PotD #43: A Light In Shining Armour

Todays post is about choices. I saw the light the lamp was making on the wall, and knew I had to get a shot of it. I shot for a while with my DSLR with a wide angle, not quite getting what I saw. So I went and got one of my DUC:s, and got this at the first shot.

Of course with some editing I could have gotten the same tones in the lights with the DSLR, but here I got what I wanted instantly. And with a quality I cand stand, even though it is a low light shot. The moral of the story? The picture is always more important than what camera you use to get it.

Also, todays post is a cross-post from another blog, ShutterCentral, where I and friends post non-DUC-related pictures daily. Check it out.

These are not the Polaroids you're looking for...

The Polaroid self-developing instant film is a modern icon, known and recognized far beoynd the realm of photographers. Last year Polaroid ceased production of thir instant film. Why? Because digital cameras are even more instant, and produce pictures with better colors at a lower price. So Polaroid lost to the digital era.

As always, we do not fully appreciate things until they are gone. Polaroids are getting more and more press as we speak. Everyone wants to work with Polaroids. But press alone is not enough to save the film production.

However, a group of people have started what seems to be an almost impossible project, to revive instant film. They have bought the machinery from Polarioids factory in Enschede, Netherlands, and aim to start production of a new, improved instant film in 2010. At the moment, they call themself The Impossible Project. Best of luck to you, guys!

But do you really want an improved instant film? Speaking for myself, the real beauty of Polaroid instant film lies in the wonderful colors the developed pictures show. It is a world of very calm colors. And when seen through the plastic lens of one of Polaroids cheaper cameras, showing heavy vignetting and other strange artefacts. You can't get that with digital.

Poladroid

Or can you? Why, of course you can! You can either spend som time in your favourite photo program, tweaking your picture until it resembles a Polaroid. Or, you can download the application Poladroid for Macintosh or Windows computers. It is currently in beta and freeware. It alters any .jpg image into a 1392 x 1692 Polaroid-lookalike, complete with borders (and fingerprints, if you should so wish). It even mimics the sound and development, for those of us who like to see the picture appear. You can shake the picture for a speedier development. All in all a very nice app.

Poladroid polaroid

iPhone apps

And for us iPhone-users, there are a bunch of apps in the App Store that help us develop (sorry) a fancy for faked Polaroids. I am currently using three, Polarock, Polarize and CameraBag.

Polarize

At the moment, my favorite is Polarize. As with most iPhone Camera filter programs, you can take a picture within the app, or you can choose an existing image. The resulting pictures are fixed in size to 450 x 520 pixels. I would like to see a way to save a larger picture even though those things eat system resources.... Polarize is free (as in beer), it does beautiful borders and vignettes, and good although a bit hard colors. You can add up to 14 characters that gets written to the bottom frame of the saved picture. A winner.

Polarize polaroid

Polarock

Our next contestant is Polarock. It is yours for the small sum of whatever-is your-localized-version-of iTunes-equivalent-of-$0.99, so it is unlikely to push you out in the streets, even during the recession. Unlike Polarize it allows for a lot of different effects, called "styles", including "B&W", which turns the picture black and white , "Center" which gives a hard vignette, and one called "Grunge". The latter makes the picture look like you had found it in the street.  I am not totally satisfied with the interface used in applying the styles, and anyway, if I want to fiddle with effects I will load up Photoshop, OK? Polarock also lets you write on the frame, btw. The main drawback here is the size of the saved image. 320 x 461 makes for quick application of the different styles, but it is starting to get painfully small. I'm not altogether impressed.

