Monday, March 17, 2008

Taking Silhouettes - Digital Photography Tips

Don't you just love silhouettes? If you've ever seen those investigator movies you cognize what silhouettes are. The investigator only shown as a dark figure talking is the silhouette. The silhouette photograph is a great image that tin be very astonishing and visually appealing. These photographs can do for mysterious, commanding, gentle, and challenging photos. It can be a great manner to set accent on a subject.

The most common and easy manner to utilize a silhouette is when there is a single primary topic of interest. This is the easiest manner to illume as you simply light it from behind the topic and thus the topic will be turned into a silhouette. Of course, you can seek more than than originative things like having silhouettes of 100s of people but that'll be much more difficult.

When taking silhouette images the word form and form of your topic is critically important. You will not see any of the inside information within the topic and only see their outline. The lines of the topic go very prominent. When taking photographs of people as silhouettes, it can be very utile as you are seeing them as lines and shapes. Taking these types of photographs of people can greatly better your photographs of people and posing them properly.

The background of your silhouette is extremely important. If your background is as dark as the silhouette it will be very difficult to see the subject. The background colour should be somewhat contrasting to the silhouette. This volition do the topic base out.

When taking silhouette photos, seek to maintain everything simple. Think of simple conceptions to portray in your images. Because the silhouette strips the topic of all inside information it is a much simpler word form of photography. Taking a silhouette against the sky can work very great and you most likely don't even necessitate any other lighting. Simply put the topic against the sky and the seeable light will do them go dark and silhouetted where the sky will be fully visible.

Silhouette photographs can be very emotional photos. It can demo very at odds and deep emotions such as as fear, sadness, grief, etc.

To drill silhouette photographs simply seek looking at a topic and see their lineation and shape. This volition give you a good thought of what they'll look like when silhouetted.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Action Stock Photos

You're walking around taking images and suddenly you see a very big and very intend looking prehistoric dinosaur haste past times you. You draw your photographic camera out and take the image but recognize that the shutter velocity was put at a incorrect velocity and the image is fully blurred. Now you have got got no grounds that you saw the dinosaur and when you state everyone you won't have any evidence!

Action stock photographs can be very profitable. If you take the image right and compose it right your photograph can be deserving quite some money. Action picture taking is primarily done with physical objects that are in motion. Obviously! For action stock photos you necessitate an action going on and must hit the action.

There are primarily two different ways to capture movement when taking photographs. One manner is to utilize halt motion. What halt movement photos make is freezing the motion. If you had person tongue and took a photograph that used halt movement the tongue would freeze in mid air. To accomplish halt movement in picture taking simply se the shutter velocity very fast. Stop movement photos can be very cool looking and very profitable. If you utilize halt movement creatively you can return some very interesting pictures.

Rather than take the stereotyped halt movement photographs of people jumping in the air be creative! Think of everything in your life that have movement and see how it'd look with halt motion.

Another manner to capture movement is by using a very slow shutter speed. A very slow shutter velocity will do the movement in the image expression blurred. It is of import to utilize a tripod so that the movement is blurred but the overall image isn't. Slow shutter velocities can do your stock photographs of running H2O expression as if the H2O was floating. They can do waterfalls look mystical.

As with halt motion, be originative when taking images of action using slow shutter speeds. Probably one of the most common stock photographs I see that usages a slow shutter velocity is with cars. They are the nighttime photographs that have got autos driving by and creating fuzzes of bright lines. This is frequently used with stock photos. There are, however, many other ways to utilize slow shutter speeds. Think about using slow shutter velocities for air airplanes instead of cars. Maybe of boats at nighttime with their lines creating blurs.

Friday, February 22, 2008

In the moment - SFMOMA celebrates Lee Friedlander

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Can Spike Lee Friedlander do a bad photograph?

