Hint for the April Monthly Special

I am really excited about the theme for the April Monthly Special. For some, it will be familiar territory, for others, a chance to push your photography beyond your comfort zone. I took the above photo during my recent trip to Vegas where lines of orange-clad workers sporting "Girls direct to you" t-shirts try to force cards into the hands of passers-by. Here, a competing distributor with an entirely different message looks like his "Repent or Perish" pitch (as seen on the flip side of his t-shirt) might soon be delivered with his fists.

Despite appearances, I actually think that they were engaged in a discussion about where to eat lunch. On a different note, which handout do you think that construction worker chose? I had to magnify the photo about 800% to find out that repentance won out over lust.

So any ideas what the next monthly special is going to be?

A current software favorite: Nik

I rarely do any kind of review. In fact, I have done one since last August when I gave some Photoshop reading suggestions. But one of the advantages of not accepting advertising is that I can express my opinions without worry.

Right now I am such a fan of Nik Software that I wish I could ignore all of my computer woes and just experiment with it. Although I heard of it a while ago and even downloaded a trial version of Viveza, I don't think I really understood how amazing it is until I sat through several demonstrations at the PMA in Las Vegas. I immediately bought the entire suite as an Aperture plug-in (but it is also available as a Photoshop plug-in and soon as a Lightroom plug-in). I don't have the time and expertise to go through every program right now, but let me give you a sample of one of them.

Silver Efex Pro
Silver Efex Pro is the best black and white conversion program I have ever seen. Here is a snapshot of how it works:
In the main window you see the picture that I want to convert to black and white. On the left are presets that correspond to various darkroom techniques (push process, various filters, sepia, etc.). The panel on the right allows you to fine tune the preset in pretty extraordinary ways. The most innovative feature is the "control point."
You can add control points (as many as you like), adjust the diameter of the area to be affected, and then use very intuitive little sliding dots to make precise changes without any tedious masking (as you would normally do in Photoshop). I won't pretend to understand how they created an algorithm that eliminates the need for masking, but they did it. From what I understand, it senses the tone, the edges, and other information and applies your adjustments only to parts of the image that are similar to where you have placed a control point and that fall within the area you have defined.

The right side panel (click on the image to enlarge) includes not only the control points but also various filters typically used in film photography and a selection of film types that faithfully replicate the look of classic films. Never again will I add grain in photoshop. Instead, I can select, say, Kodak Tri-X 400TX Pro (I used to love to shoot with that), and get the same tone, grain, and sensitivity that I would have seen in film.

Finally, if you look at the bottom of the panel at right you will see the numbers 0-10, indicating the zone system I talked about in January. As I said in that post, I don't really use the zone system because it can be an arduous process. In this program, however, you can just click on the number that corresponds to the zone you want to affect and the computer does all of the work. Very cool.

If I weren't dying to go eat lunch, I would show you the others, but for now you can check them out at their web site.

If you want more posts in the future about products that I use and like, let me know in the comments section.

Le temps change tout...

I remember seeing graffiti scrawled onto the side of Château de Chambord that read: Le temps change tout (Time changes everything). Although I hated the fact that someone had defaced the chateau, I did find the quote fairly a propos.

The above photo is a foreground/background example that plays with the theme of time and change—not at Chambord, but at a the Louvre. A few years ago, the Louvre hosted a temporary exhibition that juxtaposed sculpture from its permanent collection with works by modern artists. Here, the "permanent collection" sculpture, although hundreds of years older than the its "temporary exhibition" counterparts, seems to look on with casual curiosity, secure in the knowledge that she will outlast the plaster newcomers and their plastic wall clocks.

Is this just a self-indulgent post or is there a point?

Mostly self-indulgent, BUT the "foreground" lesson here may be that when you see something you want to photograph (e.g. the plaster men holding clocks), you might try taking some photos of that thing in relation to a foregrounded object (e.g. an onlooker). This fits with my "observing the observer" exploration of foreground/background.

On a side note:
I rediscovered the above image when I was looking for something in black and white to merge with my corrupted digital files. I took the "Rothko on acid" photo from my last post, rotated it, added the black and white photo on top of it, and then used "pinhole light" blend mode to create this strange image:

So my two monitors now have that photo and this one:

I doubt the images will have universal appeal and I know that vivid colors (as a wallpaper) may start to get on my nerves, but I guess I am fascinated by the random glitches of corrupt files because they still have symmetry and they would be very difficult to produce intentionally. I like that they were born from a catastrophic computer failure for which an entire team of professionals has no explanation.

Share your own "foreground" photo for the March Monthly Special (currently with a whopping three contributions).

Call me crazy but...

I've been sorting through my recovered data from my computer fiasco and I'm really liking the corrupted photos.







I'm sure I wouldn't like these as much if I didn't already have backups of the uncorrupted versions. I'm using a couple on my monitors as wallpaper—it's only fitting to showcase the wreckage from my nightmarish loss.

I think the top one is my favorite. It looks like Rothko on acid.