Polarize polaroid

CameraBag

Finally the multi-effect CameraBag has a Polaroid effect, called "Instant". It is a nice app, with some really nice effects, but as we are only interested in Polaroid clones at this moment we will return to CameraBag's other filters in a future post. Thankfully all the different filters  can be individually switched on and off. So with just the Instant filter on you can use CameraBag as a Polaroid camera. You can change the size of the output picture, up to 1010 x 1202, making the resulting images the largest by far. (Note: this applies only to the Instant filter, other CameraBag filters have different max sizes based on picture width/heigh ratio.) The color scheme does a very good Polaroid imitation, with an overall red shift. But it does not do a structured frame, nor can you add text to the frame. And last but not least, at $2.99 it is the most expensive app of the three. Photographic result: Very good. Fun Polarioid iPhone app: close but no cigar.

CameraBag polaroid

To conclude, if you have an iPhone, get Polarize. If not, use Poladroid. If you do not have a computer, or use a system that can not run Poladroid, wait for the Impossible Project to succeed.

Are there any other Polaroid apps for digital pictures out there I have not mentioned? Please add them in the comments.

PotD #42: Winter Wonderland

Landscapes almost always get better with DSLR:s. There are so much you can do with depth of field, extreme wide angles and such. But do not despair, once in a while you can get an OK shot in with your DUC too.

One of the oldest tricks to landscaping is to make the picture more interesting by putting something in the foreground. Problem: the foreground should be in focus. You can never be too sure on where your DUC is going to focus. Grass and twigs and stuff usually does not trig the auto focus.

A useful trick is to hold your hand out just behind the grass, let the camera focus on the hand, and then use the focus lock. That works well, as long as your camera has a focus lock. If the camera have a macro setting you can try to use that. Hopefully it will help you focus better on the foreground.

Make Your Camera Do Less

PhotoAficionado has an article about lo-fi photography, that on and off borders on what we do here. The article has some good tips for those of you who are stuck with shiny modern cameras, but still want to take pictures with lots of unforseen effects. It talks into filters, bending the cameras settings, and postproduction.

I am not really sure if it is a good thing to "dumb down" your camera. I belive that you should always try to get as good a picture as you possibly can from your camera. And from that, you have to decide what kind of picture you can produce with the camera. I think you can take marvellous pictures holding a DUC from 1999 with 1.5 megapixels, but I would not bring it as my main camera on a portrait job. And I would not spend fifty minutes in photoshop to make my DSLR-shots look like they were taken with a Holga. Use the right tool for each job.

Link: Digital Lo-Fi at PhotoAficionado



Disclaimer: It is always more important that you stay creative than it is that you follow anybody elses rules. Including mine. ;-)

PotD #41: Mmm

I have never worried about blown highlights while shooting DUC:s. To me, white is just another color you can paint with. Although sometimes, I do cover the flash with gaffers tape. Not here though.

Noise Is For Heroes!

Is this familiar: You let the camera's Auto-setting do the work, and when you look at your pictures they're all snapped with what appears to be a six-figure ISO. You can barely work out what is what in the picture, or even if you actually shot something or didn't just forget to remove the cap. The curse of digital noise in small cameras has struck again.

Well, this is a perfect moment to be positive in order to be more creative. (BePoToBeMoC. Yes, I do like abbreviations. Thanks for asking!) So what to do with digital noise?

The easiest way to make digital noise look good is to convert your picture to grayscale. On some cameras you can chose to do this directly in the camera. I do this occasionally in the iPhone, but seldom in other cameras. I prefer to do the conversion manually in the development phase. This is because sometimes the pics actually looks good in color, and I want to continue working with that instead of converting it to b/w.

More is less

You may be tempted to try and hide the noise. There are lots of software out there for noise removal, with different results. None of them, as far as I know are capable of removing noise from a picture consisting more or less of noise. So, if you can't remove it or hide it, what to do?

Exaggerate! Just as C. Auguste Dupin realizes in The Purloined Letter. The best way to hide something is out in plain view. If you make the digital noise the hero of your picture no one will ever question the ludicrously amounts of it.

