Bacon Lettuce Photo

by Joe

The New Jersey shore is one of my favorite subjects. Intending to shoot something a little different last week, I’d headed to Island Beach State Park, armed only with my Lensbaby Composer mounted on my Nikon D200, hoping to get some dreamily blurry seascapes. The first thing I saw when kicked off my shoes was this sign, posted at the entrance to the public beach and pointing directly at the sea. My first shot of the day is usually a throw-away — a sort of warm-up to the rest of the shoot — but I knew this one would be a keeper. The urge to shoot it was undeniable. It was bizarre, ironic, and cinematically irresistible.

I shot this in color and cropped and converted it to black and white in PS CS3. I cropped the image because the f/5.6 aperture ring I was using on my Lensbaby blurred the seagrass on the right side of the frame so dramatically that it detracted from the sign. And I converted to black and white because the “happy” mood evoked by the deep blue sky and vivid green grass made the sign seem more cute than odd. As an added bonus, when I pumped up the blue filter in the bw conversion process, the sky grew more dramatic and “smoky.”

If you ever go this beach, be sure to check out the sign on the other side of this dune: “NO BARE FEET.”

No kidding.

I love this photo for a couple reasons.

The first being its just a great black and white, the contrast is perfect. I think that is what makes a black and white so dramatic is the amount of contrast. If you simply just take a digital image and drop the saturation it’s still not the same. If you look at black and white photos from a roll of film the contrast tends to be deeper. However, that is my opinion and is subjective.

The second being the tilt shift effect. It adds this mystical feel to the photo along with the black and white and dark clouds that give it this ominous feel.

I don’t know if I would have stopped to look at this photo if it were in color. Not everything is better in color.

Check out more of Pam’s work on her website.

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by Joe

I was inspired to do this piece because of a recent Art History lecture I had on Andy Warhol. Although most of his work isn’t done by himself, he was the first artist to really embrace ‘Hollywood plastic’, and question society itself. He loved the fakeness in Hollywood and loved the celebrity image and used it to send a message to people about the kind of masks people wear. So I was really inspired to create something about society, and how its never ending on how much they can criticize you and make you want to change everything about you. The technical aspect of the photo is this: AB800 with large softbox at 1/4 power to camera left. The editing is fairly simple, just some curves and color adjustments in Photoshop.

The soft lighting in this photo is what initially caught my eye. As Katie stated it was produced by using a softbox.

You can check out more Katie’s work on her flickr photo stream and her myspace.

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by Damian

The shots were taken near the end of PhotoCampMilwaukee, while most people were out on an evening photo walk. I was in the Chromatarium at Bucketworks, where we had put up colorful backdrops, and decided that since I missed the strobist session earlier in the day, I would do my own. Of course, that meant having to be the photographer and the model. I set up my flash on a stand, and my camera on a tripod, and used a remote to take the shots. Since I got sick of running around behind the camera to see the screen after each shot, I actually took a mirror and leaned it against a chair to see the camera screen so I could position myself for the next shot. I took a lot of shots, but I think a few of them turned out pretty nice. (And the iLovePhotos shirt just adds an extra bit of coolness to it!) Sadly a few hours later my flash died, so I guess that puts my strobist career on hold until I can replace it. PhotoCampMilwaukee was a ton of fun though, and I learned a lot.

When I processed the photos I ended up really pumping up the color in the wall, so I had to bring the saturation down on the skin tones, which gave me the idea to do the selective coloring version.

PhotoCampMilwaukee was held on Saturday May 2, 2009 at Milwaukee, WI. He was the organizer behind this great event.  PhotoCampMilwaukee was a one-day event fully focused on photography, for people who love photography. They had professionals as well as hobbyists, and had a full schedule planned including photoshoots, photowalks, demos of software, discussions of techniques, digital workflows, cameras, accessories, and related equipment, and just plain old fun and useful things to do with photos, photography, cameras, etc. iLovePhotos had the pleasure of sponsoring this event.

You can check out more of Pete’s photos and uploaded photos from participants of PhotoCampMilwaukee.

by Joe

“I am doing a 365 and on that day I didn’t have a photo yet. So I went into the kitchen at work and snapped this shot. No setup, no special lighting. I post processed it in photoshop to get the tones I wanted and added some vector graphics. That’s about it :)”

365 is when you take a picture of something, usually yourself, once a day and post it for one year. 365 days in the year so you end up with 365 photos. The trick is trying to be creative after all that time.

Here is a 365 project by a photographer named Julie that caught my eye. Below is a slideshow of some of her work.

