And Now Michaelangelo Antonioni Dies

It's been a bad week for famous directors. First Bergman dies, and now Antonioni, maker of Blow-Up and L'Avventura. Here's a story from the BBC.

Ingmar Bergman Dies

The 89-year-old filmmaker just died. Although often associated with brooding black and white imagery, his first big recognition was with a comedy - Smiles of a Summer Night - and his film version of Mozart's The Magic Flute is marvelous and buoyant. Here's the AP story.

Online Photography Collections

I had caught misreading an article, thinking that a major museum in Cleveland was uploading its photography collection onto the web. But that got me wondering about what collections might be available for online views. I did some searching, and here are some suggestions:

• New York Public Library - The institution offers a number of online exhibitions.


• NOAA Photo Library - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has 10,000 environmental photos.


• George Eastman House - The foundation of teh photographic pioneer (Does the name Kodak ring a bell?) has a growing collection from its extensive holdings.


• Museum of Modern Art in New York - MoMA has online exhibitions and projects.


• US Geological Survey - Natural history and earth science images.


• Smithsonian Institution - Browse selected images, download screen resolution versions, and send e-cards.


• Library of Congress American Memory - Collections of teh LOC.

Using Leading Lines in Composition

When you're trying to compose a photo, one of the classic techniques you can borrow from painting and drawing is leading lines. Edges in an image have the tendency to direct the eye. To use leading lines, you arrange things so that the edges all point the eye where you want it to go. Look at this photo, for example:
Notice how the lines appearing naturally in the portrait direct your eye to the model's face. In this case the lines came from her arms and jacket, but these just as easily could have been tree branches, a ribbon of road, or a fishing pole.

The real trick to making this work is to get a physical sense of the lines - the rhythm of what you see before your eyes. When I took this shot, during some test shooting we were doing, it was when she was putting her hair up. I didn't intellectually plan out the image. Instead, I do as I always do: keep my eyes open and try to feel for those fleeting moments when you understand that there is something worth shooting.

There Are Buildings You May Not Photograph - Just Don't Ask Which

Ah, thank heavens for the Department of Homeland Security for keeping us safe. To prevent terrorists from getting information that could be used by terrorists. Of course you want to prohibit people from photographing critical buildings. But you don't want to tell them, because, well, then they might not take the pictures.

It might sound like something out of a Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut novel, but it's actually happening in the US. According to this Washington Post column,Keith McCammon innocently enough took a picture of 3701 N. Fairfax Drive in Arlington, VA. How was he to know that the office building housed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which does the DOD's high tech research? (They are the people who originally commissioned what would become the Internet, back in the late 1960s.)

You can find lots of public information indicating that the agency is there, but there's no sign on the outside. McCammon was asked for personal information, presumably so they could watch him in case he took a picture of another building that he shouldn't so they could catch him doing something that can't tell him not to do in advance because, well, he might not do it. Catch 22 - it's the best catch there is.

Book Review: 40 Digital Photo Retouching Techniques with Photoshop Elements

I had received a review copy of 40 Digital Photo Retouching Techniques with Photoshop Elements (published by Young Jin) from the US distributor, O'Reilly Media. It's thin as such guides go - 208 pages - but if you haven't yet gone beyond taking a digital picture into actually manipulating images, this a good introduction.

It's based around Photoshop Elements - a "lite" version of Photoshop that I've mentioned before - and even comes with a trial version on an accompanying CD. This isn't a comprehensive title on the subject of digital retouching; you can literally read a number of books on the subject and still not know everything about it. But as a way of getting your feet wet, it's solid.

Instead of learning one general technique after another, the book guides you through, as the title says, 40 different things you might want to do, incorporating what you need to know for each one. It's actually not all retouching in the classic sense of fixing a visual problem, though there is plenty of that. You start with learning how to correct contrast, move into gaining control over the colors in a photo, then get to a chapter called Enhancing Portraits, with some tricks I haven't seen before, like adding eye shadow to the image of a woman who wasn't wearing makeup. The book finally moves into general editing, adding special effects, and even such topics as adding motion blur and making greeting cards and web banners.

