Category: Inspiration & Showcases

Nick Tosches’ Search for Autumn

By John Watson
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Vanity Fair ran a fascinating photographic detective story day before yesterday about the author’s year-long quest to discover where a photo used for Windows XP desktop wallpaper was shot and who the photographer was. The seemingly trivial task quickly became an obsession for the author and a small group of volunteers who were blocked by an impregnable wall of secrecy surrounding the origins of the photograph.

Read the full story at vanityfair.com.

Nick Tosches: Autumn and the Plot Against Me: On The Web: vanityfair.com

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Make your photos pop out of the page

By John Watson
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Photo Pop-OutsPhotojojo, the site with the oddly familiar name and really cool DIY tutorials, has a swell tutorial for making your own Photo Pop-Outs. All you need is a little bit of foam core, some tape and a knife, and a photo. Super easy to make and very cool. These look like they’d make great gifts.

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Postal Pictures: Gifts by Mail

By Elizabeth West
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If you want to delight your friends and family, send them a picture by snail mail. While I am a great fan of online photosharing websites, especially flickr.com, I have discovered that people are thrilled to receive a nicely presented print. Yes, you can always stuff a snapshot into an envelope, but a frame makes it a gift. Frames also allow recipients to display pictures on a table or shelf.

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Polling Place Photo Project

By John Watson
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Here’s a neat photo project you can get involved in this Tuesday.

The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America. — http://pollingplacephotoproject.org/

You’ll probably be there anyway (well, statistically, probably not, but… oh, nevermind), why not bring your camera along?

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Weekend assignment: Three shots

By John Watson
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Imagine you were stranded with a camera but only enough film/battery/storage for three shots. Just three. What would you shoot? Would you be more careful with your composition? Pay extra special attention to your shutter speed, focus, and other settings? In short, will you focus more on what you are doing? Consider this an experiment. Let’s find out if being more thoughtful about what and how you are shooting (rather than using the machine-gun method) changes your photography in a significant way.

To participate you must make this vow to yourself: “On Saturday (or Sunday), on my honor, I will shoot only three photographs. And to help keep myself honest, I won’t look at them until the following day.”

 

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Amy asks, “Are studio photographs of your kids worth it?”

By John Watson
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Her answer is a qualified “yes.” It’s obviously a personal choice—and nothing against photographers who do this style of work or folks who use them—but for me, I find that the everyday snaps I make of my family doing what they do are a much more cherished documentary of our lives than any posed studio portrait. Kids running down the hall, out of focus hands and faces grabbing for the lens, asleep in bed, cooking dinner—these are the moments life is made of.

Studio portraits are really, really nice mug shots. They can be beautiful. I even shoot photos like this myself. But nothing beats a large collection of everyday shots of people doing everyday things to tell a real story about a life—regardless of any perceived difference in quality.

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Photo statuettes

By John Watson
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StatuetteMpix.com has a neat new product called photo statuettes. These aren’t fully 3-dimensional statues but rather 1/8″ thick cutouts that are then attached to a base so they stand up. You submit any photo and someone at Mpix digitally removes the background to create the statuette. That’s why pricing is “per head” starting at $16. Pretty neat idea. I could see doing this for some of the dance photos I’ve taken.

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Raw Shooter Premium for a 200 GB workflow

By John Watson
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I picked up a copy of Digital Photo Pro magazine this past week and noticed an interesting article about RAW workflow (Shooting By The Million) by Andy Rouse, UK wildlife photographer. He recently returned from a 3-month trip to Antarctica with 200 GB of RAW images (about 25,000 photos). And he uses none other than Raw Shooter Premium (RSP) to process his files. Even if you’re not an RSP fan, the article is worth checking out to see how he deals with working through so many photographs and how his workflow technique can even help someone who has merely a few hundred photos to process from a shoot.

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Motorcycle photographer ahead

By John Watson
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That’s what the sign read as I rode my CBR-600 down Santiago Canyon toward Cook’s today. And in a few hundred feet, there he was by the side of the road under the shade of a small canopy armed with a laptop, tripod, and digital camera. An enterprising photography business had setup on the north bound side of the road to take photos of bikers as they headed south. The photographs were then wirelessly transmitted to a truck at Cook’s about 200 feet further on where bikers could view them and buy prints. Pretty clever.

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Weekend assignment: Available light night photography

By John Watson
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Capturing light is the essence of photography. So what do you do when the sun goes down? Fortunately, light is ever present, be it the sun, moon, stars, a single flashlight under the covers, or the glow of a city at night bustling with activity. Making photographs at night is a strange and wonderful thing.

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