PixelatedImage Blog

July’s desktop wallpaper. Shot one morning heading up past Ruhengeri in Rwanda towards Imbabazi Orphanage. Had to stop, stare, find it difficult not to think of the relatively recent horrors as children, already up and working, walk by with machetes. Strange juxtapositions we live with in this world.

This one is 1280×853. Click the image for the full-sized image, then right-click to save. If you want a bigger one I’ve made one for my 30″ Cinema Display, so this oughta be big enough for you. Click here for the big one.

Happy Birthday, Mom. The rest of you; tomorrow’s Canada Day, so I’m taking the day off - as such it’ll be a no-blog Tuesday and I suggest you use it to celebrate the good things Canada has given to the world: maple syrup, insulin, basketball, beavers, and, the enduring comedy talent that leaves here in droves to live in Los Angeles. They may live there, but we still claim them. Not so with Celine Dion. Y’all can keep her.

Sorry I’m late with today’s post; teaching a workshop all day and it just completely slipped my mind. Having said that I’m writing this entirely coffee-free this morning so don’t expect lucidity.

Brad Jarvis pointed me to David Tejada’s blog for a post about shooting through a diffusion panel as I mentionned yesterday - link HERE. I use this technique alot and love it.

The Intergalactic emporium of all things gear-related is B&H PHOTO in NYC and they’re offering big savings right now on selected Canon (expires July 19th), Leica (expires June 30th) and Nikon (no expiry mentionned but I’m pretty sure it’s not one of these eternal offers.) The nice thing about this annual B&H tradition is that it gives you immediate rebates without having to wait for weeks for a cheque to come. Or not come. You know how it works.

Steven Frischling, aka Flying With Fish, is holding The Great Mountainsmith Bag Giveaway and all you have to do is relay your worst travel scenario to him for a chance to win one of three Mountainsmith bags.

Travel Photographers take note - the PDN/Nat Geo Traveler WORLD IN FOCUS CONTEST is up and if you’ve not yet entered, the deadline is Sept 08/08. As with all these things, read the rules and conditions and give away only those rights you feel comfortable with.

Finally, a quote:

“When making a picture, the sound of the shutter can “click off” the scene. One immediately turns to look for the next thing to shoot. To avoid killing what you behlod, linger on it. Not merely saving the view for posterity, but savoring it in the now is the only antidote to this subtle occupational hazard.” - Jeff Berner.

Have a great weekend. Take some time to shoot something that moves you.

For all the talk about fancy gear, there are few pieces in my kit that I like more, and rely on more than a simple large diffuser. For learners looking to take their portraits up a notch - it’s hard to beat a good diffuser/reflector panel.

A diffuser softens the light and removes harsh shadows. Placed directly over a subject it allows me to shoot on-location in Africa at high noon. Placed to the side, even without a reflective panel, the diffuser bounces enough to provide some subtle fill. It even makes a great flag when flare is a problem. I’ve used the black panel as an ad hoc background, and the gold panel to bounce back some fill when I’m backlighting a subject with the low evening sun.

When I travel on assignment work I use a large, and now battered, 5 in 1 collapsible reflector disc. When I am at home it’s a Medium Lastolite Skylite. It measures 42″x78″ and If I could take this on every shoot, I would. It breaks down easily for transport, though it’s still rather long when packed, but really well-built and sturdy.

I like my Skylite for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, as a diffuser it makes the light absolutely gorgeous. Gor. Geous. Secondly, it’s really rigid which allows me to mount it on a couple stands, sandbag it, and not have to worry about it flopping all over the place. Thirdly - its changeable panels allows me to have a diffuser, a white panel, silver, gold, or black, relatively quickly

On the field the Skylite is just too big for my uses. It would add one more challenge to packing and transportation that I don’t want to add right now. So I use the collapsible 5-in-1 but I could do away with it and just use the Lastolites.

