Backlit Glass
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Backlighting glass is one of the ways of avoiding problematic reflections. Glass is interesting to work with given the various shapes and sizes available.
Common Things
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Shooting things around the house may look easy but shiny surfaces, angles of light, types of lighting are all a little complicated to solve. The many tutorials on line help, but in the end, I think table top lighting has an interesting and fun learning curve.
This is as close
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This was as close as I will ever get to Czar Nicholas II and frankly he’s not in such great shape. Reflection was created with a black acrylic sheet under the coin. The coin was held steady by some wax.
Reflection No.1 (Two photographs)
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Normally when I talk about reflections it’s about a bird on the water, but it’s a bit too cold for that now. So a scotch tasting glass made for an interesting subject. Even alone the glass looked great, but stacked on top of another similar glass you would think that a mirror was causing the effect.
Cufflink
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In the studio as out in nature a good background is important. Old scarves, coloured paper, out of focus furniture etc. etc. can be made to work.
Putting Things Together (Two Photographs)
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The pandemic has lead my wife and I to do some table-top photography with flash. It’s been a long time since I have so I am relearning old skills, putting it all together so to speak. See the second photo.
Looking Down
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One of my approaches to photography is to constantly look up, down and around for things to shoot. Some perspectives can be a little vertiginous, even if we cannot spot exactly why. In this photo there is a slight tilt to the plane of the photo and I hope it adds to the mood.
Local and Surreal (Two Photographs)
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At some point we all take well lit photographs of skyscrapers, they have great potential. Shoot a bracket of shots at different exposures and use HDR, the clouds move and often the software compensates with interesting patterns. I use Photoshop and not one of the stand-alone HDR tools for this, and it works very well.
Studio Setups (Two Photographs)
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Studio work is something I’d recommend trying. I worked in pro studios as a teen and it taught me the basics. Since then I occasionally take the opportunity to try setups at home. I continue to learn new techniques, about lighting, backgrounds, exposure etc. For backgrounds here I used scarves; the camera was fitted with a 50mm lens and the light was generated by flash.
More by Silas Qayaqjuaq (Two Photographs)
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The two statues by Silas gave me an opportunity to play with light and some close up photography to get the details I wanted; especially from the material (bone) in this carving. There are a surprising number of things around the house that make for good photographic subjects.
Needles and Chilis To Beat the Pandemic Boredom (Two Photographs)b
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My efforts at true macro continue, finding subjects to photograph can be challenging. I began by pinning the chili to cork so it was held in mid air. After several hours of fiddling with lights I got a shot of the chili, and then more time was spent in Photoshop erasing the pins and learning more about how to fix backgrounds. The needle also took the larger part of the day. I have great close up vision but had a hard time seeing the hole in the needle to centre it on the camera. Both of these photographs are efforts at learning what works and doesn’t in true macro. It’s early days.
Simple (Two Photographs)
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They say that sometimes simple is best. And in these uncertain times simplicity and clarity would be a godsend. In photography it’s not always easy to get that artistic background that makes this kind of photograph work.
Street Glass (Two Photographs)
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I found these as they are. They made me look twice and that is my objective, to shoot photographs that make people look (often popularly called “impact”). There is a lot of “language” in photography, some is not entirely clear to everyone and I have seen several dictionaries on line, none of them complete.
Down But Not Out (Two Photographs)
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Fall is full of colour and there is a new randomness to nature. Leaves fall, trees get more colourful with increasing moisture and the wind mixes it all up. Abstract art by nature. It’s very much like intimate urban landscape photography, you have to keep your eye out for the details, the light and colour.
Texture (Two Photographs)
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Texture has many meanings in photography; it can refer to mood, background or even the subject. I try to keep this in mind when taking and processing photos, as it’s an element I can make creative use of. I chose these photos because texture is front and centre.
Minimalism (Two Photographs)
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I have seen more than one article recently, on minimalism in Photography. It is an interesting approach to photography and like many genres has its place and includes brilliant pieces of art. If you haven’t tried it, give it a go, it can’t hurt.
Moore -ish (Two Photographs)
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I have been fortunate to have seen many of Henry Moore’s sculptures as well as the work of Giacometti, another sculptor. These photographs remind me of their work or put another way the post processing was influenced by their styles.
Modern Art or Nature?
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There is a body of modern art that escapes my ability to make sense of. Moreover when it comes to the kind of randomness Jackson Pollack was famous for, my view is that nature does it better.
Tree and Bark (Three Photographs)
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These photographs are all about contrast and I used various types of contrast, sharpening and other effects to get what you see here. The results work for me. Like many other areas of photography, the application of contrast is something to be studied and practiced.
Natural Abstract (Two Photographs)
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I like to think, before I take a photograph, about how it will turn out after I have shot and processed it. That permits me to focus on what I want in the frame and what my camera needs to capture (settings that need to be considered etc.) . This kind of photo makes that easier than when photographing a bird. I find it improves my photography.
Imagining an Outcome (Two Photographs)
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From my days working with professional photographers in my teens I realized what made a pro a pro was their ability to describe what the photograph would look like before they took it and guarantee the results.
Envisioning the final result is an important step in my work. Though I will admit that it sometimes does not work quite the way I hoped.
Show-Time (Two Photographs)
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I went to this fair where local craftsmen, antique shops etc. show and sell their goods. Normally these events provide significant opportunity for great shots. But this year I was hard pressed to see something I had not seen the year before. I took very few shots, of which these two may be the best.
Street (Two Photographs)
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I took this shot and realized that for some reason my white balance was completely off, but also realizing it would not have a significant effect on the black and white version if I used a blue filter in processing. With contrast, and exposure settings I was able to make this the drastic and somewhat odd photo you see in black and white.
A Colour Photograph
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If it were not for the garbage on the ground it would be hard to tell if this was a black and white or colour photograph. What caught my eye was how the light hit the concrete and gave it some tonality.