Perhaps, but if he did we probably could not tell, so completely have his work redefined, for those who cognize it, the sense of what do a image worth taking. If his retrospective, gap today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, have a downside, it may be to give false assurance to inexperienced photographers. Friedlander do everything photographic - from lament to cultural observation to landscape and self-satire - look easy.

Friedlander's images hang arrayed here in thematic groups, in roughly chronological order. Some groups, such as as self-portraits, come up labeled, echoing their aggregation in book form. Vitrines in the exhibition incorporate pristine transcripts of Friedlander's most of import publications.

Other bunches challenge the viewer's oculus to link them, including four in a perpendicular row that have got mental images of things blown into, or out of, shape: a ill-proportioned tree, a wind-wrecked hairdo, a headland of cloud and a downy dog, images taken old age and many statute miles apart.

Did Friedlander recollect or seek out these household resemblances among mental images as he carried on working? Did he topographic point them only later? Or makes their grouping here merely stand for the intercession of Simon Peter Galassi, picture taking conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which originated the retrospective?

Such inquiries substance because, looked at individually, none of the four images amounts to much. We might state the same of many other person mental images on view. Give Friedlander recognition for never overestimating the significance of a single shot. He apparently experiences no ambivalency about the Romaic nature of his medium. Yet viewed en bloc, his images arouse a distinct, possibly personal, manner of encountering and remembering the world.

I state "encountering" the human race and not "seeing" it, because Friedlander have practiced picture taking openly as a constructive fine art almost from the beginning.

I state "possibly personal" because Friedlander understands both by experience and inherent aptitude the fluctuating, perhaps inestimable, objectiveness quotient of photography.

The photographic camera work stoppages a short letter of impersonality, of automatism, every clip it operates. A astute photographer such as as Friedlander, who learned his chops doing magazine work and street picture taking at the same time, works back from the baseline assurance that the photographic camera inspires in its viewing audience - or inspired, before digital engineering cast of characters a shadow of intuition on all things pictorial.

We accept an mental image such as as "Nashville, Tennessee" (1971) as an instantaneous written document of societal world because everyone in it - maybe even Friedlander himself behind the lens system - looks taken by surprise. And because it looks to do no averment about what it records, unless we care about the importance ascribed to highly coiffed hair at a certain American topographic point and time.

But expression at a recent picture, such as as "New House Of York City" (2002) in the Fraenkel Gallery's coincident Friedlander show, "America by Car," and you recognize immediately that his photographic camera have constructed a minute of layered, colliding ocular positions that the oculus unaided could never assemble, allow alone fix.

We might see "Friedlander," the retrospective, as trailing a career-long disproof of any presumed equality between seeing the human race and seeing the human race as photographed. Yet Friedlander works as if he have no ideological interest in this truth, merely a captivation with it, a captivation continually reawakened as different topics come up before his camera.

He have frequently returned to or stayed with the same or similar topics for a stretch of time, as in his series "American Monuments," "Nudes" and shots taken backstage behavior at a manner show, an improver to this locale of the retrospective's tour.

In the manner series from 2006, we see glamor getting fabricated, as hairstylists, constitution people and chests of drawers waver around waifish theoretical accounts like a race path cavity crew, readying them for the runway.

The fulgurant formalism of "The Desert Seen" series suffuses the manner pictures. They nearly disperse the unfamiliarity of their societal content through shots so brilliantly timed and aimed that they asseverate themselves as abstract structures.

Friedlander's wont of identifying his images only by topographic point name calling and days of the month makes the feeling of an creative person perpetually on the road.

Yet the retrospective neither shows nor brings on restlessness. Just the opposite. It do you experience that if you analyze Friedlander's work carefully enough, you can larn to see as he sees, even without a viewfinder. To make this feeling may be his true artistic magic act.

Friedlander: photos and books. Through May 18. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., San Francisco. (415) 357-4000, .

Lee Friedlander: United States by Car: photographs. Through April 26. Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary St., San Francisco. (415) 981-2661, .

E-mail Kenneth Baker at .