Photographing a famous landmark

The common advice when photographing a famous landmark is to make sure you frame it in a pleasing way and of course make sure to find a new and a different angle.
Ok, right. I’m not sure what kind of a “different angle” you can come up with for a photograph that was taken by millions before you. Yeah, good luck with that.

So in order to avoid getting stuck with yet another cliché you can
A) avoid shooting well-known, shot-to-death landmarks or
B) Be creative, adapt a new approach and create something original.

Ok, sounds great you say, but how do I adapt a new approach, what does it even mean?
Well, when creating your famous landmark image you can create something new either when shooting the photo or at the post process/printing stage.
You can completely change the final appearance of the photo by selecting a camera that utilizes your vision best such as the Holga, polaroid, classic camera such as the kodak brownie, large format, pinhole or even a modified digital camera. Each one of these cameras will provide you with a unique image that can help depicting your insight.
If you like abstracts why not shoot an abstract of that landmark? If you are a street photographer you can make a picture where people are the subject and the landmark is the supporting cast in the background. If you like to make panoramas or time-lapse photos, you can certainly put a new spin on any overshot landmark.

Now, improving an average (not to say boring) shot of a famous landmark at the post processing or printing stage can be a bit tricky as it is very easy to overdo it and further add to the cliché.
But, as long as you have an idea and a general direction, and you’re not just playing around with the filters in your photo editor, you can absolutely make something original and imaginative.

I usually, not only avoid shooting landmarks, but I also keep away from visiting them. (I just get quite uncomfortable in big crowds)
But on this particular day in San Francisco, the colors, the sky, the crisp air, just seemed so perfect to photograph the Golden Gate, So I did.

When printing this photo I knew I need a different approach or I’ll get stuck with yet another boring image of the Golden Gate. So I decided on taking it to the 70′s and make it look just the way I’ve imagined it back then.

Last night I printed for 5 hours in the darkroom and I cannot imagine anything else…

Last night I printed for 5 hours in the darkroom and I cannot imagine anything else that I’d rather do. At night when I arrive home I lay my prints to dry on the wood floor in my bedroom. Fiber prints cannot go in the dryer and need to dry on a hard flat surface. The best thing about it is waking up in the morning to my last night's prints; what a great start!
I’ve been working for a few months now on a “rundown with a classic camera” series.
I think this one print in one of my favorites so far. It is a picture taken in South Central L.A. (recently renamed South L.A.) with a flipped-lens Brownie box camera on Arista 400 film. It is 10"X10” print on 11”X14” Arista fiber matte paper which I chose for this assignment as it has a nice warm tone appeal to it.
South L.A. (from the Rundown series) Camera: Brownie Film: Arista 400

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Disposable cameras anyone?

This is Green Cove, Virginia which has a special place in my heart. I passed through this very little town last year while on a 34-mile bike ride from White Top to Abingdon.
As we left White Top and began our bike ride along the river I discovered I forgot to bring any of my cameras! (isn’t this a familiar photographer’s nightmare?) being out in nowhere land I was obviously quite upset.
After about 15 minutes of biking we arrive to a small place called Green Cove, which is really just a little historic spot along the bike route. But wait! There is a little convenience store by the road; you don’t suppose they have …? Yes, yes, they do! They have disposable cameras! And so I purchase 4 of them and I photograph the splendor along the trail that goes by the Holster River with them decorated little plastic thingies; tall trees, a clear river, little farm houses, cows and horses.
And I’m actually quite fond of these pictures!
Green Cove, Virginia (2010)

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Aging a color photo with coffee

 

Aging a color photo is obviously more challenging than making a black and white or a sepia tone image look old – difficult, but not impossible.
Especially if you like coffee.
Now on to the details:
The first step is to un-vibrant (is this a word?) the image so it doesn’t look too vivid. You can do this during scanning or in your image editor by reducing the highlights, saturation, and contrast. Or you can just go for one of your unsuccessful washed-out photos (as you see, unsuccessful doesn’t necessarily mean failed).

The next step is to create an aged looking paper, which I did by using the leftovers of my morning coffee. Really! All you need to do is crumble a paper (I used watercolor paper), soak it in coffee, and let it dry in the sun. Now the same watercolor paper looks like it has seen many years of hardship.

Next, scan the stained paper, open your favorite photo editor and blend it on another layer with your washed out image. And just like before, you will need to play around with the blending and transparency settings until you like what you see.

By the way, if you are not a coffee drinker and prefer tea, no worries; you can do the same process using tea instead of coffee. I’m sure there are many other ways to age a paper such as burning, ink stains, distressed ink, antique solutions, or simply use an actual aged paper from an old book. These are just a few methods to choose from, so simply select whatever works best for you.

As a final touch, you can darken the edges of the photo by using the darken or burn tool in your photo editor.

