way that things are shaping up.

Bug screen shadows

 

Opportunism is a big part of photography – not everything has to be planned down to the last detail. This shot is a case in point, I was making my first coffee of the day and spotted the shadows cast by the bug screens on our windows. I have never noticed this before and I suspect that the effect requires extremely bright sunlight from a certain angle. Two minutes after I had taken this shot the effect was no more.

At first I tried to get a shot of the wall on the left but then noticed the shadows on the toggles. Here there is a bonus because the shadows really help to define the form of the toggles.

Anyway this version of the image is a little small but click on it and the original mesh and the shadows cast on both the toggles and the wall will be obvious.

Very big ball

This photograph represents an attempt to play around with scale. I wanted to create the illusion that the beach ball was normal size and that the chairs in the foreground were toys.

For reference the beach ball was somewhere in the region of ten foot in diameter.

The ‘toy’ effect is usually achieved by the simple use of a pseudo tilt shift software filter but that alone didn’t work  in this case. This image is the result of a lot of selective focus work, vignetting and adding texture layers. If I had to do it again I could probably lose some of the steps but to be honest, I quite like the way this turned out.

Going AWOL – for a couple of days

 

Things are going to be a little quiet around here for the next few days – until around Tuesday 15th to be precise. I have to make the final corrections on the book (the one advertised somewhere on the right of this page). It is going to print next week so this is the final push.

I will probably post one or two photos but please don’t expect much in the way of text. I will make up for it towards the end of next week.

Have a great weekend :)

Tracing steps

This used to be one of my favorite spots for taking fun candids. It had a real Reservoir Dogs vibe despite the fact that it is probably one of the safest places anywhere.

Unfortunately the spot no longer exists, or at least not in this form, the wall has been patched, the No Parking sign is no more and the whole place is now much more upmarket.

Good for the town for sure but one less good location for a photographer. The fact that this spot is only about a hundred yards from my house makes the loss even greater.

The model, by the way, is my wonderful and tolerant wife – Meg.

Keeping it abstract

Something abstract. For what it’s worth it is a recipe holder shot at f/1.8 (to limit dof) as much as possible against the light from another room (bright light on the right) and a couple of smaller windows (dimmer lights on the left).

I wanted to create the impression of a spiral floating in space which is why I was careful to make sure that no part of the recipe holder that gave away its function should be visible. Even a tiny part of the stand would have shattered the illusion. The object had to be obscure.

The same thinking applies to the background. Nothing could be identifiable as this would have also destroyed the illusion. Apart from anything else it was important that the scale of the image stay ambiguous. An identifiable doorway for example, would have immediately signaled to the viewer that the spiral was small and the abstraction would have been lost.

Multistory car park.

Edited with Lightroom and Snapseed. Snapseed does a great job with retro effects, anything from fairly subtle to garishly unsubtle.