Friday, September 9, 2016

Take all the help you can get

Like many I am a little intermediated by certain words and phrases: Fine Art Photography is one such phrase.

Wiki tells us that Fine Art Photography (FAP) is photography created in accordance with the vision of the artist as photographer. Fine art photography stands in contrast to representational photography, such as photojournalism, which provides a documentary visual account of specific subjects and events, literally re-presenting objective reality rather than the subjective intent of the photographer; and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services.

Of all the types of FAP, the one that I'm drawn to is  Black and White fine art photography; which leads to discussing post processing.

There are many tools out there and some are real bargains: for instance Google's free Silver Efex Pro: https://www.google.com/nikcollection/products/silver-efex-pro/

In addition to such 'plug-ins', anyone trying to undertake B&W FAP work is well advised to exploit luminosity masks. Once again, there are a few tools out there. From personal experience I would suggest you look at TK Actions, ADPpanel+ or lumenzia

A rather new boy on the block is the B&W Fine Arts Adjustment Panel from Joel Tjintjelaar

Joel has also written about FAP: here

The following images, of a couple of the buildings at the Getty Centre, were taken with my Canon EOSM. Post processing started in Lightroom and progressed to Photoshop-CC, where I made use of Joel's new panel.




Although Photoshop, on its own, is a powerful tool: there is no doubt in my mind that the addition of some of the above 'plug-ins', or all of them, is a great way to take PS to the next level.

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Another cloud resource for Photographers

As you are aware, there are some great photography resources 'up in the cloud'; and many of them are free,
 
In case you are not aware a new one has been added by Google: an introduction to the scientific, artistic, and computing aspects of digital photography. 
 
Topics include lenses and optics, light and sensors, optical effects in nature, perspective and depth of field, sampling and noise, the camera as a computing platform, image processing and editing, and computational photography. It also covers the history of photography, looks at the work of famous photographers, and talks about composing strong photographs.
 
This course is based on CS 178 (Digital Photography), which was taught at Stanford from 2009 through 2014. The link is to the Google version. 
 
The course consists of 18 lectures. The topics, with dates, are given in the course schedule. The lectures were delivered live on Google's Mountain View campus, broadcast live to Google offices around the world, and recorded for later playback.  The videos linked into these web pages are from those recordings, edited slightly to remove discussion of Google internal projects. Keynote slides from these lectures were converted to PDF files and linked into the schedule after each lecture. 
 
Marc Levoy, the Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford, and Principal Engineer at Google,  has made his material freely available, but some of the photographs included in the lectures are individually copyrighted. Please respect copyrighted information.