Single-Serving Photo

First and foremost, a happy new year to all of you, my lovely readers. Whether you check in now and then or have been a reader for several years, it is solely for you that I do this. Believe me, when I talk to myself I don’t do nearly as much editing.

Anyway, what better way to ring in the new year and to step back from the commotion of life, if only for a moment, to appreciate the bigger picture than… With a picture? A picture exactly one year in the making, in fact.

Michael Chrisman, a 31-year-old photographer living in Toronto, set up a small pinhole camera on January 1, 2010, overlooking the city’s skyline. On new year’s eve, he collected it. The developed picture is shown to the right, and I have to say, I love it.

In the image you can clearly see the trails of the sun across the sky, each one tracing a slightly different path as the Earth tilts on its axis through the course of the year. You can see the reflections in the water, and you can easily make out the CN Tower, Toronto’s most distinct fixture.

Think about this for a minute. A tiny pinhole sat open for 31.5 million seconds, sending beams of light toward a piece of photographic paper, capturing an image that by itself represents a year of activity. Three hundred and sixty five revolutions of our planet around its sun.

It’s a great way to put life in perspective, I think. I wish you all the best in 2012, stay tuned for more photography talk in the coming weeks.

Please read more about Michael’s creation on thestar.com: Year-long exposure of Toronto skyline produces ‘dreamy’ image

Dennis Calvert shares a really neat light painting technique on his blog that he calls “Man on Fire.” It basically involves creating a darkened silhouette by firing a remote flash behind a subject to overexpose the background behind them, and then “painting” in the silhouetted area with some neat little light wands.

I’m sure you could do this with subjects other than people and with light wands other than the ones Dennis uses. The result, I think, is pretty spectacular. Because the background is blown out, bits of light trail that go outside of the silhouette area become wispy and look very cool.

Believe it or not, the image is straight out of the camera, no post-processing or alterations at all.

Go check out the whole article on Dennis’s blog where you will also find a time-lapse video of the making of the image, which is pretty neat in its own right.

I’ve posted about this before, but there is something so romantic about being able to do professional-looking product photography right in your kitchen and sharing the images with the Internet at large and watching them fumble all over themselves to figure out which studio you hired.

This is essentially the culmination of the progressively tumbling costs of photography equipment and exploding mindshare of innovators on the Internet. There are now low-cost solutions to problems that were insurmountable to the layman until only a few years ago and we have not only the actual photographic technology to thank for that, but also sites like handmade spark, who provide marketing advice to Etsy sellers.

I won’t delve too deeply into what Etsy is for anyone who may not know because it’s a bit beyond the reach of my topic here, but it is a marketplace of sorts, and thus it benefits greatly from well-executed product photography.

In any case, handmade spark posted an article about how to set up a really simple aluminum foil reflector setup that uses natural light to illuminate your (small) product subject and when I saw it I immediately thought (I’m really not kidding), This is exactly the kind of stuff my SSP audience would love to see.

This is miles beyond the whole Strobist crowd with their SB800s and their watt-seconds and their multiple white balances. There is a time and a place for off-camera flash, but check this out… We are lighting a product on our kitchen tables with aluminum foil-wrapped cardboard and we are getting sweet results.

Alright, I feel as though I’ve gushed about this enough. Read it for yourself: Studio Quality Product Photography with a $12 Set Up

I just read a very cool article by Alex Koloskov over at AKELstudio’s “Atalanta Photographer Blog” about how he was able to get great macro detail on a small medical brush with clear bristles when shooting on a white background (for a catalog, I would guess).

Here’s a little taste of what the final product looked like using his techniques (this is a 100% crop of the final photo, click for the full size version):

Head over to Alex’s blog to see his lighting setup and read his tips on how to pull this off.

To the right of your histogram that is. You do remember how to read one, yes? Slightly, ever so slightly exposing all of your photographs to the right of the histogram, which is to say slightly overexposing them, should be your goal, 100% of the time.

Why? Because there is more data in the brightest few stops of sensor attenuation than in the rest of the entire range, which is to say that there will be more detail, less banding, less noise, and so forth, within the brightest areas than there will be in the darkest ones. But you’ve observed that before, right? You’ve seen how terrible shadow areas can look when you try to brighten them up.

“It’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.“—Will Greenwald

Then there’s this guy Will Greenwald. He just posted a whole article about this in which he says “it’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” Awesome, I agree. But neither of us are saying you should “blow out” any of your image; definitely don’t do that.

Strangely, most of the people who commented on Will’s article disagreed with him. Those people are amateurs. (more…)