Anne's Weblog

I am reading a lot. Books, newspapers, blogs… It doesn’t matter to me. Themes are of a wide variety, of course I am reading a lot about photography. As a matter of fact I bought quite a few books about this subject in the last half year. One I was particularly drawn to was “Within the frame” by David DuChemin. I read it from cover to cover in just a few days. Since then it really is a reference guide for me. You can check the Amazon site here.

The book focuses on the “why” more than on the “how”. It’s all about vision and David can definitely describe it way better than I can. I can highly recommend the book to everyone who thinks that a creative eye is more important than buying gear for thousands of dollars. Even though gear is important, it’s not that easy. Ansel Adams with a cheap pocket camera could still take amazing pictures. In fact the equipment he used was so much less technical than ours today, but he still rocks the photographic world with his art. Others with the biggest camera, the most expensive glass, hundreds of filters etc. won’t be able to create something of substance. If they are only shooting in Programm Automatic for example.

But let David talk, he is so much more eloquent than I am (at least in English. I swear I am better in German).

I can’t wait to get a copy of his soon to be published book “VisionMongers”. Check it out here.

It’s almost half a year since his last book was published and he delighted his many fans with publishing three incredible e-books. In late August he made “TEN” available. He explains ten ways to improve your craft without buying gear. Check it out here. One month later he published “TEN more” to give further advices to improve your art. More about it here. The newest one is “Drawing the eye”, which you can check out here. He made it available for download just a few days ago.

All of these e-books cost $5 and are available on his website. They are a fantastic read and they contain so much eye candy, it’s incredible. This is something that I loved in “Within the frame” and David is continuing to show his amazing skills. I truly love it. For the pictures alone the e-books worth the money ten fold. But the text is the true treat.

Above all this (his amazing writing skills, his passion for teaching, his incredible skills etc.) he’s a true good-doer and is working for World Vision among others. He’s a true humanitarian. As if it wasn’t already enough… I just can recommend that everyone checks this guy out. You won’t regret it.

P.S. He’s writing a blog too where he shares thoughts, gifts and lots of other things. www.pixelatedimage.com

I am subscribed to some photography blogs. The first blog I read was the Pioneer Woman, who is an amazing photographer (and cook), who shares willingly what she learned on her road to photography. It is incredible how much she does for others, not only does she share her secrets, but she’s give-away-contests, where you can win a DSLR for example, and she also created the Pioneer Woman Action Sets with help from Doug for Totally Rad Actions.

On of the contributors to her photography section is Jodi from MCP Actions.  She has amazing video tutorials to a lot of tipps and tricks in Photoshop. Every video I’ve watched so far was an incredible source of wisdom for me. She also creates actions for Photoshop to enhance your photos in an easy way. Among those are free actions as well, like her magic blog it board or touch of light/touch of darkness. Amazing!

I don’t remember how, but from there I got to Jessica Claire, who is a wedding photographer in California. She’s amazingly talented and shares so much of her life and her art. It’s fantastic. Somehow I found my favourite photographer at this point. Jasmine Star. Her blog is truly incredible. She’s in the business for just three years and she blogged all the time of her Ups and Downs, her personal life and her way to become a pro. She’s so giving! She’s not only organizing and hosting the OC SmugMug for free! She’s also writing helpful stuff on her blog. She blogged about her tipps and tricks, what kind of post-processing she uses, how she achieves the typical Jasmine-Star-look, how she uses natural light as well as off camera lightning, or about her marketing efforts etc. Even how she organizes her papers or how much she charges for a CD with negatives. You can follow her on Twitter and on Facebook.  I love the discussions on her fanpage, because they are so incredible helpful.

Why do I love Jasmine Star? Because of her giving. I think that’s a wonderful trait, because so many pros are afraid of giving away secrets and here is Jasmine, who’s giving away so much of her knowledge without fearing that she might get some competition, but realizing that this makes her special. She is building on her uniqueness, and (as Dane Sanders puts it) when you build on your uniqueness nobody can compete with you, because just you can be you.