The downside? Like any piece of good gear they aren’t cheap. I bought my initial kit at B&H for $349 - that includes the frame, the diffusion panel, the white/sunfire panel, a crossbar/handle, and a carrying bag. But for the quality and versatility I get out of it, I’d pay it again in a heartbeat. Lastolite also has small Skylites (42″x42″) and a large one (78″x78″).

If the Lastolite Skylite isn’t in your budget, try a large oval 5-in-1, like this one that sells for $80. Either way, once you’ve played with simple diffusion and bounce lighting you’ll be spoiled. It’s not fancy, and no one is going to ask you what brand of reflector you use - but your images will look fantastic.

I suspect the democratic nature of photography - the fact that anyone can pick up a camera and begin making photographs without the kind of talent or training needed to be, say, a painter - is what is responsible for some of the best and worst of this art. The best because it puts it into the hands of children and absolute amateurs and allows nearly immediate intuitive expression. The worst because that same quality also encourages the notion that no training is needed. With the accessibility of excellent digital cameras suddenly everyone is a photographer.

And there’s the rub. Photography, for all its accessibility remains a visual means of expression - a language - and without the knowledge of the alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, we’re wildly babbling away. Oh, we’re talking alright, we just aren’t saying anything.

I’ve preached on this before, the need for visual literacy, but this time I want to point you to two books that are exceptional guides to even the professional. Some of us would rather lick the dust off our sensor with a wet tongue than read a book, I get that. But until there’s a way to absorb this by osmosis, we may just have to suck it up.

The first book is one I’ve pointed to before. Freeman Patterson’s Photography and the Art of Seeing.

The second is Michael Freeman’s The Photographer’s Eye. When I first mentionned Freeman’s book I got a number of comments/emails confirming my suspicions - this is a truly excellent book. The premise of The Photographer’s Eye is that the way you compose a photograph influences how someone sees it, and from that premise Freeman digs into the hows and whys of composition in a substantial way. This is a meaty book and you’ll probably have to read it with pen and highlighter in hand. Some pages I’ve had to read twice just to get the gist. But at the end of the day, if we’re looking to hone our craft, this will take us closer to powerful images than all the gear reviews and pithy little blog articles we spend so much time amusing ourselves with.

You owe it to your craft to read - and study - this book. Highly recommended. I’ll be re-reading this again over the coming weeks, once just wasn’t enough.

I had to get it out. Won’t happen again. Check back tomorrow for a post about a book that can help reduce your need for the Un-Suck Filter. Folks reading this on an RSS feed will have to click in to see the image. It’s silly and cynical. You’ve been warned.

My sponsors, ZINK, the technologists behind the new pocket-sized Polaroid mobile printer dubbed “PoGo” just told me the product is about to hit the market. The Polaroid website says PoGo hits Best Buy stores (probably in USA only) on July 06, 2008, and in Target on July 20, 2008.

Estimated price will be $149.

I will do a review as soon as I can. In the mean time think about how many times you’ve wished you could give a subject a copy of their photograph, think about how much easier it is to give a copy then and there, rather than waiting until you get home and hoping you remember. Think how useful this might be in getting that model release signed or getting a reluctant model to spend a few moments with you. In the places I work these small photographs would be kept as priceless family heirlooms - not bad for a thirty-cent piece of paper.

It will weigh 8 oz. (without battery) and measures about 1″ by 3″ by 4.5″. Each 2×3 print takes 60 seconds to make. Downsides? 15 prints per battery charge, but extra batteries are available. There’s no inks to replace and the paper pricing looks like it won’t kill us either. Here’s the website.

It’s just past noon on Monday and I’m only now getting to posting something. We had guests this weekend and I’m only now recovering. I usually put in more work over the weekends, just didn’t get to it this weekend so it all got bumped.

