The Weekly Photo (Week 25) Cameos

The intent for the photo was to document a culinary creation, but when I inspected the image, there it was: A cameo appearance. It was unintentional, so this was not an attempt to emulate Alfred Hitchcock. He made an art of doing a cameo appearance in his movies.

Well, let’s look at the photo.

There, very obvious once you look at it, is “my self-portrait”, in classic photographer pose – look at the spoon. I’ll show it flipped so you don’t have to turn your monitor on its head.

Normally I try to make sure that I show just the subject, no more, no less, but when it comes to reflective surfaces it is easy to catch yourself in your photos.

Particularly prone to inadvertent self-portraiture are domed or concave shiny surfaces like the spoon here.

Cars are just chuck full of such mirrors, especially in and around the lights. Here are three examples. The first one, on the left, is rather obvious. The other two are more subtle.

 

Other “cameo traps” are the glass surfaces of buildings. So many of today’s architecture is full of angles and curved glass. Take pictures in a town area and your chanced of self-portraiture are pretty good. You may get unexpected photos of your companions along with yourself.

Windows of all types can provide the opportunity for self-aggrandizement. That includes the zoo, the aquarium and other places that put a window between you and your subject.  Now go look through your own collection!

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

The Weekly Photo (Week 24) - Bonaventure Cemetery

A Stroll through Bonaventure Cemetery

Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, has a worldwide reputation and claims to be the most beautiful. It is a lovely and serene place.

 

Many of the sights and statues have become famous and visitors comes from far and wide.

Bonaventure VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

The Weekly Photo (Week 23) - Vultures

We were quietly minding our own business one morning when I thought I saw something dark flash by outside. Peeking out the door to our back deck confirmed that, indeed, I had seen black wings. The surprise was that a black vulture was paying a visit. But wait there were two.

I rushed upstairs to grab my camera. It had the wrong lens mounted, quickly I changed to the telephoto zoom. The vultures were still there when I got back to the door. I started snapping. As they hopped from the deck to the ground I took the break to look at the camera settings. Aperture priority was set to a small stop – I had been doing flower close-ups. Oops, indeed the camera has picked appropriate shutter speeds of 1/8 to 1/15 second. And, yes, the photos were blurred and useless. There must a be moral there someplace.

Fortunately the vultures were in no rush to leave, they inspected the neighbors garage, ignoring my presence.

They even posed for portraits before ambling off into the woods.

Oh, yes, that moral: Be prepared! Before you put your camera away, mount the lens most appropriate for grabbing a quick photo. Set the controls to AUTO or the equivalent most versatile setting. It will make the chance of success of a quick-grab photo so much better.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

The Weekly Photo (Week 22) - Lines

This week’s photo is a view of the interior of the Savannah International Trade and Convention Center. It is a nice enough image, but it came to be selected for a different reason. I was working on a review of art effect tools for preparing “sketches” from photographs. Such tools are plentiful, you can find one in Picasa, FastStone Image Viewer, and other photo editing programs. You can even come close to that effect with the Word 2010 “Photocopy” art effect filter.

To evaluate a number of these tools I picked some photos with strong lines, strong contrast as well as some more typical photos. For the “strong lines” photo the interior image stood out – so it is also The Weekly Photo.

Now for a little more of the story. Let me start by showing you some of the “sketches” from this photo.

You can see larger views of these pictures by clicking on them – they take you to my Picasa Web Album, now Google+ Photos. As produced by these tools, the effects are realistic as “pencil sketches”, but I find them typically unsatisfactory as images. They are too light – I guess I never liked the #2 pencil. The loss of color also bothers me. Picasa offers “Fade” which in other programs is called “transparency”. This slider allows more or less of the original photo to “shine through”. The next two examples illustrate that.

Often I like to use several tools, working on the same image, until I see what I like or wanted. Here is such a “sketch”:

This image enhances the lines and still shows the soft colors of the original.

Here is a sketch, maybe more like a heavy-handed crayon drawing. As you can see, the sketch tools can be used in varied and very personal ways.

Here are other two images to illustrate the sketch tools.

The photo has strong areas and lines, the “sketch” effect is very realistic. It seems a bit too stark. So here it is with some drawing paper added as background – much more satisfying to me.

One final picture along this line – my friend the robin.

Nice sketch, wouldn’t you say?

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

The Weekly Photo (Week 21) – Gardenia Blossom

Gardenia Blossom

Our gardenia bush is now in full bloom. Usually that does not happen until June, but everything is rushing the seasons this year.

Gardenia blossoms are gorgeous, fragrant white flowers, but hey last just a short time. Photographing them has been a challenge for me. Our gardenia gets dappled sunshine in the morning, by early afternoon it is mostly in the shade. So the combination of light and blossom development has to be just right. Wait an hour for better light and the blossom will already show yellowed edges or it sprawls all over. The difficulties for me don’t end there. My camera has trouble focusing on the all white blossoms, and the depth of field is rather shallow for these nice big flowers even at small apertures. With my aging eyes I can’t focus manually. So it is usually one in a dozen at best.

Here is todays effort, taken early in the morning.

At post time, in the late afternoon, this blossom is well beyond prime. No retakes for these volatile gems.

Then there are the little problems uploading to Picasaweb, or is that the former Picasaweb, setting the access with the new sharing method, and linking to the photo. Hope it works for you. (Leave me a comment if it doesn’t, please.)

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck