Tweenbots are go!

I have posted robots here before, as well as on some other sites, as it is a photographic subject close to my heart. That is why this site and it's theme - will people help a box of cardboard if it has a face? - made me smile.

Tweenbots - Robot/People art by Kacie Kinzer

PotD #52: Cotton Candy

This is a shot taken at noon, in full lught of the sun. Something had to be done. Turning it down dark brought out the strange quality of the snow, making it look like silk. And that is todays lesson. If you take a bland picture, tweak it until it becomes interesting. There are no rules. Good luck!

PotD #51: Mirror

If all else fails, take a picture of yourself.

PotD #50: Hot In The City

At the moment, I try to make most of my pictures look like postcards from the sixties, with lots of yellow, and faded colors. Normally, I draw my pictures beyond satuation. And like always when you do something by habit, it is good to try the total opposite, and see where that gets you.

For more faded pictures, check out my contributions to ShutterCentral for the past and next couple of days.

PotD #49: It's A Jungle Out There!

Organic is always good. And on a day when the weather just is not good enought for being outside, you can find organic inside. In your house plants. And since good pictures of beautiful flowers has been done and done, why not try to do it differently. Picture the stems, the foilage, play with lightning, fix motion blur. See jungle! See jungle! Go join your gang yeah, city all over! Go ape crazy! Yep, that last part is a reference.

PotD #48: Coffee Is The Answer

And if coffee isn't the answer, then there is something wrong with your question in the first place. Apart from that, did you ever stop and think about design? Everything in your home is actually a product of someones artistic talent. Or lack thereof.

With this in mind, you can look at your household appliences as if they were statues, or big buildings. With the added bonus that you can easily light them, and photograph them from points that would require a crane and some expensive permits had they been actual buildings. Is that a Frank Lloyd Wright in your kitchen?

DUC Hunt

"OK, I want to start shooting with any old DUC I can get my hands on. Where can I find one?"

The easiest way is to ask around. Some of your friends and neighbours are bound to have a scrap pile. There's no telling what you may find there, and ususally they're glad to get rid of the junk. You can't beat free when it comes to pricing.

Flea-markets are another way to find good DUCs. The downside is that you can't always test the camera, because the batterries are dead, there's no memory card etc etc. It's more of a gamble. If you think you can live without the money, buy it. That way you will not regret it later.

Also, eBay, Craigslist etc are good hunting grounds. Unfortunately, the really nice DUCs dosn't get listed so very often. After all, would you take your time to put up an item you expect to fetch at most $2?

There are different types of DUCs. Maybe some of the stuff you already has got lying around at home contains a camera without you realising it.

• Most likely your cellphone has got a built-in camera.
  
• Maybe your computer or computer monitor has a built in webcam? Not as mobile, perhaps, but useful for studio shots.
  
• If you got a digital video camera, chances are you can take stills with it.
  
• Do you have kids? Then perhaps some of their toys can take pictures. Go look in the playpen.
  

There. You probably found something lying around you never thought about to use for serious photography. Now, get out and get shooting!

Small World

This has probably been done before, but it is still brilliant. Watch for some excellent "miniature" work by Keith Loutit, Sydney Australia.


Helpless from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

PotD #47: Here Bunny Bunny

Plush toys are an excellent way to train lighting. They do not get as bored of what you are doing as the rest of your family.

PotD #46: Waiting For Tomorrow

This blog has it's focus on DUC:s, as you may know. Not because I like to live in the past, but because I find using how shall I say, technically challenged cameras stimulating. Using them forces me to think in new ways, about pictures, light, technology, everything. It feeds my creativity.

And that is the other big focus here, creativity. Wired has just published an interesting article on what to expect from cameras during 2009. It makes me hungry for some new cameras. What about you?

Using themes for motivation - Creativity Exercise Two

There are lots of reasons not to bring your camera with you everywhere. It is too heavy, it could be stolen, the camera stops working after you gone for a swim etc etc. But the most common reason is the feeling that you are not going to use it.

This is not the same thing as photographer's block, which we talked about curing the other week. This is the idea that your life is divided between times when you take pictures and times when you do not. This is, of course, hogwash.

How do we make sure, or at least plausible, that we are going to use our camera? I find an effective way is to have an ongoing theme for your pictures. A form of collection if you wish. You set you own theme, it could be a simple noun, like "door" or "xylophone" or it can be as complicated as you wish. It should however be simple enough that you could find a fitting motif at least once a week without trying to hard. That is, a big no-no on themes like "Flying fish dancing can-can with Zsa-Zsa Gabor in Times Square". I mean come on, when are you going to photograph that if you live in Brooklyn?

I have a couple of themes going on our team-blog ShutterCentral. Here is a link to one of them; "Men With Jobs".

Everytime I step outside without a camera I see great shots that could fit in either of my themes. This makes me more eager to bring the camera next time. Even if I do not catch a theme picture, who knows, I might make a great stand alone shot?

Are you using themes? If so, what are they? Be sure to tell in comments.

PotD #45: Snow All

Photographically, on-camera flashes are horrible. So, in a DUC perspective, if you can get your on-camera flash to do the wrong thing, it can be the right thing. Here, the trees are turning into some kind of monster over at the edge of the light.

PotD #44: Pintsize

Just a couple of days ago I talked about robots hiding everywhere. Then I find I have taken a picture of one without realizing it. Because surely, this must be this guy from the webcomic Questionable Content?

And I honestly do not remember what the picture is supposed to be, apart from blurry.

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?