Around Chicago with a classic camera

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The drawback of the automated camera

Among my [many] different film cameras I have a Nikon N-75 SLR from the 90’s.
Like many other cameras made in the 90’s, it has a few automatic features like Auto Exposure Bracketing, Exposure Compensation, Multiple Exposure and more.
Also Film loading, film winding, and film rewinding are all fully automatic. I think at first I liked the automatic film rewinding and loading feature as it saved me time when I had to change rolls while shooting. But then one nice day while shooting in downtown Santa Barbara, very much unexpectedly my camera stopped responding. Obviously at first I blamed the camera’s battery and so instead of enjoying taking pictures I now had to search the stores in the area for the right battery (you’ll be surprise how difficult it can be to find a battery in today’s modern cities). When I finally found the correct battery I replaced it with the old one, but alas the camera was still dead! Obviously something with the automatic mechanism had failed. Luckily I had a Holga camera with me so I switched to medium format and continue shooting. When I came home, disgusted and disappointed with that Nikon I put it away and never picked it up again.
The problem with these “sophisticated” cameras, that allegedly make your life easier with their fancy features, much like Digital cameras, they are extremely delicate and don’t offer durability or long life. They also have a frustrating tendency to break down on you when you need them most! I’m sure its somewhere on top of Murphy’s most annoying laws list (if he ever made one).
Since then I stick to old cameras, especially I love the plainest manual cameras that let you do all the hard work of loading and winding yourself. The less features the more reliable the camera is. Not to mention that with these simple cameras you are the boss, no tricks and no help, its all you.

old war

Valley Forge was profoundly beautiful today with its deep skies, the scent of rain in the air and the anticipated arrival of fall colors and I would probably stay forever.
On the way back to Virginia we stopped by Gettysburg where the sun was setting over these bloody battlefields.
We also drove through Harrisburg which sits on the Susquehanna river but that’s nothing to brag about.

And now all I can say is that its sooooo good to be back in Virginia.

WordPress tips

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.

What does a photographer dream about?

Every once in a while I wake up from a terrifying nightmare;
I’m traveling to a new place, another city, sometimes it’s San Francisco, or New York, sometimes it’s a city I haven’t been to yet, but very often the dream takes place in Jerusalem, in particular the old city of Jerusalem. So I’m there, and I’m so happy as I always am when I travel and usually everything is just perfect and the moment is just right to take an amazing picture. But oh, no! I don’t have my camera! Apparently I left the camera somewhere behind (the hotel, the house, the bus, the subway, the airport). Now what? I usually spend the rest of the dream trying to retrieve my camera, overcoming obstacles (they always like to pile up when I’m in a panic mode), cracking impossible challenges, and trying everything I can possibly think of to find my beloved camera. And in case you are rooting for me, I’m sorry to disappoint you but I never really recover my camera and often I wake up at some point, quite happy to find out it was just another one of these disturbed dreams.
And I wonder, is it just me or do most photographers have such frightening dreams about their vanishing cameras?

the ghost of general George Washington / Downtown Boston
… but I know that somewhere beyond it, in dim lights, over the rainbow, lays the real Boston where General Washington was called upon to take command over the continental army.

Camera: Nikon N75
Film: Fuji RHP III

Around town with a toy camera #10

Santa Monica Beach / Holga / Fuji NPH400 / 2007

About photoblogs and time

I set out to find out why people choose to photoblog.
Yes, yes, they connect to others, become a part of a community and improve their photographic skills. But these are mostly the outcome and reward of photobloging and not the initial motive.
After a bit of poking around the web I decided photoblogs meant to be nothing more than ego boosters. This is the only way I can explain their existence.
This ego booster element demands lots of visitors, especially of the type who leave profound comments such as: what a beautiful photo.
In order to pursue these intelligent visitors most photobloggers resort to leaving comments on other blogs. And so very often pohtobloggers feel obligated to reciprocate comments to their visitors in order to keep them coming back and all.
I think it’s quite true most photoblogs get their hits from other photoblogs (where they left insightful comments such as: nice photo) and not from search engines. Get you thinking about substance vs. marketing/chasing skill.

But then again, sometimes I wish I had more time to check out the sites and photography of all visitors here. I think time and age are conspiring again me. They have a secret plot to take me down.

The picture here taken in North End, Boston got the coffee stained textured layer treatment.

How to save a bad photo

Someone mentioned to me this photo looks somewhat like the old
1905 version by Edward Steichen.
All I can say is I wish I was there.
For the background textured layer here I used the same scan of an old book cover which I talk about in this post. I also had to burn (darken) some areas of the original picture where unwanted elements where visible. This proves that even unsuccessful pictures such as this one can be salvage and get a second chance in life.

Turn off

There’s no better way to turn me off and away from a photo blog than a
political rambling. sorry. not interested.
It’s hard enough sometimes to concentrate on the photography.

unrelated photo: wall street, NYC 2006 expired film .textured layer.

even more about texture

One thing about adding a layer of texture to an image is that we actually talking layer-S, meaning more than just one layer of texture. This technique often demands plenty of modifications and tunings to get just the right appearance and mood one is after.
At least, that’s what I hear.
Because me, I suffer from a deficiency in the levels of patience to endure such tedious work and I often prefer the “quick fix” solution.
In this case I added ONE layer of scanned textured paper I found in an art store, set the blend mode to “overlay” and done.

Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

Mt. Vernon

Here’s another image which endured the textured treatment when additional textured and painted layers were placed on top of it.
This time it’s a picture of George Washington’s home in Mt. Vernon, Virginia.

Mt. Vernon, Virginia

Texture

The fastest (and easiest) way of adding an interesting quality to a picture is to open your photo editor and insert an additional layer of texture. It can be a scan of stained paper, canvas painting or a textured paper.
And it can be a combination of the above.

Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

To the east coast

I’m leaving to the east coast today.
I’m not sure if I’ll have time to post from there, so no promises. But I’ll be back here in a week or so with lots of new, hopefully with a flavor of old, pictures to share.
So here’s George Washington, my favorite American, in front of University of Texas in Austin.
No surprises, on top of my list is a visit to Washington’s home in Mt. Vernon, Virginia

ta ta.