Here are a couple of tips that are not precisely photo tips but since they are Wordpress improvements, they can in effect support and also enhance your WP photography blog presentation.
The first one I want to mention here is the lightbox 2 plugin I installed here. This plugin opens the image in a new window while darkening the background page. Pretty neat and quite easy to install. Just download the plugin here, unzip, upload to the wp-content/plugin folder and activate in the plugin section in Wordpress.
Here, give it a try; click on this image:

The other thing I wanted to mention is that Wordpress allows the design of pages outside Wordpress which can then be uploaded into WP. The reason one would want to do it is if they want pages that look differently than their blog pages but still keep them inside WP.
It took me a (long!) while to figure it out, but once I did, it turned out to be a pretty easy and straightforward practice.
Here it is; How to create unique pages in WP:
1) Create the page in your html editor.
2) Add this code at the top of your page above the html: < ?php /* Template Name: TemplateName*/ ? >” (replace the TemplateName with anything you want)
3) Upload the page into: wp-content/themes/default folder.
4) create a new page in WP. Give it a title and select the template you have just created from the Page Template pull down menu.
5) publish your page.

Take a look at the page I created outside WP: Creative photo techniques (link is located at the top of this page)
As you see it doesn’t have the sidebars like the other pages. In this case I chose to keep the page looking somewhat like the rest of the blog by maintaining the title and the colors but you don’t have to if you want to create something new all together.

Tags : lightbox 2, plugin, wordpress, WP

Picture shot on Kodak T400cn. I love this film. I love it because it is quite an unusual film.
It is a black and white film but it is designed for processing in C-41 color negative process.
It can then be printed either on black & white paper or on color paper.
The problem with this film is that it had been discontinued a few years ago. The good news is that I found 5 rolls of this film in the Expired Film bag that resides in my fridge. And the other good news is that this film did not just vanish but it was replaced with another similar film: Kodak Professional BW400CN. It’s definitely on my list of things to try out someday.

Tags : black and white, c-41, color, expired film, flea market, Kodak T400CN

Here’s a new printing technique I tried out yesterday and certainly loved the output.
It is quite simple to do:
I chose to use a vellum printing paper for this task.
Since Vellum paper is translucent I printed a black and white photo of Capitol Records building after I enhanced the contrast a bit.
After a few minutes the ink was dry and I placed the paper back in the printer but this time I made sure to print a second image, an abstract background in this case, on the other side of the paper.
This creates a nice layer effect when one of the sides is sharp and the other is faded, depend on which side you are looking at the printout from. In this case I scanned the Capitol Records photo in the foreground.
It is obviously a very easy printing technique and the only real dilemma is which photos or images to use.

Tags : black and white, Capitol Records, Hollywood, ink jet printing, vellum paper

One of the nice things about having a blog is not only that I get to babble about stuff nobody around me wants to hear, but in fact I have a direct access to the most brilliant photographers around, oh yes, I am talking about you!
Take a look at the negative here; you might notice that the 3 lower right images and also the top second one from the left have a strange dark round vignetting around the images.
I have no idea how it happened.
Someone asked me if I used a filter but I don’t even own any filters and don’t know how to use them.
I was shooting a Nikon N75 camera.
So can you tell me what happened here?

Tags : film, negative, nikon n75, santa monica, venice beach

I read an article in one web design magazine declaring twitter is going to kill the blogs. In fact, the article argued, many bloggers already shut down their operations and twitted over to a better place such as facebook and twitter.
The article pointed out, with some satisfaction, the new rising culture of “140 characters or less”.
So, I had no idea, but it turns out the people of the net, I mean you, my dear readers, are apparently awfully shallow, cannot sit through a few paragraphs of text and allegedly suffer from the familiar 21st century symptom of short attention span.
Well, OK, nice observation, but I don’t buy it for a moment.
As I see it, there are 3 types of blogs: personal (I decided to die my hair pink today after I found out my boyfriend was cheating on me… etc.), professional and the good ones.
The daily-routine personal blogs did move to twitter heaven and better so. It is just the perfect place for them.

The professional blogs, which are traffic-driven and typically exist to enhance sales of ideas, services and products, they will adapt to where the traffic is.
And as they are the marketing savvy ones who know best where to find their crowd, I can only assume they are now twitting (or is it twittering?) fast-paced clever brief ideas, maybe some are still keeping the blog around but only to complement their 140 characters reality on twitter.
And then there are the good blogs. These self-driven blogs are the ones that present rich, educational and informative substance. They often focus on a topic or a theme and provide their visitors with a wealth of content that usually originates from personal learning experience. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t see these types of blogs dying any time soon, simply because twitter and facebook cannot replace the same type of web presence.
Bottom line, these fine blogs are safe, well, at least for now, until the next craze.
Now, let me know, in 140 characters or less, what is your take on this new wave of fast-paced short-burst twitting (or is it twittering?)

Tags : black and white, blogs, holga, kodak tx, new york city, social networking, twitter

I don’t know much about inkjet printing, but every once in a while I like to get some special printing paper and either transfer images onto this paper or just print my latest images.
A couple of weeks ago I found a sample pack of Inkpress digital media paper.
It has 23 different print papers, such as Watercolor Rag, Cool Tone, Fiber Gloss and
Luster Duo ( I have no idea what it means).
So I chose to first try the Matte Canvas but to add a twist I printed to the wrong side.
It might be hard to tell from the scanned version but this print turned out pretty cool.
I think I’m going to frame it.

This picture was taken on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.