Of course, you can't expect to have all the information you would get in a larger volume. For example, they show one technique for creating high contrast black and white images from color ones, but there are at least three ways I can think of to also create black and white results, but with even more control. However, for someone new to photo manipulation - or someone, like me, who knows a fair amount but is always looking for new things to learn - this is a good book, particularly at a U.S. list price of $16.99.

BBC Cancels Photo Challenge

The BBC has been dealing with a scandal about six shows that had staged phone-in calls and pretended that they came from regular people, not insiders. So the organization has decided to cancel all competitions that it was running. Unfortunately, that includes the annual photo challenge. Ah, well, maybe next year.

File Those Photos

Ever look at your folders of photos and feel despair of getting them organized? Fear not - it's a heck of a lot easier and faster than you might think. First, you need software to really do this well. I use ACDSee Pro (though the regular version is quite capable if you aren't storing everything in the camera's native RAW file format - which, I'd argue, you should do because it's like having the original negative). Adobe Photoshop Elements has an organizer, if you've already got that software. For Mac users, consider something like Shoebox. The imperative thing is to have the ability to work on groups of photos at the same time.

Next, you want to come up with a naming scheme. This was a great tip that I got from nature photographer Ian Macdonald-Smith when I was writing something on this topic for Outdoor. Find something that triggers your memory for related groups of images, like a place and date. You might add the name of an event, like Aunt Sadie's Birthday Bash. The main thing is to replace the automatically generated file names with something that has meaning to you. Use the software's batch naming ability, so you might have the following files:

Aunt Sadie's Birthday Bash, New Orleans, 2-25-97 001
Aunt Sadie's Birthday Bash, New Orleans, 2-25-97 002
Aunt Sadie's Birthday Bash, New Orleans, 2-25-97 003

and so on.

Now you add keywords, photo captions, copyright information, and categories, which the program you've chosen stores in a database and, depending on the file format you choose, tucked inside the image itself. Choose the information for whole groups of photos at the same time and using batching to apply that data to all the photos at the same time.

That's going forward, but you can do the same thing with the images already sitting on your hard drive. When you have a few minutes, pick a group of old photos and apply these same techniques. You'll be getting caught up in no time.

Book Review: Closeup Shooting: A Guide to Closeup, Tabletop, and Macro Photography

This book is by Cyrill Harnischmacher, the author of Low Budget Shooting, which I recently reviewed. I was very impressed with that first title; this one, a bit less so. There is quite a bit of good information here, and certainly you could learn a lot about how to start experimenting with photographing all manner of things close up. But where Low Budget Shooting was really innovative in addressing a need that many photographers don't even think of having, Closeup Shooting looks at a topic well covered and doesn't breath the same refreshing air as Harnischmacher's first book.

In some cases, the technical information is limited without, so far as I noticed, an explanation. To say that extreme closeup photography is only possible with an SLR or DSLR is flat out wrong. Medium format and large format cameras are capable of as much and even more. (Perhaps the book's title should have been Small Format Closeup Shooting.) There are many examples of images, but relatively few show the set-up and lighting diagrams that help people understand how the techniques worked and to apply them in their own shooting.

Given the number of special considerations one could make, 121 pages simply aren't enough to offer comprehensive coverage - there are entire books written on nothing but close-up photography in nature. At $24.95, this certainly isn't a dud, and it contains a lot of useful information, some of which really is innovative (like building a glass box to do split surface/underwater shots, but I don't think it would be my first stop. I'd at least browse through some other titles and, if I wanted to do table-top, look at some of the excellent lighting books on product and table-top shooting. I'm going to see if I can get some review copies of other books in the area and, hopefully, find something that I could recommend more enthusiastically.

