Shanghai's People Power

No blog, travel or otherwise, would be complete without a discussion of fashion. After all most photographers at one time or another have taken photographs that emphasize what people are wearing.

With over a billion citizens, people power has always been China's advantage over other countries around the world. Whenever you have a society that's based on collaboration, you'll find ample photo-ops where a group of people are all wearing the same thing.

If you're photograhing people candidly, never underestimate the value of not reinventing the wheel--if you see people who are already posing, shoot away.

Tip--If you see a group of people posing for photographs from the street, by all means snap away, the work has already been done for you.

It helps to ask first, and, most of the time, most people won't mind.

Paris Protest Head-in-Sand

Last night I was referred to as a master. Had dinner with "the masters."

Indeed, the rest of the people at the dinner were masters.

I felt a little out of place, even though I gave a great seminar earlier in the day--Digital Fine Art Photography (they left off the Dummies)-- at the Palm Springs Photo Festival.

Highlight of the evening was a slide show of Glen Wexler's work.

Both Wexler and his dad were at the event. Dad is well-known architect (an icon here actually), Donald Wexler.

Also included in the after-carry-out-dinner-with-the-masters was another slideshow from Photo Festival's friends Corbis.

Showed as part of the younger Wexler's work was an upside-down pair of pants with shoes on the end.

I was quick to let the group know that the same symbol was used for protest in an instillation form as shown above.

I took the photo a few years back and wanted to show here, cause there's know place like Paris for the best demonstrations/protests.

Art is everywhere.

To find this image file in my computer, I simply typed in protest in my Mac's finder (File>Find).

Tip: Many people ask me how to file their images. I say name the image by what it contains and then it will be easy to find years later.

Black and White Conversion in Raw

Raw files are great once you get them into your computer--all you have to do to get black-and-white from color is move the saturation slider in the Raw processing window. Raw files are files that your camera uses to not only take a picture, but to store the settings at which you photographed, allowing you to change them post-processing.

The quality and contast of this method is as good as you'd get if you were shooting on film.

Check it out.

The photo below was taken in the City of Lights while I was penning Digital Art Photography for Dummies There's one like it in the book along with other ideas about shooting and organizing both black-and-white and color photo sets.

Los Angeles Times, Incomplete Reporting of the Sinatra House

Backlit sign on slot in Vegas (Backlit signs are great photo subjects for collages)

If you caught the article about the Sinatra House in the LA Times's West Magazine you got an earful of Sinatra's tristes, but nothing about when or who remodeled the house.

Don't know why they omitted this information when they had Palm Springs-based photographer David Glomb (he's covered in my book) submit terrific photographs of the remodeled house.

My guess is that it was the writer's discretion to omit anything that has happened to that house post-Sinatra.

But--hey--I've covered that house over the years and have the real meat-and-potatoes

Alert--Alert The bible thumpers (a pretty Black woman and a middle-aged white blonde) just arrived at my door. Urgggg--religion is getting on my nerves--there's more to life than religion (about 70 percent of the time now the media, it seems, has taken up this subject on prime-time news). Geeze it's just common sense that you work for what you feel what's right and let go of the results, having a little fun on the way.

Back to Sinatra:

Here's links to what I've covered about the house beginning with the remodel:

Homestore/AOL article with before and after remodel photos.

Tape recorder with tape found hidden between the house during 1997 remodel and whose contents are unknown.

Palm Springs real estate and how I got to cover the Sinatra house remodel (not to mention notes about burning CDs)

Tips about architectual art photography can be found here.

Roadside Elephant in Socal--Cropping using the Rule of Thirds

Check this picture out. I cropped it using the rule of thirds. I took it while I was driving home to Palm Springs from Riverside, CA on Highway 60. It is of one of those ubiquitous, ornamental (and sometimes tacky) roadside sculptures.

If you drew a vertical line across every third of this frame, you'd find that the first vertical line would go right through the elephant.
I planned it that way. I placed the elephant following the Rule of Thirds.

