May 31st, 2006
Brian Dilg has an interesting gallery of retouching examples that show the before and after of a photo and his thorough adjustments to the original image.
These pictures remind us that in this age of ubiquitous Photoshop trickery, what you see is no longer what you get.
As a side note, this site doesn’t seem to load up properly in Safari, so you might want to check it out in another browser.
May 31st, 2006
The Digital Journalist has a page featuring 100 Photographs that Changed the World. Of course, not all 100 of the photos are present - they are an excerpt of the 100 photos available in the Life book of the same name.
Nonetheless, the heights and the depths of humankind’s place on earth (and beyond) in the last century are succinctly summarized by this small collection of images. More information about the book is available here.
May 31st, 2006
If you’re a photographer lacking inspiration, check out some of the top sites on this list of the best photoblogs. Maybe the work of others can get you going.
And of course, if that doesn’t do the trick, there’s always my article on Breaking Shooter’s Block.
May 31st, 2006
I just found this guide to the Top Ten Stock Photography Cliches and had a chuckle. A couple of my favourites are ‘The Handshake of Synergy’ and ‘The Flirty Customer Service Gal.’
It’s a mixed blessing that I’ve never shot a photo that would fit under any of these umbrellas. On the one hand, I can be proud of myself for eschewing these all-too-common images. On the other hand, people buy these photos. Frequently. Maybe I should go find a multicultural group of business execs to pose on some starting blocks…
May 30th, 2006
DIY Photography has an article about concert photography. One of the people commenting on this article mentions the rules change when you’re in a smaller venue and I agree.
When I’ve had the chance to shoot shows with small, independent bands, I like to play around with the flash. Particularly, for more vivacious acts, I like to fire off a flash burst combined with a longer shutter speed. The Flash gives definition to the subject, but the longer exposure catches a lot of the ambient light - those stage lights don’t go to waste. When the band is especially energetic, you can often get interesting streaking in the photos. It captures a lot of movement and truly conveys the vitality of the show. This can also sometimes have the benefit of allowing you to work with lower ISO settings or slower lenses without having to worry about blur.
All this makes me wish I was back in a country where I could see some bands play. I miss rock.
May 30th, 2006
When re-launching the site, I couldn’t very well go ahead and put up a new site without adding some new images. That just wouldn’t do. So, in an effort to give some fresh content, may I present you with my my photos of the Poi Sang Long Festival in Chiang Mai.
This fantastic event celebrates the ordination of the new novice monks that belong to the Thai Yai and Shan peoples of the area. For three days these boys are dressed up as princes and carried around by their family and friends – their feet aren’t supposed to touch the ground the whole time.
Their brilliant dress, makeup and headwear made for a spectacular scene that was only overshadowed by the joy of the festivities.
May 30th, 2006
A few weeks ago, I had decided to take some steps to upgrade my site. A couple new features here and there and I hoped it would start to fulfill the goals of the site in a more efficient way.
What I quickly realized upon making additions was that the core framework the site was insufficient for my needs. The thing was held together with duct tape and no more tape was going to make it solid. My attempts to improve upon what I had made this clear – I need some solid bolts or welding to underpin this thing, not tape.
I started to tinker with an alternative content management system: Wordpress. It was like settling into a comfortable chair. It was so relieving to have my CMS work predictably. I told it to do something; it did it. Fancy that.
I started to develop a new, friendlier version of my site using Wordpress as the engine. I was planning on developing it behind the scenes while my current site remained in place for any viewers who happened to come my why during development. A couple days later, that plan went down the tube when I learned that all the images on my site were no longer accessible due to who knows what error.
I couldn’t have people trying to find my work and ending up receiving only errors, so I took down the site and started to rebuild in earnest.
A short while later and I am counting down to launch. The site may look mostly the same to you, but to me, the difference is like riding a high-end, custom-built mountain bike with good shocks versus a rusty shopping bike with no seat.
And with that, let me welcome you to the new and improved dsphotographic.com. Please feel free to let me know what you think. I’m especially eager to hear from Windows users since I haven’t had much opportunity to test the site on a PC.
I now intend to use the brand-spankin’ new backend to deliver more content to this lovely little blog. When I’m not travelling, I hope I can be a good source of travel photography (and related) news. (With, of course, the occasional bit of unrelated, fun news thrown in just because.)
While travelling, it will be business as usual with my posts. Updates will come as time permits, but I always prefer being behind the lens and shooting marvelous locations to sitting behind a computer if I’m given the choice.
I hope all that’s not too confusing and I hope you’ll follow along.
May 9th, 2006
Yeah, I’m seriously regretting using Mambo now. I’ve just been using Wordpress for about a half hour now and it is so much more user friendly. I really think I could have the non-gallery portion of my site up and ready to go in no time.
The problem is that pesky Gallery software. I think I could leave it as a standalone, but I would have to do some serious changes to the CSS files. That’s not really a big deal at first glance, but really, without being able to see it in IE, I’m bound to be in for a few surprises considering it’s so bloody hard to get that script to do what you want.
That’s all fine and good. I know how I could do that. One tricky thing though would be to try to get a search block for the images working on the non-gallery pages. Right now I can do that through Mambo (which, by the way, was a total fluke of coding and I still don’t really know what I did). I really don’t think I would have such good luck with Wordpress. I really want people to be able to search my images from anywhere on my site, but I don’t know if that’s going to be possible.
May 8th, 2006
I spent a little time yesterday making some improvements to the site. First off is a revamping of the RSS feed. Previously, the RSS feed generated by the Mambo CMS (Content Management System) had no real dates attached to the items. But, thanks to this hack, the RSS feed is now actually accurate.
I also added the ability to comment on blog entries and articles. I don’t really know if anyone will be interested in making comments or not, but at least now they have the option!
I would also like to add some kind of trackback or pingback functionality to the blog here, but I am now discovering that Mambo is really a horrible platform for blogging. I’m now kicking myself for using this particular CMS - something like Wordpress would probably have suited me just fine. I didn’t necessarily need to have my gallery embedded into the overall CMS and I could have had them working together adequately without all the hassles of Mambo.
If only I were efficient enough to implement a new site CMS in a few days. I would give it a go, but a few things are going to hold me back from that. First off, I don’t have a PC for testing, so I can pretty much forget about it. I also don’t have a lot of time on my hands for this sort of thing. On a related note, the amount of content on this site is escalating every day and porting it over to another CMS would likely take a while. Oh well. I have what I have for now so I’ll see if I can make th best of it.
May 7th, 2006
Pendulumeca gets the time waster of the day award. You might consider not clicking this if you want to stay efficient today.
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