24. Apr, 2015

For the past few weeks I have been looking at cinematic photography and way to reference some of the directors and photographers in my own work. My main director, although an obvious one, has been Hitchcock. There are several reasons behind my choice, Hitchcock was an innovative director using techniques no-one else had used, with many landmark films. He was visionary and his influence is still felt today, just one small example of this is the use of the  phsycho shower scene currently being used to advertise a brand of shower gel. As a child growing up Hitchock was someone whose films I often saw on the television, I suppose they stuck in my memory, I had forgotten how many there were. 

All his work is so good it was difficult to narrow it down, I ended up concentrating on North by North West and Rear Window, two films quite different from each other. For my outdoor project I have tried to use the empty landscape ideas from the crop duster scenes with my own twist. When I get some indoor work done I may use the claustraphobic ideas behind rear window.

My concept for this project is displacement, putting a man made item in the landscape where it does not belong. This is one of my first examples, more to follow  

22. Apr, 2015

Over the last few weeks I have been looking at stock image sites like Alamay and Shutterstock, there are lots of different sites to checkout. The one you go with depends on personal choice, but these are the things I found useful. 

Alamay is a very large site with over 55 million photos and only accept photos taken with a DSLR using files of 17mg uncompressed data. Before this causes a panic, this is the size before you save them as jpg. To check your file size in photoshop go across the top bar to image, in the drop down menu is image size this give you options for reducing files to use on line, but as importantly gives the uncompressed size. If your camera is over 6m pixels you should be fine. Alamay are strict with quality and don't accept oversharpened images or soft focus, as long as you are careful to choose only sharp, clean images, with no dust on the sensor it's plain sailing.

Some of the other sites accept a wider range of images from all sorts of cameras however they may be royalty free. One other site worth mentioning is Millenium images they are a much smaller company who specialise in more creative work, they do have a very high standard for image size, but if your camera is quite new a your work is imaginative they may be the people to use.

On last point, be very selective with your key words this is how people find your work, otherwise your best images may be on the last page and unseen. This photo is one I submitted to Alamay recently. 

16. Apr, 2015

Like a lot of photographers I really hate having my own photo taken. This causes me a lot of problems some I can avoid, some not. I can't get out of group shots at weddings but I can take control of the dreaded selfie. 

In the past year I have looked at a few photographers, who along side the work I knew about have also found creative ways of taking self portraits. Vivien Maier who specialised in street photography also made very creative use of reflections. She used windows and mirrors in many shots, in some she used multiple reflections, every photograph was well planned and her eye for the unusual was astounding. Maier also made great shadow selfies, her work is well work a look, not only for her street photography.

Another favorite of mine the great landscape photographer Ansel Adams was also known to to the odd shadow selfie, more recently I seen examples of double exposures, peoples feet or hands, there seems to be no end to the possibilities. After some experiments this is my attempt at double exposure. It was taken as two speparate photos and processed in photoshop, it can be achieved in camera with my nikon D5300 with almost identical results, it just gave me more freedom to mix and match.