The Rule of Thirds is a great way to plan your shots. Take for example, a landscape of the countryside just outside your city or town. You'd want to frame the picture so that the bottom two-thirds of your frame would be land and the top third sky. In this case the lines you drew across the frame to divide it into thirds would have been horizontal.

Photography Ideas for Teachers

Here's what I taught today at the TechEd conference in Pasadena.

Objectives--To show teachers the connection between art, photography composition and techniques, and digital cameras connection and application to math, science and language.

CHARACTER REVELATION
Who knows your students better than you? Some students are good at art, others reading. Why not photograph students at the tasks in which they excel?

HOW DO YOU DISCOVER CHARACTER TRAITS?
Consider how students reveal their feelings and attitudes differently. Some of us may show our individual character with immediate transparency, while others may be more difficult to 'read' at first. The portrait photographer must become proficient at studying people around them. Since students know one another well, you can get the pot cooking by engaging them in a think-pair-share to have them write sentences with the theme a how-my-partner-looks/acts-best theme.

Watching for signals in a subject's mannerism, reactions, expressions, body language and so on, assists one in how to capture the subject's character so that it is revealed and asthetically fits into the a frame of specified size.

Since students know their subject, they can take photographs of each other, capturing them in a more-relaxed and natural-looking manner. Teachers and students can produce quality images of each other (yes, give the camera to your students and have them photograph you) by finding a common ground or a topic of particular interest to his/her subject--a hobby, the latest news, a mutual acquaintance, or any number of other topics.

You must take all possible steps to put a subject at ease in order for her or him to appear natural. You can also revise the steps to create a fascinating writing lesson for your student/photographers.

MASTER THE CRAFT WITH MATH
Photography, like any art form, is based on some basic math-based rules of composition, such as the Rule of Thirds (making a landscape photo, for example, with one-third sky and two thirds land) and using a vanishing point (drawing out in perspective of a scene and finding something similar to photograph).

After students master those composition techniques, they can put their own artistic interpretation of a scene to make an art photo. They can experiment with various camera settings (f-stop, shutter speed) by writing down the values of what's shown in the camera each time they shoot at each value. Without even knowing the term f-stop and/or shutter speed, they will see a pattern (lightness/darkness of photo for example) after they record the numbers.

THE TREK FROM CAMERA TO COMPUTER
Snapping a photograph is only the beginning. Digital art photography requires following certain paths before you can print and frame your output (final image), including
1. Getting the image into your computer
2. Digitally tweaking the image: With your image open in Photoshop (or your image editor of choice), there's practically no end to the tweaking that you can do.
3. Saving your image in the appropriate file type: Whether your shooting with a high-end digital Single Reflex Camera or a mid-level point-and-shoot, the files in which your camera store your picture will ultimately be saved in a high resolution format called TIF, file format. Your digital image will travel across a number of devices and platforms before it is finally printed. As it travels, you’ll learn how to save it so its resolution stays in tact throughout its travels.

FOREGROUNDS AND BACKGROUNDS
Simplicity
Keeping your shots clean and uncluttered is paramount to presenting a great art photograph. That's not to say that you can't shoot something detailed and ornamented, but make sure your audience sees what you wanted to show, not clutter and unnecessary background distractions. In order to do this take various photographs yourself with foregrounds, middle grounds and backgrounds to use in class for showing students how they can visualize a three demensional space in a two demensional photograph.

WHO CAME UP WITH THESE IDEAS?
As a post-career teacher who taught for 14 years--7 in Oakland and 7 in Daly City, CA, I researched and wrote examples of the Rule of Thirds and other art composition techniques (including all the math technicalities) for my book "Digital Art Photography for Dummies (Wiley, 2005). When I wrote the book, I imagined all of the readers to all of the students who I have instructed throughout the years, not only as a public school teacher, but as a university professor. I've taught various courses from technology to linguistics at National and Chapman universities. For more informantion (and a lot of multidisciplinary fun), visit my blog at http://digitalartphotographyfordummies.blogspot.com. And, last, I've had the pleasure of sharing my thoughts at tech conferences througout the state of California.

