Feb
28
Recently I’ve started a new job and since the office is located in the heart of Beverly Hills I decided to park my car about 10 blocks away and simply walk to work. It’s a lovely walk through lively streets. You can imagine that it didn’t take me long before I decided to take one of my cameras along. So far I photographed with my Canonet, which is absolutely great for street photography, but I’m planning to try out different cameras in the coming days.
The picture opportunities on the way are endless and my only problem is that for the life of me I can’t seem to be able to blend in. (and you would think it shouldn’t be too difficult for ME to blend in with the beautiful people of Beverly Hills… 
) Everybody is just so friendly, they smile, they say “hi” and “good morning” and they make it almost impossible for me to mingle and take quick candid shots the way I’ve been practicing for so long.
So there’s a fun challange for me.
And by the way, for everybody who writes me and complain they don’t have TIME to take pictures consider doing the same and walk to work; it won’t only result in lovely pictures but it is also a healthy practice which will no doubt contribute to your overall well-being and happiness as well.
Posted in Thoughts about photography, black and white photography, people
Feb
25
As you might have noticed there are photography blogs and there are photo-blogs.
So what’s the difference?
Unlike photography blogs, photoblogs typically don’t share information, advice or ideas, but instead display their beautiful photos which is really nice of them, but after seeing a few of these photos it just becomes a little boring. yawn.
As it is there are way Too many beautiful pictures out there and if one wishes to check them out they can just visit photo sharing sites such as flickr, picasa, photobucket, pbase and such where you can view photos by categories or keywords and bookmark your favorite photographers. Makes much more sense then just jumping between photoblogs and wasting precious time before stumbling on something worthwhile.
In fact photoblogs often miss the opportunity to deliver and share meaningful information and deal with photography in any serious way.
This is why Photoblogs are dead!
On the other hand check out Dave’s photography blog: New York photography (black and white photography blog).
If you know of any good photography blogs, feel free to share them here.
Posted in Recommended, Thoughts about photography, black and white photography
Feb
22
It doesn’t rain much in Los Angeles but when it does, the result is a great panic.
Traffic is even worse than usual, the city ends up looking like a big lake due to a bad drainage system, and mudslides are winter’s answer to summer’s fires.
The local news stations send out their “storm watch” teams to cover live how the brave LA natives are handling the drizzle.
And they do handle it pretty well;
armed with winter gear and umbrellas they abandon the streets to find cover in the malls and coffee shops.
[Text and image recycled from my book "Streets of America"]
Posted in black and white photography, street photos
Feb
19
You know how sometimes you take this great picture… and you just love it… and its almost perfect… almost. Yes, something is missing and you just can’t put your finger on it.
So you try cropping it, adding contrast, you play around with the colors. and nothing. Its still almost there, but not quite.
The trick is to put it away. Just get away from it. And one day, dig it out, look at it again, and it will suddenly hit you; that is it!
I took this picture a million years ago somewhere in between Long Beach and Catalina Island. The original image was taken with my old Minolta SRT in color and I spent a few (too many) hours in the school’s lab trying to get a good print out of it (yes, color printing can get pretty tricky, not to say frustrating). And I did like this picture but I always felt it was missing something… except I didn’t know what.
Last week I looked at it again and right away I knew what it needs: It could certainly use a nice layer of canvas texture and definitely is more appealing to me in black and white. Finaly.
Posted in techniques, texture layer
Feb
15
To achieve this effect I began by soaking a watercolor paper in the leftovers of my morning coffee and let the paper completely dry in the sun. After scanning the paper into my photo editor I layered the original image on top of this coffee stained paper with the transparency set to “overlay”.
Next, a combination of both layers was placed over the original image and the transparency was now set to “hue” (you will need to play around with the amount of transparency.)
And there you have it, a warm coffee kind of day in Dutchess county, upstate New York.
Posted in Experimental, Photographic art, techniques
Feb
12
When working on an image or inkjet transfer there are two ways of combining a few images or, like in this case, parts of the same image.