One day Jasmine blogged about a boudoir shoot of hers and I was instantly smitten. I wanted to learn more, so I googled it and came up with the Boudoir Divas.  Marissa Bouchér and Kimberlee West are so incredible, it’s just not possible. Their motto is: Bring boudoir back and bring curvy back! They think every woman is beautiful and they want to help her (regardless of shape and size) to feel as beautiful as she is. The pictures they are taking are so cool! It’s amazing! I wish I could effort their Paris workshop, but at this point it is not possible for me. Hopefully in the future. They also created the Posebook with their favourite poses for all women. Incredible.

The Divas blogged about their favourite albums, which is KISS. One of the owners is Kevin Swan, who’s doing incredible video tutorials. And now we are coming to the title of this post. One of the videos is about using Adobe InDesign to create your albums. I watched it yesterday and it’s really amazing what you can do with it. I’ll think I’ll try the test version and then see if I like it. Not that I need to design albums at this point of my life, but maybe in the future?

These are just a few people that ahve caught me with their passion for photographer and her way of giving freely to aspiring photographers. It’s good to know that this kind of passion and love (both for the art and the people)  still exists.

Today Scott Kelby posted the winners of his World Wide Photo Walk that took place back in July. Strangely he didn’t pick me But he’s chosen some good photos! Excellent shots!

To check the 10 finalists and 1 grand prize winner out, visit his blog.

Congrats to all the fabulous photographers who won the prizes. Great work!

To Scott Kelby: Thank you for putting together such a fun idea. It was great. I will be there next year again.

To all my fellow photographers: It was a good time that day in Bonn. Hope to see you next year.

P.S.: This is the photo I sent in.

The last day of the workshop was full of using the computer again. He showed us how to use layers and layer masks. I knew all of this, so it wasn’t too useful for me. But then we talked about printing your pictures either at home or at stores. That was the best part for me. He explained the different possibilities, the different stores and what’s the best to get good results. He showed us different papers that can be selected at fine art printing studios and so on.

That part I really enjoyed, because I always asked myself, where I can get good prints of my pictures without paying a fortune. He recoomended www.saal-digital.de, which works with an ICC-profile and guarantees repeatable results.

Conclusion: The workshop showed me some new points and some new methods. But it would have been better when there was a beginners course and a course for more experienced people, because I could have learned much more in this four days than the things we learned. Some parts, especially the waiting parts, were wasted time. I think I could have learned as much in a one day intensive workshop.

Wednesday, 12th, was the third day of the workshop and my birthday. Now I am 28 years old. It is definitely time to live my dream.

We worked at the computer again. The next method we used was to seperate channels to tweak the red, blue and green channel individually. It was good to see what you can do to highlight some parts and get rid of others. It was very interesting to see all the changes.

Then we worked with curves and the channel mixer. Even though I knew how to use them before, I’d never known how specific you can use them. It was amazing to see what you can do to get the best out of the SOOC-shot. He also gave us a list with the factors to simulate old black and white film in the channel mixer. Now I can make my pictures look like an Ilford film or a Kodak film, just as I want.

After the workshop I went to my family to eat cake and celebrate my birthday. My mom gave me a copy of Lightroom as a present. I also got a book about photography and other literature. Later that evening we drove to an arabian retaurant which we LOVE! We usually only eat starters. They have 30 little bowls with different dips and salads which you can eat with bread. After finishing it you are full. And the desert is amazing! It’s like heaven in your mouth. So good. A friend of mine met us there after work and it was a good feeling to have my best friend joining us. Good times.

The second day we spent on the street to get some pictures to process later on. We went to different spots in the city center and the teacher explained how to best take the photographs. He gave tipps when someone had questions, showed techniques and was a good source of knowledge. I took yesterdays picture in that time.

