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John Watson is the original founder of Photodoto. If you're interested in what John has been up to, you can browse his personal blog.

Do you hate it when people say “cheese”?

By John Watson
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Continuing on my journey towards total photo snobbery, I’ve come to realize that my friends and family and I have different ideas about what makes a “good” photo. I’ve actually gotten exasperated requests at Christmas to “just send regular pictures.”

I prefer a documentary style approach to photographing my family and friends. I prefer more reality in my photos, capturing people doing stuff besides posing, looking natural and relaxed. But many people prefer smiling mug shots. I don’t go all prima donna and refuse to take requests. No, I just bury my pain deep inside of me where it can fester and create raging internal conflict and turmoil useful for artistic endeavors, smile, and say, “Say cheese!”

They like but I prefer

They like but I prefer

They like but I prefer

They like but I prefer

I give them both. Once in a while, they like my version better.

… Continue reading Do you hate it when people say “cheese”?

Big and Tasty Food Photography Tips Roundup

By John Watson
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I’ve got a nice roundup here of food photography sources with a ton of great tips, tutorials, and videos for making food look tasty on camera. How seriously you take this probably depends to some extent on whether you’ve ever heard the term “food stylist.”

Last week felt like food photography week with several blogs posting about it. It was interesting timing for me because I’ve coincidentally been shooting a lot of food for the past couple of weeks. I don’t have much to add tip-wise except this: it is more challenging than it looks.

If you’ve got food photo tips, please share them in the comments!

Photo credit, above right: Mr. G (cc-by)

Tips, Tutorials, & Inspiration

The Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips, Photojojo.com

Tips from Pixar’s Sharon Calahan, the director of photography for Ratatouille, Becks & Posh

Food Photography—An Introduction, Digital-photography-school.com

Tasteful Food Photography,

… Continue reading Big and Tasty Food Photography Tips Roundup

Poll: How would you classify yourself as a photographer?

By John Watson
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Let’s get to know each other a little better. To me, a beginner is someone who is just starting out or who doesn’t have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of photography (shutter speed, aperture, depth of field). We were all beginners once.

Intermediate photographers have mastered the basics and have started to explore more advanced topics like lighting and composition. Advanced photographers are at a stage where they are refining their craft and possibly specializing in specific disciplines.

{democracy:2}

… Continue reading Poll: How would you classify yourself as a photographer?

Review: Arizona Highways Photography Guide

By John Watson
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Arizona Highways Photography Guide

The Arizona Highways Photography Guide was written by the editors and contributors to Arizona Highways magazine. It’s broken down into three parts of about 100 pages each: The Basics, Types of Photography, and Places for Photography. Read on for a short review and how you can get a free copy.

This book covers a broad range of photography topics and, while it doesn’t go very deeply into any of them, it does provide a lot of very practical information. Every single page is filled with beautiful color photos that are used to illustrate a point and are each accompanied by a useful tip.

For example, page 40 includes this tip under a photo of a fast-moving motorcyle rider: “By using a slow enough shutter speed and panning with the motocross rider’s movement, the photographer was able to blur the background to heighten the sense of speed,” and it includes the shutter speed, ISO, and aperture settings.

Page 78 discusses depth of field and hyperfocal distances with helpful and clear diagrams. The tip on page 138 explains how color plays an important role in the composition of a photo of a bobcat at the top of the page.

… Continue reading Review: Arizona Highways Photography Guide

Review: Adobe Photoshop goes online with Photoshop Express

By John Watson
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Photoshop Express featured Adobe has finally opened up the beta of Photoshop Express, the long-awaited online version of Adobe Photoshop. I’ve just finished running it through it’s paces and I am impressed.

Photoshop express requires registration to use. You get access to the online editing tool and a relatively meager 2 GB of space for photos at a custom URL which you can organize into a slick public gallery and slideshows. It won’t replace dedicated photo sharing like Flickr (no comments, limited interaction) but for casual users just being able to share a few albums and slideshows may be enough. By default, photos you upload to the service are private until you move them into your public gallery.

Photoshop Express

The interface should be immediately familiar to anyone who has used Adobe Lightroom. The default view of your photos mimics Lightroom’s browse mode and even includes the ability to rate and caption your uploads. Unfortunately it does not support RAW editing. That would have been killer.

Editing is also very much like Lightroom. Unlike Photoshop, it does not support layers, masking, or really any of the features that make Photoshop,

… Continue reading Review: Adobe Photoshop goes online with Photoshop Express

Selecting foregrounds in the GIMP (video)

By John Watson
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This video is a quick demonstration of the foreground selection tool in the GIMP, a powerful and free image editing application. The foreground selection tool gives photographers a quick and easy way to isolate portions of a photograph for masking or other effects.

Music by sunbyrn.

… Continue reading Selecting foregrounds in the GIMP (video)

Tethered shooting on Ubuntu Linux using gPhoto2

By John Watson
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Photo by Jacob Garcia

My D70, like most digital cameras, has a USB port that allows me to connect it to my computer and download photos. Many cameras also allow you to control them using your computer when they are connected. This is called tethered shooting. You click the shutter and a few seconds later the photo is displayed in all its glory on your big screen monitor. This can come in extremely handy in studio situations. It’s a great trick for quickly checking that you’re capturing the shots you want without squinting at a 2 or 3 inch LCD.

On a lark it occurred to me to do something goofy with my camera (more on that in a minute). On the way to crazy town I came up with a way to do basic tethered shooting on Linux.

… Continue reading Tethered shooting on Ubuntu Linux using gPhoto2

Photographers are visual liars

By John Watson
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Maybe not all of them and maybe not intentionally (in some cases) but, more or less, almost every photograph is a lie of sorts. I’m not even talking about post-processing. We portray what we want the world to see. Each one is a view of the world from the photographer’s viewpoint. The only photos I can think of that might be totally honest are documentary and clinical in nature like, perhaps, crime scene photos. But I even wonder about those.

Bachelor pad

… Continue reading Photographers are visual liars

The making of a “simple” snapshot: a photo essay in four frames

By John Watson
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Last night, as she tucked our son into bed, my lovely and talented wife came into the office in search of the camera. Our conversation went something like this:

Wife: “Where’s the camera? I need to take a picture of your son. How do you get this thing off the tripod?”

Tripod head

Me: “Wait a second. You’re going to need some light.”
Wife: “This is supposed to just be a quick snapshot.”
Me: “Do you want a blurry mess or do you want to be able to see what’s in the photo?” (Set flash to TTL BL, +1 EV, on-camera, oriented to bounce off ceiling and adjacent wall. Camera set to ISO 200, P mode, +0.7 EV)

SB-800 Speedlight

Me: “Oops, you’re going to need some film.”
Wife: Grrr.

Flash memory

Me: “There you go.”
Wife: *Click!*
Me: “Hey, presto!”

Snapshot

Scene and composition: The Lovely and Talented Wife
Camera setup: Me

… Continue reading The making of a “simple” snapshot: a photo essay in four frames

Anatomy of a photo: The silly faces project

By John Watson
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The silly faces projectI recently published this photo on Flickr (click here to view larger) and it received a lot of interest so I thought I’d share how I made it. Taking 64 photos like this may look like a lot of work but it can actually be done quite easily. Here’s how I did it.

First of all, I used two flashes for lighting. An on camera SB-800 with diffusion dome pointed up and back and an off-camera SB-600 bounced into an umbrella to the right of the camera. You can do this without fancy lighting equipment. The important thing to remember is simply that the lighting must be consistent from shot to shot.

… Continue reading Anatomy of a photo: The silly faces project

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