Ok, lame apologies aside, here’s something I discovered this morning while trying to organize some new projects. It’ll appeal to you if you’re visually oriented and kind of anal-retentive about being organized. Another apology: this is Mac OS-X only. I’m on Leopard but assuming it works on Tiger too. Could be wrong. For those that are left out - sorry. (Update - I’m told this is OSX Leopard only)

I like my desktop and folders to look good. I also like them to be easily identified and since I am a visual person I’ve taken to making custom icons for important files. But this morning I just wanted a down and dirty icon for a new project folder. Here’s what I did:

1. Make an image and make it square.

2. Save it in Photoshop as a JPEG.

3. Find that JPG in the finder, click it and hit CMD+i - this will bring up an info pallette with a little thumbnail at the top. Click that and hit cmd+c (Update - Follow the instructions, and the REVERSE of the image below. I mixed it up. Sorry.)

4. Find the folder for which you want this ad hoc icon, click it, hit cmd+i, find the little thumbnail as you did in step 3, click it and hit cmd+v

5. That should paste a new icon. If you used a square you won’t have transparency issues. Now just delete the jpg image and you’re done.

Head over to GKB’s blog for a fun interview with yours truly. It’s brief, but fun. Thanks to GKB for taking the time. Link HERE.

Have a great weekend, folks.

James Nachtwey opens the LOOK3 Festival - read about the inspiring conversation between Nachtwey and Time’s MaryAnne Golon on PDN Online HERE. I respect this man more than I can say. (If you’ve never seen his TED speech, head over HERE to A Thousand Words where Jordan Nielsen has it posted.)

From that PDN article:

“When you see so much pain and so much sadness, do you feel you still have the capacity to love?”

That question drew oooohs as it was asked by Time’s MaryAnne Golon to photographer James Nachtwey. His answer drew a thunderous standing ovation.

“Witnessing pain and sadness is an act of love,” he said.

In light of that the rest of this stuff is just trivial.

__

David Ziser has an excellent post on building your client base. Read it HERE.

The LAYERS Blog has an excellent tutorial up on solving underexposure problems. Most articles of this sort scratch the surface but don’t get beyond the “move the exposure slider over” kind of advice. This one is solid and I guarantee you’ll learn something new (guarantee not actually guaranteed.) Link HERE.

Moose Peterson linked to a deal on the Epson R1900 if you’re a NAPP member. And you should be. Check out Moose’s post for the links and details. If you’re not a NAPP member, here’s another solid reason to join.

Scott Kelby wrote a candid post yesterday about forgetting to put a memory card into the camera. Read that HERE and then go HERE for my solution to it (if you’re a Canon shooter.)

Every once in a while a camera comes out just at the right time, and the Canon G9 seems to have done that. I’ve been watching for signs of discontent among the masses and so far it seems everyone loves this camera. Matt Brandon has it, loves it. When Scott Kelby and I were talking about it he said he loved it and particularly praised the video quality. Gavin Gough just got one and his first impressions seem about the same as everyone else’s. All my colleagues at the Travel Photographers Network seem to be raving about the G9 as well and the number of working pros now packing the G9 as a take-along or scouting camera just keeps growing.

In fact, the only negative thing I’ve yet to hear is that the noise above ISO 400 is pretty bad. But that’s par for the course with a point and shoot - the sensors are small and while companies like Canon are making strides you just can’t expect the sensor on a G9 to perform in anywhere the same ballpark as a 5D. It’s an unfair comparison. Sure, there’s the new Sigma DP-1, but by all accounts it’s slow as molasses and very expensive.

So, like I said, the mob has spoken. Sharon’s older Powershot died a long undignified death this year and she’s taken over my Leica DLux-3, which is sexy, but it’s no G9. Once B&H Photo gets them back in stock I’m placing my order and will do a review at some point. I’m also looking at the WP-DC21 underwater housing so I can take it snorkeling. In places like the beach, a small camera and a housing makes photography much more carefree.

Any G9ers want to confirm all this or warn us all away from it due to some horribly scarring incident you had with one? Chime in.