Take this picture, for example. The thing i like in the picture are the oniony (no, that is not a real word) light bulbs. But a can not really make the picture interesting as it is. So, I shoot with one of my trusted DUCs, and suddenly I get loads of noise as well as some jpeg artifacts to work with. I then pull at all the levers in Aperture, and voila! I get the picture at the top of this post, a nice result with good graphic qualities.

The reason I shoot black and white with the iPhone? There I use the nice app Old Camera, that also gives me random effects, tinting etc. Check it out. We will get back to software systems in future posts, if you got any favorite software that gives an instant DUC-feel, please share in the comments.

Oh, you don't get the title of this post? It is from an old song by the Damned, about the benefits of cheap digital cameras, called Noise Noise Noise.

Two-Dimensional Art

Todd Smith, who I just discovered on Twitter, is a good photographer who is doing some thinking on the side. This blog post of his deals with "flattening of the layers", as Photoshops would put it. The problem we have as photographers when we make two dimensional object from a three dimensional reality.

My favourite line: "Good photography distills the essence of the world and makes it fit inside a picture frame." That is a very good summary of what we all do as photographers. Also, Todd refrains from any talk about you needing any special technology for this. You do not need any special type of pen to write a good book, do you?

PotD #40: Honeycomb Light

I know, I know, there are a great amount of pictures if lamps here. I blame the season, it is hard to find natural light at the moment. It will get better as the light slowly returns to northern Europe.

But what I was supposed to say today was this: Lamp posts are your friends! If you want a crisp shot in bad light with a DUC, head for the nearest lamp post. Press the camera against the post, and bam! Instant tripod. OK, so it is not quite as versatile as a good 'pod. But it is way more rigid, and takes up less place in your pack. (Note: do not remove lamp post, or bring it along as you leave. It is probably illegal.)

If you are somwhere where there are no lamp posts, use a tree, a house, or a big rock to steady your camera. Do not use a car, since you are likely to set off the alarm. And if you can't find a motive, you can always turn the camera upwards and shoot the lamp itself. Just watch out for dogs.

PotD #39: Pointillism In the Night

One of yesterday's articles at Gizmondo talks about Why More Megapixels Isn't Always More Better. Good article, good thinking. Apart from some strange bias against digital noise, that is. As today's picture show us, digital noise can be almost poetic.

PotD #38: Squarebot

I have a penchant for looking at things until they start to look like robots. You should find at least one robot previously unknown to you in your daily surrondings. Just look, wait, and look again. Robots tend to hide in symmetry.

PotD #37: Grainy Guitar

When in doubt, take a picture of an instrument. Guitars and brass instruments are excellent while kazoos... ...not as much. But it is hard to take a dull instrument shot. Especially if you got a macro. You can get much closer than what I did here, and then your pictures really start to shine!

24 Picture Limit - Creativity Excercise One

Do you ever dream yourself back to the good old days horrible time when your camera only held twenty-four pictures? Where, to make it even worse, you could not erase any of the pictures once you had taken them. If so, you are sure to appreciate todays exercise. This is an easy exercise in limitations and concentration you can do almost anywhere, anytime.

You start by giving yourself a set time. Five, fifteen, thirty minutes or what suits you and the surroundings. If you got a timer or an eggclock, set it. In this time you should take tweny-four different pictures, with any camera of your fancy. DSLR, DUC, whatever. Sort of an one-person photo contest, where you yourself is the judge.

If you never done this before, chances are you will not be able to use more than one or two of the resulting pictures, but that is not the point. The goal of the excercis is to draw harder and harder limits around yourself, until you can do this in four minutes or less. This gives you roughly ten seconds per picture.

With ten seconds between pictures I can hardly move. How do I take different pictures from a single spot? You have to rethink a bit. Height, for example is a thing I myself has to fight when I take pictures. It is so easy to forget that the camera, unlike yoour eyes, do not have to reside at eye-height. It can reside at camera-height, which is almost anywhere.

Take pictures of youself. It has not to be perfect portraits. Shoot your T-shirt. Check your bald spot. Wing an ear.