Technique: Improvising Support

To get a clear shot you need a steady camera. The best way of achieving that is to use a tripod. But there will be times when you didn't bring one with you, or where you need to move around too much to set up. Instead, look around for what might act as a substitute. Camera bags are great; put one on a rock or the back of a chair or even propped in an open car window and then put the camera on top. The bag acts like a cushion.

I've had great luck with walls, columns, and other vertical structures. I turn the camera on end to get a vertically-oriented shot and then hold the camera against the surface, keeping it steady. You can use a bundled up coat or sweater to act as a cushion, allowing you to set a camera on a rock, on the ground, or even against a hand railing.

Just look around and see what might be available. You'll find your shots look better, and you don't get tired from carrying yet another piece of equipment around with you.

More Time for Public Comment on New York Photo Restrictions

I mentioned at the beginning of the month that New York City was considering imposing restrictions on taking photographs outdoors. According to today's New York Times, the city has extended the time for public comment until August 3, 2007. Here are the proposed rules, and here is the form to send a message to Katherine Oliver, commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Boadcasting.

The Megapixel Myth

If you're like most people, when you compare digital cameras, your eye probably goes first to the megapixel count. It's understandable - the manufacturers and the press generally grasp this number close, waving it as though it proved something. And it does, in a limited way. The megapixel count tells you, more or less, how large an image you can print out at a 300dpi resolution and get really good detail. (It actually gets a bit more complex, as you can enlarge images, but let's not go there for now. I'll cover enlarging images - something easy to do - in some future post.)

You can work in two different directions. One is to check the pixel dimensions of the sensor. A camera like the Canon 10D (an "older" model, but one that I still use) might have 6.3 megapixels in a sensor that is 3088 pixels by 2056 pixels. Remember that we want 300 dots per inch for good print resolution. Divide 3088 by 300 and you get about 10.3 inches; divide 2056 by 300, and the result is about 6.9 inches. So you can figure that is the largest native print size.

The other direction is to take the actual print size you'll want - take 11x14 inches as an example. Multiple each side by 300 pixels per inch to get 3300 x 4200, or 13,860,000 pixels. That's close to 14 megapixels.

But the qualify of the image is affected by other factors, the largest being the quality of the lens and the software you use to fill in the image. Software? Yup, software. From an imaging standpoint, those sensors still have huge gaps between the pixels, and each pixel only sees one color, Something has to figure what goes between the pretty colored dots. Cameras can vary greatly in the quality of either the software or the lenses.

If you want to know how the actual images compare, you need help. Reviews can be good if the people writing them actually can tell the difference between one set of results and another. One good source for opinion is PC Magazine camera reviews, generally written by Daniel Grotta and Sally Wiener Grotta, two colleagues of mine who know a lot about the subject from all angles. Daniel also has his DigitalBenchmarks site, which has some free detailed recent reviews.

If you want to get more for your money, consider an older model camera. When new models come out, stores will be looking to clear their inventories. Getting last year's model is generally going to be safe and will give you plenty of power for what you need to do.

Tips for Shooting Events

There is a site called digital Photography School that posted a list of "21 Tips for Amateur Wedding Photographers." If you like photography, chances are that one day you'll be asked by someone to photograph their function, whether a wedding, b'nai mitzvah, birthday party, or some other occasion. Although this list is supposed to be geared for weddings, with few changes it covers any event. It's worth a read if you find yourself saying "Yes" and then thinking, "Oh, good lord, what have I just done?"

Great Photo Gallery Resource

If you want to show your images online, Smugmug.com is a great tool. The investment can be relatively low, the tools are flexible in terms of layout, and it's run by a family that provides great customer service (e.g., tech support from those who know what they're doing). I've got my photo site on it and know some other photographers who do the same. You also don't need a lot of technical experience to create a custom look to your site.

