PictureOffice

Opportunity knocks

Sometimes you just walk by a place and see something you like. You think "why haven't I got my camera?" So you rush home load up the gear and rush back. In this case it was the Tram Sheds at Harold Park in Sydney. Normally the doors are bolted shut but the wind had blown them wide open and I had to investigate, and investigate I did once I'd raced home for my camera. If you'd like to see the results of my 5 minutes sortie followed by 2 minutes of creative adjustment in Lightroom then follow the link below.
Glebe Tram Sheds

Photo of the Month

Taken a great photo recently and want to shout about it? This photo was taken by Rebecca Olsen of a friend of Sydney Photographer Michelle Breen. A great shot with great post production.
Each month I'll be posting the best photos provided by readers so if you have a photo you'd like to share, then email it here

This Week in Photography

It's been a mad fortnight, websites, jobs and Sydney Flash Mob Freeze!
So please check out this site. It's called TWIP which stands for This Week in Photography. The author is a leading photographer, Scott Bourne and blogger which means he updates his tips about 3 times each day.
If you've worked out RSS, (see this post) then they can be delivered painlessly to your web browser (hopefully you've graduated to FireFox)

TWIP

Studio Workshop with Celebrity Portrait Photographer Paul Lovelace

August 2nd Clive Girdham and celebrity photographer Paul Lovelace will be holding a one day Studio workshop in Sydney. Early bird special $180 until July 12th, thereafter $250

This Studio Photography workshop has been designed to cut through the mystery of studio lighting and equipment and leave you with a high level of proficiency and confidence.

This workshop teaches you the skills required to shoot at a top professional level by introducing you to the equipment used by these professional magazine and advertising photographers.

COURSE INTENT:

To understand and be competent in the use of studio strobes, wireless synchronization, light meter reading, softboxes, snoots, shoot through brollies, backdrops, modeling lights and much more...

Simple and effective communication techniques to put your subjects at ease to get the best results

Interactive, dynamic, exacting, challenging and very hands on!

TOPICS COVERED:

Studio lights

Light metering

Lighting ratios

Cable synch, wireless flash, master and slave principals

Studio portraiture

A complete understanding of all lighting alternatives such as low and high key, soft and harsh effects

Communication with your model

Live results displayed on flat screen MACs , critiqued and edited on screen with Photoshop and LightRoom

WHEN/WHERE/WHAT:

To be confirmed, August 2nd 2008, 10am to 4pm

Location, Professional Studio in Alexandria, Sydney
   
Your instructors are Blitz Magazine Photographer, Clive Girdham, celebrity and media Photographer Paul Lovelace with studio lighting assistant.

Paul's work of Andy Warhol has recently received acclaim in Europe, featuring in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and at the Moderna Museet Stockholm.

YOU NEED

Your DSLR, charged batteries and memory cards!

Book online here now!

Questions to  Clive by email workshops@pictureoffice.com 

Inspiration for free

Lynda dot com, who I should really get kickbacks from, has just released the second installment of their Creative Inspiration series. It profiles Douglas Kirkland, one of the most accomplished and celebrated photographers of the last fifty years. This series of videos features Douglas Kirkland’s photography, from his early career at Look magazine during the golden age of photojournalism in the 60s and 70s to his transition from analog to digital photography in the 90s. His iconic images of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson, and Nicole Kidman, among others, are known all over the world. The piece is 1.25 hours long, and features movies on Douglas’s work, his studio, and his on-location photo shoots. It also includes a presentation showcasing his body of work, a discussion with a group of high school photography students.
And the best thing is it's FREE, just register on the site
PS. I'll shortly be releasing my commercial website and will be looking for help with additional photography work, if you are interested be sure to get in touch.
regards
Clive Girdham

Breaking whose rules?

Firstly whose rules? Photography is subjective with beauty being in the eye of the beholder. Unfortunately we are living in a period of obsessive "pixel peeping" over analysing our photos at 200% on the computer screen, looking for noise or checking for sharpness.
Here's a an idea, why not deliberately sabotage that photo and see what results....