Put your camera on the ground. Things look very different from there. Do you have a monopod? Put the camera on it, stretch out, and let the camera see the world from a basketball player perspective. With the help of the timer, you can lock your camera inside your fridge, to once and for all check out whether the little light inside actually goes out when you close the door.

As soon as you realise that you do not have to hold your head pressed to the back of the camera, you are free. And thats one of the points with limitations. They make you understand freedom. Remember, creativity lives in ideas, not in tools.

Try to do a 24P-set at least once a week. It's easy. Give yourself a random timelimit. "I will finish before my lunch date shows up". Or until the next train, until the meeting starts etc etc. This is a easy way to build creativity muscles. Before long, you will find yourself capable of actually doing twenty-four good pictures in a row, without any fillers or throw-aways.

PotD #36: Fan Base

I like to play with blurred images. Don't get me wrong here, I love sharp image. But in order not to go to far in that direction, once in a while excercises into blurdom are necessary. This on is taken a late evening walking around indoors while constantly moving the camera around. The beams making a vague fan pattern from the sharp light in the lower left corner is what made me keep this one.

PotD #35: Parking Space

Composition is something one will never quite master. Sure, there are the basics, rule of third, horisontal line, balancing. Learn them, then forget them. Think different! In this picture, the car is not the real center. This is a picture of a white triangle drawn by the right frame, the red car and the dark base. For the sake of clartiy, I will show you:

See? When you start thinking of the possibilities of using objects and shadows to create shapes, you start looking at things differently.

PotD #34: Mirror Image

Why did I hire Francis Bacon to take my picture! This looks nothing like me!

Well, actually, I shot this one myself, but you already figured that out. This one is shot in an almost dark room, with f/1.9 at 1/4 of a second, while I was rotating the camera around my head. We will be looking at portraits in lots of different forms in the future.

PotD #33: Musical Chairs

I like to walk around and take pictures in bad light with the camera moving. Sometimes you can make out some details, sometimes you can not. I think the blur gives a slightly dreamy feeling, almost surreal. These chairs feels threatening, don't you think?

PotD #32: UFO

You can always take a picture of the nearest streetlamp, anytime, anywhere. Well, obviously there has to be a streetlamp in the near vincinity. But apart from that.

PotD #31: Getting Clean

Like many photographers I like to shoot waterfalls and streams. In the winter nature is cold, wet and up here in Sweden, mostly dark. Time to go exploring indoors. Aha, a wash machine! That will do for now...

PotD #30: Lightcat

"Your picture is is only halfway finished until you given it a name". I do not remember who said that, I think I read it somewhere a long time ago. It cured me from calling stuff Untitled. You do not have to put titles on you pictures. But it is important that you know how easy it is to steer the way people look at your picture just by how you name them. Honestly, would you have seen a cat in this picture unless it was in the title? Maybe, maybe not. But after I put it in the picture, it is much harder not to see it, right?

PotD #29: Bench-O-Rama

There are no rules on how much you can cut away from your pictures. Although as a movie buff, I normally keep myself somewhere around CinemaScope ratios. OK, so this one is slightly wider.

Also for today, I have started to work on the back catalogue. PotD # 1-5 now has descriptions:

• PotD #1
  
• PotD #2
  
• PotD #3
  
• PotD #4
  
• PotD #5
  

PotD: Radioactivity

For today, a little painting with light. Often a DUC under low light and constant movement will give us a very yellowish blur. Thank heavens for curves in Photoshop. For the picture above i get almost X-filey.

PotD: Square One

The built-in flash on a DUC never give you a good exposure. And that is what I like about it! I often shoot DUC-flashes at things, just to see what the resulting image will look like. This is one of those pictures. For those who wonder, it is a guitar case.

PotD: BNC Connectors Gone Wild

Many DUCs have a macro setting. And as long as you make sure to disable the built in flash, they can often produce really good results. In this picture, the camera managed to give me a nice narrow depth of field. It may have helped that the sculpture lay just inside a gigantic windows facing north, but I ain't picky. I can live with that.

