FotoTV.Classic of the Week: Light Paintings
A Simple and Effective Lighting Technique
Photographer Jean-Francois O’Kane talks about painting with light while comprehensively demonstrating the techniques to follow for a sensual erotic shooting, as well as the tools and equipment needed.
As O'Kane demonstrates on his model Alexa, light painting is a creative photographic technique in which exposures are made in a darkened room by moving a hand-held constant light source to illuminate the scene. He moves the light to selectively illuminate and accentuate parts of the model's curves and highlights, by facing it directly into the camera. As viewers quickly learn, light painting requires a significantly slow shutter speed of a second or more-- besides that, to create a stunning photo, total control over exposure is essential, as is dressing in black and using a tripod and white balance.
Although O'Kane admits, "It's difficult to achieve perfect settings such as exposure on the first time around, "A prerequisite is to be prepared to experiment, use a light meter or grey card, and have fun while you are doing so."
Painting with light is indeed an exciting technique for amateur and professional photographers alike, and fairly simple to recreate. It offers photographers a chance to express their creative side, and artistic ability, perhaps to impress clients or simply to explore new photographic disciplines, and O'Kane demonstrates so with flowing ease, using the tools and equipment readily available from a house or garage, and with the camera equipment most photographers already have.
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New Video online: Default Settings in LR
Save Time With LR Defaults For Noise Reduction
Especially when working with more than one camera or at multiple light situations, default setting depending on ISO speed can be a real time saver.
Kate Breuer explains how to set up the Lightroom preferences to make Lightroom look at the camera setting before applying default settings.
In addition she explains how to apply different default settings to your images depending on the ISO.
new Video online: Steve Schapiro
The Golden Age of Photojournalism
In this FotoTV. interview, photographer Steve Schapiro sits down to share his poignant stories and to discuss working with iconic individuals of the 1960's and 1970's.
Schapiro began his career during the golden age of photojournalism. He has worked on films such as "Taxi Driver" and "The Godfather", which gave him the opportunity to work together with Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Jodie Foster and Francis Ford Coppola.
Schapiro has worked for Life Magazine. He shares several personal stories about working for the magazine and the monumental personalities he photographed. He was afforded the opportunity to work with Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy during a time of the 1960's when news changed from 15-minute daily reports to 24-hour news coverage.
Three elements of a photograph important to Shapiro are emotion, information and design. Shapiro recommends that it is important to photograph images that are close to a photographer and meaningful. He also goes on to say that we are now in an age when the camera might become obsolete as more and more people use smart phones to photograph live events. Schapiro’s use of the black and white medium gives an eternal sense of classic photography as his images convey an emotion stronger than that of color. "Today people don't think in terms of black and white", Schapiro says. A collection of his work can be found in the book "Shapiro's Heroes" or "Heroes” as Schapiro humbly calls it.
new Video online: Make Misteaks!
Martin Krolop Throws all Rules to the Wind
In this photo workshop Martin Krolop talks about important design rules and principles of photographic ...
and ... throws them all to the wind!
If you want to give your photographs an individual style, then this is not possible with the conventional rules of photography. The trick is to be extreme and to make mistakes consciously. Focus on the eyes was yesterday. Martin blurrs images, sets the focus point anywhere but not on the eyes and shoots a portrait with the wide-angle lens. Finally, Martin uses the Polaroid camera in order to counteract potential image sharpness.
It is not about to photograph carelessly and furiously, but be aware of the limitations of current esthetic systems to be and to decide against it. This way you can expand your horizons - and you realize why some rules were not set up for no reason.
So try it!
New Video Online: Composing Color
Learn How to Merge The Background With Your Subject
Composing can be tricky at times and merging the subject with the chosen background is one of the most difficult things. Learn how to master it.
Photographer Kate Breuer explains how to use color tones to compose a relation between background and subject that merges them to one harmonic picture.
She uses different colors to show which ones are fitting and which are not.
New Video Online: TED Talk 2012
Can art change the world?
"Can art change the world?" - That's the question JR talks about at TED, one year after the beginning of the INSIDE OUT project.
"I wish for yout to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world... INSIDE OUT". - JR
INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually.
(The text above is taken from the website www.insideoutproject.net.)
Now, one year after beginning, JR sums up the project and it's development so far: 100.000 posters have been printed this year!
New Video Online: Lightroom 4 Update Process
Kate Breuer Explains the Update Procedure to LR4
The new process version that came with Lightroom 4 is an improvement but updating to it can be a bit tricky and cause problems. Learn how to avoid them.
Kate Breuer shows what happens when updating an image from Lightroom 3, process version 2010, to Lightroom 4, process version 2012.
In addition she explains how to bring most images back to how they loooked easily.
Last she talks about how the new process version causes problems with presets and what to do about it.
New Video online: Nice Fresh Greens
Photographing Greens, Creating Special Shadows
In this video Eberhard Schuy demonstrates a very special way of photographing greens. Very important: Background, Freshness and an artful shadow.
For the background Eberhard uses a white wooden plate worked on with autopolish on which the carrot green generates great reflections. He conveys the impression of freshness with small water droplets on the polished plate.
Particularly Eberhard attaches importance to the shadow. To give tthe right whistle to these he clamps two normal reflectors together.
Alice Springs
A Visit at the Helmut Newton Foundation
In this FotoTV film, curator Michael Harder shares work from June Newton alias Alice Springs at the Helmut Newton exhibit.
A lot of people know that June Newton shot under a pseudonym. But then again there are a lot of people who did not know that June Newton, wife of legendary photographer Helmut Newton, had a successful career shooting under the name Alice Springs. While visiting today, curator Harder takes us through different eras of Alice Spring and her work. There is definitely a resemblance of work style between her work and Helmut Newton’s work, because he taught he how to use a camera. But it was probably on all the photo shoots she shot documentaries of which gave her an insight to Helmut Newton’s world of photography.
Under normal circumstances there is always a “June’s” room. The curator changes out photos periodically depending on theme or content. This interview is good for photographers who want to learn more about the working relationship between Helmut and June Newton and for photographers who are interested in getting to know Alice Springs.
New Video online: PS Actions II
Save Time With Recorded Actions
Photoshop actions are a useful tool to save you some time when it comes to workflow parts you need to do often. Learn how to record more complex ones in this video.
Kate Breuer records an action that pushes the colors of an image using the LAB mode. Therefore she creates an action with mulitple steps. In a second step she shows how to simplify the action using less steps for the same result.
Learn how to use actions for complex workflows and save time.
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