Also, here is a flickr group that you can join if you’d like to start your very own 365 project.

by Joe

I recently contacted Photographer Corey Lack about an awesome photo that he took and asked him if he wouldn’t mind sharing how he was able to capture this shot. He went above and beyond submitting a video with how he was able to edit this photo.

Thanks to Corey we can actually see the process he took to make this photo pop like it does. This is awesome, thanks Corey for taking the time to demonstrate this process, I learned some new things! If you like this, make sure you check out Corey’s website and see some of his other amazing photos.

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by Joe

Not entirely sure what the actual name of this technique is but for now I’m calling it “miniaturizing.”

Take a photo and using some Photoshop tricks you can trick your eyes into thinking that they’re looking at a model of an actual full sized image.

Take these two images for example:

Before

After

Here is how it’s done:

Miniaturizing Photos from Joe Philipson on Vimeo.

We had a “Today’s Bacon” where someone miniaturized a football stadium.

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by Joe

This photo is a test shot from my color film class at college. We are doing a color in cinema project and the movie I chose was American Beauty. For this shot I added my own element with the black rose. I shot this in one of the studio bays at the school. it involved my camera being on a studio stand about 8 feet high pointing straight down with a ladder over the models legs so I could reach it. I boomed a large softboxed speedotron strobe over the top on the side at a slight angle and placed a strip light behind the models head. I don’t remember the exact settings of the strobe. As for props… I used 4 red twin size sheets to help fill in the space between the rose petals because I didn’t have as many as the movie. I also used 4 boxes of 500 count rose petals from the wedding section at Hobby Lobby. That means it was supposed to be about 2000 petals but it sure didn’t look like it! I did some minor color adjustments and added a vignette in Camera Raw and then smoothed the skin just a little in photoshop.

What a great idea and execution! What makes this photo is perspective.
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by Joe

“Photography saved my life, when I moved from Russia to America and felt completely alone, camera became my best friend. From that moment I carried camera anywhere I go, no matter how heavy it is. This was taking in SF. Best part about SF is fog, which creates great overcast with no shadows! My whole idea was to take a shot from a different perspective, make old subject like Golden Gate Bridge look new and interesting. After about 50 pictures I found my winner. Image taking by Nikon D80 and processed in Photoshop, no HDR. I Use different processing plug in’s (check www.deviantart.com and www.topazlabs.com for plug-ins!) Then I apply multiple amounts of textures. (Most textures created by me) It’s all about love to photography, patience and hard work!

You can visit Arina’s photography site for more inspiration. Her photos are a great way to display the use of textures to add a new dimension of quality to your images.
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by Joe

Self portrait shot under natural light. This image was more a result of trial and error that involves my love for graceful, dancer-like pose/movement and my current interest in artistically blurred images. I shot myself sitting on the floor, making subtle body movement as I got into the pose within 2 seconds of clicking on the wireless remote, and did wind up with several shots with varying sharpness and blurs. At post-production stage using photoshop, I extended the dress (which was originally just over the knee in length) and added fabric to cover my left arm to further enhance the flowy feel. These were done by working on copies of a portion of the dress, using a combination of the clone tool, transformation (warp) tool, healing brush, as well as masking to join the pieces together and also get the right translucency of the fabric. I then added more depth to the lighting and tones I blended duplicate layers together (commonly known as Orton technique), combined with some dodge & burn. Then finally, subtle grain was added.

Check out more of Vanessa’s Work. We’ve covered the Orton Technique here on BLP. This is a great image that displays some of the varying aspects of photography and displays how using flashes and slower shutter speeds can convey emotion in your image. What makes this photo especially amazing is that it is a self-portrait. Well done Vanessa.

by Joe

I think what made me take this photo, was the influence of having seen so many inside shots of old passenger trains, and old busses. Stepping inside this vintage car, my camera automatically lifted for the shot. I did have a vision of using HDR, but I was too lazy to set for multiple images. Since I was shooting in RAW format, I knew I could produce a descent HDR anyway; at least in the style that I enjoy creating.
The image was processed with Photomatix single RAW HDR conversion, with somewhat exaggerated settings. Then processed in Adobe Photoshop CS3, where Neatimage was used to reduce noise, and a texture layer was added to enhance the feel of depth and color.

Canon EOS 40D
Canon EF 24-70mm 1:2.8 USM lens
1/64s
f2.8
ISO 400

Allen has definitely shown how someone can use HDR’s to make photos look like paintings or masterpiece works of art. Here’s another image of his that caught my eye.

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