Tags : broadway, canvas, downtown, inkjet, Los Angeles, print, special paper

If you have a blog, or a message board, or a guest book, you probably had to install something against spam. For obvious reasons, blogs and other types of community sites with user participation are a great attraction to these scam bags.
The reason spammers choose to overflow other sites with their links is that the existence of these links, even if nobody actually clicks them, increases their artificial search engine ranking.
Before I began this blog I installed a street photography forum on my site which was a nice place for street photographers to talk about related issues and review each other photos.
But very quickly the spam robots discovered this forum and began posting their links in the older discussion threads. Back then the anti-spam practice was to ban ip addresses and certain key words but other than that there was nothing much to do.

Minolta SRT 101 . Kodak T400 CN BW film . Malibu 2009

Now days it is much easier to prevent spam in comments.
There are many ways to fight spam like installing automated spam detectors, rejecting links in posts, members participation only, using the “nofollow” tag (which in my opinion is not at all effective), and of course the most irritating anti-spam method; the CAPTCHA. This is when you need to validate your message by entering a combination of letters and numbers before you can post your comment.
Needless to say that this method tends to get on everybody’s nerves when so often the letters are impossible to read that it takes a few tries before the form is finally submitted.
When I installed my blog I made sure to add an anti-spam plugin called Akismet, which works just fine. It always finds the spam and leaves it in a folder on the server for me to go over and make sure it is all spam alright. Until recently, I didn’t mind checking this spam folder every once in a while and deleting the spam, but suddenly there are more and more spam comments and going over the spam folder became more time consuming.
So I decided to simply install another plugin which requires the posters to review their posts before they submit them. It is a very simple fix but quite smart. It lets people review their comments and at the same time it prevents the automated spam comments from being posted.
So far, in the last couple of weeks there were no comments in the spam folder. It is empty.
Seems like problem solved.

Tags : blogs, spam

For different reasons some of my photos are closer to my heart than others.
Sadly the main reason I like one picture over the other has no artistic explanation at all. in fact the reason is quite trivial; it has to do with the circumstance under which the photo was taken, mainly how I felt at the time, and hardly ever has anything to do with the actual qualities of the image.

And so I keep going back to these photos and I often pick them out to use them when I experiment with a new image process.

One of such images is this picture to the left which I took in NYC in July 2001.
I believe one of the explanations I grew attached to this photo is that I took it while, for the first time, I was completely alone in NY. It was quite a memorable day.

Same image under my infamous distress process:

This one was aged with a texture layer:

And finally a mixed-media image transfer (on canvas).

By the way the drawing above the image is a transfer of the original empire state building blueprint.

Tags : black and white, Image transfer, New york, nyc, photo, print, texture layer

This was not planned or anticipated in any way when I began taking pictures, but now, I find the main benefit of photography for me is that every picture takes me flying back in time not only to the event or occasion, no, my going back in time is much deeper than the usual picture-memory association. My pictures take me into a dark forgotten locked channel of awareness that otherwise would have stayed locked forever. If you experienced it you know what I’m talking about.

But this is merely the value of photography; this is not why I photograph.
The main reason I take pictures, and will always take pictures, is that I love this place.
And because I love this place I want to illustrate and forever preserve its existence, the truth and the depth of it which I’m grateful I’ll never understand.
But don’t let big words fool you; it is a lot simpler than it sounds

And I have faith in you, my dear two readers; I have no doubt you can come up with a better explanation to an otherwise perplexing drive we have to photograph everything around us.

Downtown San Francisco. Holga. inkjet transfer

Tags : film, from above, holga, Image transfer, medium format, San Francisco, toy camera

As I’m transitioning into a new stage in my life, and after losing my stupid underpaying job back in the beginning of April, I’m taking small steps toward freedom and making income in web design.
A key part of my new “career” is taking web development classes at the college.
I’m one of these freaks who like school anyway, so obviously this is not at all a chore I must endure to carry out my new direction in life, in fact I’m having fun and enjoying being in school once again.

As a part of the main class assignment we, the students, were divided into 5 groups and basically we compete over building a website for a real client.
It’s a hectic project, being dependent on the other team members and having constant deadlines, but I’m learning a lot, not only about web design, but mostly about team work and my hidden leadership and organizational abilities.

Our real-life client, unlike most real-life clients, is an unusually good client. He always supplies us with everything we ask him for, from his logo and published materials to text content and photos.
And as to the photos, this is where we discovered a problem. By we, I mean Julie and I. Julie is one of my team mates and she is a good photographer. We only had to take a quick look at the photos we got from our client to decide we have to go there and make a few decent photos ourselves.

I wasn’t at all excited about it. Our client, Larry, his brother Don and their brother-in-law Jerry operate an auto parts and machine shop in Santa Monica.
Obviously completely and utterly a foreign land to me. And besides, I don’t know anything about this type of photography. I mean, just because I have a camera and just because I run around town and take street photos, doesn’t mean I can make portraits or shoot auto parts and things I know nothing about.
Oh, why did I even agree to do it?

I met with Julie in front of the shop and we went in together armed with our digital cameras…
And guess what? This assignment turned out to be so much fun! I’m serious.
You know how the photographer’s job is to ease his subjects and make them feel comfortable in front of the camera?
Well, these awesome guys made sure to make the photographers feel at ease and comfortable behind the camera.
I can’t tell you if the pictures are great or amazing or any good by any standard, but I can tell you I had fun taking them, and I love them all.
So what did I learn? Hmmmm….. I guess I learned that as always, it is all about the manner.
It is something I need to remember.

Tags : black and white, portraits