Library Journal Review for Digital Art Photography for Dummies

My first big time review from Library Journal.
Bamberg, Matthew. Digital Art Photography for Dummies. Wiley. 2005. c.370p. photogs. index. ISBN 0-7645-9801-5. pap. $34.99. PHOTOG
Journalist/photo artist Bamberg provides a thorough overview not only of digital photography but also of photography in general. In Part 1, he offers solid, practical advice on defining one's audience and personal approach to photography and discusses the process of making photographs, various compositional elements (e.g., color, light and shadow, perspective), and the transition to digital photography. Part 2 contains wide-ranging tips about photographing outdoors and indoors, photographing people and animals, and taking color, black-and-white, and night shots. Part 3 deals with the use of PhotoShop; Part 4 is about managing digital files, printing photographs, and matting and framing one's work. In Part 5, and in a bonus section titled "On
the Web," Bamberg imparts additional tips that address everything from
photographing on a cloudy day to enhancing one's photographs with text. The book includes a useful index for locating specific information and is illustrated with more than 300 full-color photographs. Bamberg has written a remarkably clear and comprehensive overview of digital photography; recommended for all libraries, especially for public libraries where there is interest in amateur photography.
-Raymond Bial, First Light Photography,Urbana, IL

Blurring Backgrounds in Photoshop Polynesian Style

Quick tip about blurring backgrounds.

Tomorrow I sign more books at Borders in Rancho Mirage, a tiki book signing, if you will, as the theme will be tropical Polynesian. Tiki was a Polynesian God represented by carved, painted wood.

Here's a tiki I caught on film and scanned. This is an original tiki carved in the 1960s when people went crazy over anything Polynesian--thinking with a kind of Trader Vics mentality.

In order to blur the background of this tiki, you have to select and feather it.
Click on the magnetic lasso tool
Type in a value of 3 for the Feather value in the top menu bar.
Click and drag to select tiki with magnetic lasso tool.
Click on Select>Inverse.
Click on Filter>Blur>Lens Blur.
Play with the sliders to get the blur you want.

That's it!

Photographing Quickly

Tropical clouds at dusk or dawn can present a variety of color any place you shoot in the sky (not just the horizon). This photos were snapped upon entering a high-rise hotel room in Bangkok. Each moment the clouds changed and so did the colors.

Photojournalism Moment--Europe at a Crossroad

In 2002, I was in Amsterdam when the news came out that Pim Fortuyn was shot.
Bringing his image back today is necessary, I think, in terms of photojournalism, because of what's gone on in Europe lately--protests, riots, and the words the government has taken that contradict their once prevalent liberal thought.

I can remember the party-liberal land of Amsterdam being in shock when the news got out. People, glued to their televisions screens, watched as the memories of the leader flashed--a leader who formed a populist party that ran on an anti-immigrant platform.

This openly gay 'right-wing' leader's assassination brought forward Europe's immigration argument. Fortuyn rejected 'left-wing' political correctness and, ultimately, came down hard by rejecting the ease with which Muslims were immigrating to the country.

Now that you have a little background, the image above, I believe, makes sense as images of the man are pondered through a blood red grill.

While the war in Iraq rages on and Bush's policies and actions (or inactions) churn of incompetence, there is one bright spot on the American horizon--our general acceptance of immigrants (including Muslims) needs to be lauded as we do a much better job of integrating a variety of people into our American culture.

Palm Springs Photo Festival

If you live in Socal or are planning to come here, come on out to the photo festival. I'll be there!

This Deco Urinal Sure Beats Duchamp's

Is this too risque for a Dummies book blog? I think not. After all, I got the art word in my title, and this photograph represents, sure, a lot of pooh pah, but also one of the greatest modern art pieces ever thought of (see here).
Tip: As photographers we can take known works and go a step further (notice the colored deodorizers at the bottom of the toilet).

Don't you think this urinal is a bit better designed than the one Duchamp pulled out and put on display? Check his out and the comments people have written about this sassy piece at Art News.

Perspective Toronto

Just a photo today, one that keeps things in a colorful perspective.