PotD: Pool

I do not know where this was taken, but I like the feeling. What happens in Vegas stays in the camera, right?

PotD: Splashy

Water on mousepad. All sorts of liquids make for interesting patterns whether or not spilled intentionally. This was not.

It's Not the Camera, It's You! Really.

Why is it not the camera, you ask. It is not the camera because the camera is just a tool. If you are not pleased with how the house turned out, you do not blame the hammer, do you?

Different cameras make different tools. Panoramas, portraits, sports, whatever you chose to photograph there is a type of camera that will be the best tool for the job. But in reverse, you can always pick up a camera, look at what it can do, and from that deduce what kind of picture you should aim for with that camera.

Why is it you, then? Because you are the one not making the most of what you have. And this fine blog is here to help you.

That said, let us move on. Hi there. Welcome! This is the introducing post of the It's Not the Camera, It's You! blog. Here Limitations Are Fun, and Not Enough Light is a good thing.

I thought I should start with talking a bit about the main focus for this blog, namely creativity and cameras. Digital cameras, to be specific.

Digital cameras

To put the digital camera in perspective, we have to go back in time. 1991 Kodak and Nikon released the Kodak DCS (later DCS-100). It was not the first digital camera, but one of the first you could actually buy in a store. It consisted of a Nikon F3 body with a big chunk of digitallery smackad on at the bottom. It was 1.3 megapixels for the price of $13,000. Many a photographer lusted after it. I know I did. But today many of us will turn down a $100 mobile phone if the camera is not at least 5 megapixels. Even if we never use our phone for photography. So, what happened?

Competition happened. In order to sell cameras, you need an advantage. You have to have something the other brands do not. AND, you need to convince the buyers this advantage is neccesary to fully enjoy the object on sale. This has given us point-and-shoots with 14 megapixels, DSLRs that can capture video and a lot of other things.

The megapixel race has made digital cameras go out of style very quickly. The cameras you bought ten, five, two or one years ago look like Ford Model-T:s compared to what you find in the camera store today. But, like the Model T, many of them are still usable, even very much so. The trick is finding out what for. We will use them for the mental weight-lifting that is creativity training.

Creativity

Creativity is something a lot of us wish for. Many people think it is some sort of gift given to other people, and not to them. Actually, creativity is like a muscle. It is there, but you have to work it to make use of it. So how do you learn to flex creativity?

The bad news, is that it is all work work work folks. Sorry. You have to do things, instead of dreaming about doing things.

In my experience, actually doing things make you more creative. Why? Because when you do things, *some things go wrong*. Most often these things just adds to yor frustration, but every so often, you look at a picture where the exposure went wrong, and you find you really like the effect. So you go about to duplicate what went wrong, and when you found how to do it at will, you have another way of making pictures.

Sometimes, you go overboard with you new weapon (Picassos "blue" period is a good example), but at least you have another way you can actually do things. And being creative is about finding different ways to accomplish your goals.

Blogger and productivity guru Merlin Mann talks about the  problems with cretivity, in particular about the differences between feeling versus being creative in this article. It's basically what I just said, except the part about the cameras.

And that is what we will be doing here. Learning how train creativity and appreciate not-state-of-the-art apparel. Not only are limitations fun, they can help us be much better at what we do. You are welcome to come alongfor the ride. No matter if you are a total newbie or an seasoned pro, you can always find new angles. Pun intended.

Articles are prone to arrive at a bi-weekly basis. Each day though brings the Picture of the Day, often with a photo tip. You are all welcome to hang around!

Up next, our first exercise. Until then, what is the most meaningless feature/function you have found on a camera?

PotD: Sky Curve

I do not particularly like photographing sculptures since basically it is using someone else's work. But here I felt my part, i. e. light and framing added enough to make this picture my own. Flat gray winter days can add a lot to architecture.