The second half of the day we started with the computer course. The program we used was Paint Shop Pro X2, but we also could use Photoshop if we wanted. I used both. I wanted to be able to use the tipps at home in Photoshop as well. The first tool we used was the black and white film tool in Paint Shop Pro. It’s almost the same as the black and white adjustment tool in Photoshop (CS 3 and higher). It’s quite easy to use and you are able to produce some good pictures.

Unfortunately the levels of knowledge of the participiants were very different. Some had a broad knowledge, some had just even a rudimentary knowledge of computers. It was very difficult to get a good balance. I know that. But I wished the levels were more equal. I was bored at some times, because I finished the task and had to wait until all the others succeeded too. Sometimes it took an hour until everyone finished the first step. It was a little bit annoying. I hope it will be better the next day.

I was on vacation this week, because I wanted to attend a workshop. It was called digital black and white photography. The aim was to produce good quality photos like the ones in the old times when you’d stand in the darkroom trying to get the best result. You’d develop, enlarge, expose and whatever, used different chemicals and paper to produce amazing photos.

In the digital era the camera has a funtion to take black and white pictures, but it is just standard. It may work for some photos, but not for others. Most pics look flat and like a rainy autumn day instead of having a good contrast.

The workshop wanted to change this, to show ways to make pictures as good as they once were.

The first day was all about theory. The workshop leader talked about the world of colors, about additive mixture of colors and subtractive, mixing with black and white. Then he proceeded to  talk about JPEG and RAW, about the sensors and all the possibilites that digital cameras have. He explained, why to use JPEG and why to use RAW, which is best for which situation, and the differences between 8bit and 16bit.

It was a good start. I think it is important to know the basics before you really start to learn new things, because otherwise you might have problems later on. I knew all of this before but it was good to have a kind of refreshing of some basics.

The second half of the day he talked about range of contrast and the difference between analog and digital in regards to the range of contrast. Film was much more forgiving than digital media is. If you couldn’t get the exposure right, you always could hope that you are within the range of two aperture stops and then the pic could be saved. The dynamic range within a modern camera is about 10 aperture stops, which means you are getting to the limits if you might photograph a scenery with harsh sunlight and deep shadows or a wedding with the white gown and the black tux. He talked about the right exposure, that it is more important to expose for the light parts, so they don’t get clipped. Our eyes can always see some kind (even minimal) variation in a white area, but it is used to the fact that there are areas with pure black without any differentiation. At the end of the day he explained about depth of field and how you can use it for composition.

I think it was a good start, but I hope I will learn more about new things the next three days.

I took a day of from working on Thursday. I had booked a workshop at www.fotoschule-ruhr.de and I went to Gelsenkirchen to meet with the instructor. At 10 am it started with the basics, aperture and shutter speed. The main focus was exposure, because this is the most important part of taking good pictures. I knew quite a bit about it before, but it was good to get some advice on how to work with the manual mode. I tried to use it before, but it was quite difficult to understand it by just reading books. With a real life instructor it was so much easier and I think I learned some new tricks.

For lunch we went to a restaurant nearby and I had baked potatoes with sour cream and salad. It was a good meal. We had time to ask a lot of questions not just about the course, but also about photography in general or in any special field.

Afterwards we went to the park to put into practice what we’ve just learned. The teacher was always close by to be able to help. Unfortunately the park doesn’t have too much to offer, so we had to find objects, like flowers, ducks, grass blowing in the wind. I always had some problems to nail the exposure, especially when I wanted to photograph sky and landscape or some other dark/bright pictures. It was good to learn how you do it correctly.

The next part was post-processing and it was very inspiring to see how a pro do it and what he would do to make photos even better. He said all the time, post-processing is for enhancing good pictures, but not to save bad pictures. Even though I knew that, it was amazing to see this put into practice.

It was a good day all in all. I can’t wait to attend the next workshops and learn some more stuff about this best of all arts (at least for me).

Yesterday I edited the photos of the World Wide Photo Walk. It was the first time that I had to really edit a bunch of photos and I love Lightroom. I can’t say it often enough. I am going to submit one of the photos to the contest of the walk, but here are some photos.