Games People Play Slideshow
More of minimalist photography set to music. These were all black and white shots, from a couple of years back, and all have something to do with games.
Music: Looking Out Distractedly by Jaspertine
http://ccmixter.org/files/jaspertine/16136
2008 – Licensed under
Creative Commons
Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)
YouTube Progress Report
I have finally got around to putting some slideshows on YouTube. So far the total number of videos that I have posted is three, the total number of views is 196, and the total subscriber number is one. Hopefully those numbers will tick up in the coming months. I am planning to post roughly one new video a week, mostly slide shows but with the occasional ‘how to’ and opinion piece thrown in for good measure.
Urban Exploration With a Panasonic ZS8
This video is the first one that I compiled and the only one that I haven’t posted on this blog as of yet. It is pretty rough, especially the end where the music cuts off abruptly rather than fades out. I would correct this if I could but there seems to be no way to do this other then deleting the whole video from Youtube and re-uploading. This would break all the links to this video from elsewhere on the web.
The photographs are outdoor shots, lots of rust, peeling paint and the suchlike but with the difference that many of the shots are close ups/macros.
Urbex; Lots and lots of Cable
A little something for:
#cableicious curated by +Charles Strebor over on Google Plus
I had a bit of time on my hands this morning so I shot about 30 images, all featuring cable and stuck them all together. This is the result.
For what it is worth these were all shot within 150 yards of our house. America really doesn’t like to hide its cable under a bushel 
A h/t to +Kay Walker for setting the idea for this folly in motion.
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Messing Around
It is a Friday afternoon so work was not going to happen. I was digging around my computer and found some cheesy movie making software that came preloaded with the machine in question.
Anyway – here are some of my recent pics loaded into one of the themes. The theme itself is reminiscent of all those flash websites with the slidey bar things that served no purpose.
It may or may not be worth a minute and a half of your time – saying that the background music is excellent so if nothing else watch it for that.
Enjoy.
Just a quick note about the second part of the Bryce series. This week got away from me a bit so that will not be happening for a few days at least. Please accept my apologies for that.
Point and Shoot Urban Macro
Mention macro to most photographers and I suspect that images of bugs, flower parts or other living nature type subject matter comes to mind. There, however, is a whole world to explore that is man made and things not regarded as beautiful can reveal hidden depths. Personally I like working close up with the stuff of city environments such as building materials and metals in all of there possible states.
3D for the Photographer; Part 1
Introduction
This is the first of what will hopefully be a short series of posts looking at 3D computer graphics and how the technology can serve the photographer. I will be using Bryce 3D software which is considered a 3D landscape program. The principle behind Bryce and most 3D programs is a simple one – wire mesh objects are created and then textures are, in effect wrapped around them. This all happens in a 3D space that the user can move around in and, in effect, take a snapshot at any time. The 3D space can be given other characteristics such as light, fog etc. What I intend to do is to use the 3D space provided but to use photographs in place of the textures. One obvious purpose that the photographer could use this technology for is to create a virtual gallery showing their photographs. I will be attempting something different to this though. I want to use the 3D environment to create something that is an attempt at art in its own right not simply a representation of something that exists in the real world.
The posts will take the form of tutorials but I cannot emphasize enough that the best approach is an instinctive one. Play with the software and see what it can do. This first post is more dense than I would have liked and I promise that subsequent ones will be much lighter as first principles will already be covered. I was originally going to split this first one into two parts but decided on balance to get the whole thing out there so we can get onto the more fun stuff next week.
2D into 3D
Today I’m working on a small side project – creating tutorials for using Bryce, basically a 3D landscape creator, as a 3D space for manipulating photographs. Bryce is free software and is available for the PC and Mac but not Linux unfortunately.
The way I see it panning out is that there will be half a dozen or so tutorials of which I’ll publish one a week on a Friday. The first one will be posted tomorrow.
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If you have ever wanted to dabble in 3D or just find an interesting and different way to use photographs this project should be of interest. Bryce is very non technical for 3D software and instant gratification is almost guaranteed. The software is traditionally used for creating landscapes with basis in either reality or fantasy – the use we will be putting it to is a little unusual. One thing is for sure, the imagery that can be produced in a 3D space is not simply more of the same.
Much more tomorrow including an introduction and a tutorial that will enable the production of an image similar to the one above – (it really isn’t that hard – honest).
Removing dust from a Lumix ZS8 Sensor
“Out Damned Spot”
Something bad happened a week or so ago. My brand new toy, a Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS8 point and shoot became all but unusable. A black spot had taken up residence in the inner parts of the camera and dominated every shot. Normally I am not one to worry about little imperfections as these can be easily rectified in Adobe Lightroom. I shoot an average of around five keepers a day and it takes me about three seconds to remove an imperfection. In other words if I have one sensor blemish I lose about 15 seconds a day and say, three only costs me 45 seconds. I can live with that. The monster in question though was no ordinary spec – on full resolution, 14 megapixels, it was an oval measuring around 190 x 120 pixels.
Flickr and Aviary; Strange Image Editing Decisions
Seeing who stands to gain what is a good way to work out the underlying dynamics of most human processes. Applying this in the case of Flickr and the dud of an image editor supplied by Aviary leaves me none the wiser though.
Up until recently Flickr, the granddaddy of all the photo sharing social networks, gave their users access to Picnik, for editing pictures from within the Flickr ecosystem. Picnik was a startup that was, at some point swallowed up by Google. Now, as you probably know, Flickr is owned by Yahoo. Recently Google started its own social networking site, Google Plus.
A large part of Google Plus’s strategy in its fight to become the numero uno social website was to get the serious and semi serious photographers to adopt and evangelize their service early on, i.e. when it was invite only. This presumably left Google in a bit of a fix insomuch as one of their main rivals, Yahoo, was in the position of using a very popular Google property i.e. Picnik, against Google. This just sort of happened to Yahoo as when they bought Picnik on board they were independent and had no connection with Google.
c’t Digital Photography; A Genuinely Useful Photography Magazine
Within the covers of c’t Digital Photography lies an intelligent, well thought out magazine that treats the reader with respect and not just as fodder for the industry advertisers. If you think about your own photography in a more sophisticated way than simply as a race to afford the latest and most expensive equipment then this magazine is probably for you.
During the late eighties, while I was still living in the UK, I purchased a few photography magazines. It didn’t take me long to stop purchasing them though, as the articles had little depth and were mainly sales pitches under the guise of reviews. To make matters worse, the few ‘how to’ type pieces were often recycled from one magazine to another and even in the same magazine after a period of time had elapsed. Does anyone else remember the countless pieces written on the subject of how to get a zooming effect by using a slowish exposure and zooming while the shutter was open? Everything to be said about this esoteric subject in less than a hundred words yet this was treated as the holy grail of photography technique and was repeated in a dozen magazines and at intervals of what seemed like three months in all of them? Of course it is worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of said publications were all owned and published by the same firm.
The MP101 Kindle Ebook
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The Minimalist Woman
My wife's excellent blog.