Camera Phones Start Getting Serious

Technology analyst firm Strategy Analytics is predicting that camera phones are going to become increasingly more serious devices as people come to expect at least 1 megapixel resolution as standard and vendors try to differentiate themselves with higher resolution, better optics. Starting next year, expect such features as zoom, flash, and autofocus to become the rage. So you can bet over the next few years that the camera phone will move from being a gimmick to a more serious tool. In fact, many people may abandon having both devices.

That raises the question, though, of how you take a good picture with your camera phone. How do you brace it, incorporate a viewfinder to get a steadier image,and get control over exposure and white balance? The features may be alluring, but getting a really good picture will still require technique. I think that will require a lot more experimentation. There are books devoted to making the best use of 35mm film SLRs, large format cameras, and digital SLRs, among others. Each device has specific handling requirements. Start looking for the camera phone books to hit the market some time soon.

Poor (or Cheap) Person's Image Editing

Photoshop is an amazing tool - and it's also an expensive one. I've often been asked what cheaper alternatives there are. Here are a few you might consider:

• Photoshop Elements This is technically the "lite" version of Photoshop, but don't let that fool you. Most anything you're likely to be doing in regular image editing is possible in Photoshop Elements, and Adobe often puts the newest features into this program before rolling them out in the flagship version. By itself it runs about $100 - not cheap, per se, but a bargain when compared to the multiple times more expensive Photoshop CS3.


• ACDSee ACD Systems (hence the name) has some great photo-related tools. The photo manager, whether regular (about $40) or pro version ($130), has basic editing tools built-in. You won't be able to retouch images the way you could with either of the Photoshop products, but you can crop, change size, adjust lighting levels, remove red eye, and do other tasks that might be all you need. Plus, you get a great image organizer. (Photoshop Elements also has image management, though personally I prefer ACDSee Pro).


• GIMP Feeling really broke? (Or really cheap?) GIMP is an open source application that doesn't cost anything if you download it. You won't get all of Photoshop's features. What you will get is quite a bit, though, and you can't beat the price. If you like a bit of hand holding (its lack being the one downfall of open source), then you should consider a book. GIMP 2 for Photographers includes GIMP 2 on a CD and will walk you through the installation and configuration before showing how to use the software. It's $30 list, but the Amazon link I provided shows it at just under $20.


• GIMPShop A writing colleague pointed this one out - a version of GIMP designed to work like Photoshop.

BBC Photographer of the Year Contest

The BBC has an annual contest for photography with no entry fee. There are specific themes and they're looking for things beyond the obvious. The first category competition is over, but the next - Hidden - has an entry date of July 22. You can enter up to three images per category. BBC staff pick a dozen images and then put them up to the Web for popular vote. The two most popular from each category go on to a final competition for a Nikon D40X, with an extra prize for the image that most catches their eyes. Details are here.

Another Digital Photo Basic: White Balance

If you've ever noticed how your home's lighting can seem positively amber when you've just come in from outdoors, then you have a grasp of why white balance is important in digital photography.

All light is made of many different colors and it falls in a spectrum from deep blues to reds. (Think of a rainbow.) Often, there's a bias toward one color or another. For example, candlelight is yellow compared to tungston bulbs, which lean far more toward the warm (or red/yellow) end than sunlight. Light on a cloudy day is bluer than what you get in direct sun.

As the quality of the light changes, so does the appearance of colors, much as your clothing will look different when you are under some sort of colored light. White balance is the digital equivalent of indoor versus outdoor film. If you want a realistic representation of colors under different lighting conditions, then you need to take into account how the tint of the lighting affects what you see.

So you need to set the white balance of your camera to match the prevaling conditions. There is an automatic setting, but that can get confused by light reflected by colored surfaces, or it may be that you want to deliberately set the white balance to get a warmer or cooler sense to the image. Some cameras will let you take a reading from a white surface and then adjust the color perception so that the object actually comes out white, and not an amber or bluish color.