Why not go create your own reality and experiment with various filters in photoshop or lightroom and create a more interesting image? Following are a few versions of the original shown on the left.

   

In camera settings v post production

Hanging onto summer
Originally uploaded by Clive Girdham

It all sounds very grand, "post production" or "the digital darkroom". In reality photo editing software is an essential stage in the development of your final picture. Typically your camera (shooting in jpg mode) will have many adjustments for color saturation, sharpness, contrast etc. It can all become very complicated trying to workout the best combination of settings for a landscape, portrait or just a zany snapshot. That's one reason why I pay very little attention to these in camera settings and leave them all on "normal".

Photo editing software packages also offer a bewildering number of adjustments that can be made to your image. And just like your camera functions, if you don't learn what they mean and how to use them you'll tend to ignore them.

The picture above has clearly been manipulated. Straight out of my digital compact camera the image was "flat" meaning the image lacked contrast and saturation.

Contrast is the difference between the light and dark areas. In other words increasing contrast makes the darks darker and the whites lighter.
Saturation describes the intensity of a particular color and in this example the colors blue/green and purple have been ramped up for effect.

The adjustments made now make the flower and leaves jump out from the fence and transform what is a very ordinary image into something quite punchy.
 

Subjective subjectivity, huh?

Hereford St dog
Originally uploaded by clive_girdham

It's all too easy to fall into the trap of worrying that your pictures aren't up to "standard" as if some magic standard existed. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

You might worry that you don't have the latest camera, software or sufficient creative skills. Stop! take a breath and just enjoy the journey. Photography is totally subjective and even the classic rules are meant to be broken

The picture above is of a dog that protects the front gate of it's house everytime I walk by with my dog, that's it! Nothing more, however to me (subjective) it tells a daily story of tenacity and courage all wrapped up in a bundle of hair.

In this case the original centered subject was re-cropped to satisfy the rule of thirds and punch was added to the dull and noisy compact digital camera picture with a simple creative filter in Adobe Lightroom. Time taken, 15 seconds.

I'll print off an A4 copy and pop it in the owners letter box with a note. I'm sure she'll be delighted and will have her own story to tell.

Adoring Adobe Lightroom

Glebe's Arch Rival
Originally uploaded by clive_girdham

Professional photographers adore Adobe Lightroom because it allows them to make very quick and creative edits at the fraction of the time of Photoshop.
Photoshop is the bees neez when it comes to capability, but if all you need to do is upload 2000 RAW wedding photographs, adjust one and synchronise the other 1999 then this program is for you.
Not only is it great for basic editing, adding pre-set creative effects, it's also great for logically cataloging your photos which I'm guessing are in multiple folders all over your hard drive.
I haven't tried Apples Aperture which is very similar, instead I've put 100% effort into learning Lightroom. For more advanced editing Photoshop is must have, however following the 80:20 principle, 80% of my work requires only 20% of the capability of Photoshop, hence I use Lightroom most of the time for edits and all of the time for cataloging.

regards

Clive Girdham

The Future is here!

Wireless computing is getting smaller and more versatile, the future will have us all interconnected via hand-held devices, if we aren't already. What this means is that software applications that we use to edit and store photos will become
web based.

For example many businesses throughout the World utilise web based tools for contact management HighRise is a popular one and for project management BaseCamp is very popular

So where does that leave your photographs? Sure smaller devices will have massive storage capability but the small interface isn't always great for editing and viewing. This is where web based storage and editing comes in. Adobe has just released a beta version of Photoshop Express which is a web based storage and editing package. Currently it's free and offers 2Gig of storage. The editing functions are fantastic as is the user interface. This is the future, web based applications that leave you free to roam the world and upload your photos from anywhere and then edit at a desktop computer in an internet cafe in South America.

Check out Photoshop Express, it's free! When filing out your details you have to tick USA as currently it's not available for Australia, however it works regardless