You can print the pieces out separately and then join them together in a collage when transferring onto the receiving surface. Or, for a more precise result, simply join the images together on the computer in your photo editor before printing and transferring.
By the way, the above image was chosen to be the February icon of the inkjet transfer group on Flickr. Pretty cool, no?
Posted in Image transfer, inkjet transfer, techniques inkjet print printing transfer
Feb
09
This is probably the saddest news I’ve heard in a while: Polaroid is ceasing production of its instant film!
I’m not even sure how I feel about it though I think I’m a little angry…
And by the way, in case you didn’t know Polaroid had secretly stopped making their famous instant cameras about a year ago.
Now, before you know it, there will be a Fake Polaroid Photoshop effect.
Just wait and see.
Posted in News & other stuff, Polaroid, Thoughts about photography
Feb
07
This image is the result of a combining extreme and creative scanning.
Not only I gladly skipped the cleaning-up-the-negative part and somewhat pushed the settings, I also added some more flaws of my own to the process.
Posted in extreme and creative scanning, techniques
Feb
05
The first nice thing about Lulu and other POD publishers is that it is free. It’s free to publish a book and its free to create your own storefront. Lulu gives you a storefront which you can customize to your taste. So you can publish a book and if nobody ever buys it, you didn’t lose anything.
In fact,you don’t even have to purchase your own book
To publish a book with Blurb you need to download their software, BookSmart, and use it to create your book. With Lulu you can work with any software you wish as long as the final book is in PDF format. (I designed my book with InDesign which is, in my opinion, the best software for writing books.)
When your PDF is ready you need to upload the file to your account on Lulu and assign it to your book project.
Paper back book sizes available at Lulu are 8.5 X 11, 6 X9, 9X7 and more. The prices are good as well: only $19.53 for an 8.5 X 11 full color interior, perfect bound, 100 pages.
There are 3 binding options: Perfect Bound, Saddle Stitch and Coil Bound
You can design your own book cover or use one from their vast free gallery of book covers.
The quality of these books are pretty good. They are bookstore quality which means they are printed on white interior paper (80# weight), which is not a heavy photographic paper, but yet quite nice and good quality.
The only thing you must remember with Lulu is to print your books in full-color interior ink, even for black and white photo book because their black and white ink is poor quality and suitable for poetry books and such but not for photo books.
Lulu’s turnaround is quite good. It takes about 3 days from your order to the time the book is shipped to you.
After approving your books you can set the price and begin selling it through your storefront.
Lulu also offers to purchase an ISBN number for your book in case you want to sell it in stores or online bookstores like Amazon.
Posted in Photo Books, print on demand book lulu print on demand publisher publishing
Feb
02
When talking about publishing a book one needs to make a distinction between putting together a photo book and writing a photography book.
There are lots of print on demand sites out there; Blurb, MyPublisher, Picaboo, sharedInk, and others. For the right price, they will put together a photo book for you.
And the price is somewhere around $25-$40 for 20 pages. These books mostly resemble a photo album or a portfolio and are probably the best choice for any photographer who wants to put together a portfolio of their work.
Seems to me the high price tag on these books will make it quite difficult to sell them, and so they are probably more appropriate for personal purpose.
But if you are interested in writing and publishing a book about photography or maybe have a selection of your photos printed into a store quality book you should consider other options, such as soft cover books of standard sizes which are offered by most of the POD publishers. And since their prices are competitive you should definitely consider printing your book with Lulu.com
Some book-on-demand publishers, such as Xlibris and iUniverse require you to purchase a certain amount of books when you publish with them and with a steep price attached.
The only POD service I found that is somewhat similar to Lulu was CafePress, but their printing quality is poor and not suitable for photo books .
Next time: writing the book, publishing choices, prices, quality and turn around.
Posted in Photo Books, print on demand blurb book publishing lulu mypublisher picaboo POD print on demand sharedink
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