You will need to reconsider the white balance every time the light changes. That could mean moving indoors from outdoors, or visa versa, or even moving into a shaded area outside when you were in full sunlight. Just remember - if something goes wrong, this is a setting that you can adjust if you set your camera to save RAW images, and not JPEGs.

Easiest Improvement for Digital Photos

There is a big flaw the way most people use their digital cameras - and an easy fix. When you see people using a digital camera, notice that they often hold them away from their faces and watch the LCD screen on the back for the shot they want. They moment they do, they inject tiny motions and shaking that they don't even notice. But look at those pictures in a larger size and everything will look fuzzy, because they ended up burring the results by those small movements.

The fix is to always look through the viewfinder, and not at the screen. You can then hold the camera up to your face and brace it underneath, resulting in better focus and sharper pictures. An added benefit is that you can leave the screen off, except to preview what you just did, and that saves battery life.

Technique: Shooting Fireworks

On the Fourth of July, fireworks are in order. With an easy technique, you can get professional-looking shots of the bursts. You'll need a tripod, camera that allows manual adjustments, and a cable release (to avoid jarring the camera). This will work with either film or digital cameras:

Place the camera on the tripod. Watch at least one firework explosion to see where in the sky they take place.

Set the aperture to f/5.6.

Attach a remote release. (This isn't absolutely necessary, but you do run the risk of adding blur to the final image if you're pressing the button on the camera.)

Set the shutter so that it will stay open until you release it. Depending on the camera and setting, this could mean that you either press the remote release twice, with the second time closing the shutter, or you press and hold it to keep the shutter open and release it to close the shutter.

Listen for the sound of the next firework going up. When you hear it, open the shutter and keep it open until the burst is complete.

Close the shutter.

Make sure that the lens you're using covers the area in the sky with a little room to spare, because you probably don't want to cut off parts of the image.

Book Review: Low Budget Shooting

When I requested a review copy of Low Budget Shooting: Do It Yourself Solutions to Professional Photo Gear by German photographer and designer Cyrill Harnischmacher, I was hoping to see something useful. I was first taken aback by the thinness of the volume - 72 pages with a hardback cover and paper thickness that only seemed to emphasize the lack of wider content. And yet when I flipped through, I realized that the $19.95 price was something a photographer could recoup multiple times in a single project. Just learning to create a custom soft box out of maybe $10 or $20 worth of material - without needing much in the way of skills or tools - is a money saver. You can learn to pretty easily make reflectors of all sizes, diffusers for a hand-held flash unit, even a table with continuous background for shooting products. There seems to be a bias toward table-top and close-up work, but the techniques he suggests are actually a jumping-off point. For example, you could adapt the soft box construction to a studio flash, or even series of flashes, or create large area reflectors using thin PVC pipes instead of fiberglass tubing. If you have the slightest inclination toward do-it-yourself projects, then this will give you great suggestions for building and improvising a lot of your own equipment without going broke in the process.

New York Mulls Public Photography Restrictions

The New York Times had a disturbing article:

Some tourists, amateur photographers, even would-be filmmakers hoping to make it big on YouTube could soon be forced to obtain a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance before taking pictures or filming on city property, including sidewalks.

If the city goes with the new rules, it would require two people using a camera in a single location - meaning a 100 foot radius from where someone starts - for longer than 30 minutes to have a permit and the hefty liability policy. The same would go for 5 or more people using a tripod in a public location - including sidewalks - for longer than 10 minutes, including set-up time. The film office is saying that it wouldn't include amateur filmmakers or photographers, but the proposed rules apparently don't read that way, at least to the New York ACLU. Even if the film office supposedly didn't intend to restrict amateur use, the police could esaily go by the letter of the law. Apparently no one attended the public meeting about the rules. I'd also wonder whether the permit would be for a single location, meaning that if you were going to be multiple places, you'd have to get a permit for each.