Toronto Art Expo and Images

David Grieve's impressionism paintings certainly could be rated sky high at this year's Toronto Art Expo, an event that I visited today.

In some ways the event itself was a disappointment as I like to think of art as a celebration. This event, however, had the enthusiasm of that found in a funeral parlor.

Nonetheless, there was some good work in this downtown Toronto event.

Aside from Grieve, there were two other notable photographers in the show--

1. Peter Harris's oils, which looked almost like photographs, so much so, that's what I thought at first until the artist told me otherwise.
2. Peter Laventhall's art photography was noteworthy and exciting as he's been to many places where I have. I'm envious though as he's been to Cuba(Canadians are permitted to go there) and I'm not allowed to go (whine, whine).

Here's ten Toronto images--

Toronto Wide Angle Art Photos

These were shot with an EFS 10-22 mm wide angle lens. This Canon lens, while nice for art photos, creates much fish eye distortion when photographing architecture. This irritates me. Se la vi...

Toronto is a clean, fun city. Lots to do, but little in the way of significant older architecture compared with other Eastern cities of its size. I read that they save only the facades of the older buildings so that when you enter an older looking place, it's new inside.

Photo Shoot LA--Contemporary Furniture

Lost a couple of days on this blog while I was in Los Angeles on a photo shoot for the modern store Room Service. Tricky shoot because there were lots of photos to take (every piece of furniture in a very large store) and a limited time in which to shoot. At any rate here are some of the photos. When I get rich, my house will look like this. I guess I'll just have to keep selling Digital Art Photography for Dummies.







Off to Toronto next. Later...

Mountain-top Snow in Palm Springs

AOL Message Board Question Answered--Shutter Lag Time

Hey, wanna catch your baby quickly without having the camera respond to your click slowly, so that you end up missing that photo-op moment.

Today I found myself researching the point-and-shoots with the lowest shutter lag time to answer a post on the AOL message board. The shutter lag is the time it takes to take each picture--the time between when you press down the shutter button and the time when the shutter actually closes (and then opens) to capture the image on the sensor.

A very fast shutter lag time would be 50 milliseconds (Nikon D 200 SLR). For point-and-shoots the time is much slower .08 to .13 seconds for the more efficient cameras in this respect.

For faster shutter lag times in the point-and-shoot models, look for a Casio Exilim EX-Z110 or a Sony DSC S40, both are well under $500. For a chart on shutter lag times--go here: http://www.cameras.co.uk/html/shutter-lag-comparisons.cfm A liitle better camera with a shorter shutter lag time would be Sony DSC H1, which is the price range you are looking for.

Lights, Camera, Action--Renting lighting and backdrops

Sometimes you have to go back to good ole photography--stuff that's been tested for decades--to prepare for a shoot.

On Monday, I go to Los Angeles to shoot a modern furniture at Room Service, a store in Los Angeles. The pictures that I take will go into a catalog. No candid photography with this job--just arranging furniture into sets and shooting individual pieces in front of the backdrop.

Here's what I had to rent for the shoot (the stuff had to be fairly portable and simple.)

*9 foot Arctic White Backdrop (Wish me good luck in getting that in my car!).
*Background support system.
*Norman Strobe w/flash head and stand.

Will put some of the photos up on Monday night.

Eiffel Tower--Slow Shutter Speeds

Paris makes you think of the Eiffel Tower.

If you want to be close to this great monument (right now I want to be there) the Hotel de Londres (1 Rue Augereau, Paris 75007, France) is the place, rated highly, it's only minutes from one of the world's greatest wonders. (Ah, heck, I just looked that up on the internet, because once again Paris is on my mind.)

This picture was taken at 100 ISO, f/5.6 and shutter speed of 3.2 seconds.

Channel Mixer

If you recall yesterday's post, there was a lady, who was, well...picking up after her dog. In color the photo was just drab. There were just too few colors in the photo.

Tip: When there are too few colors in your photo and/or boring colors, switch it to black and white.

How do you do that?

You could just desaturate (Image>Adjustments>Desaturate). But a better way, I think, is to do this:

1. In Photoshop use Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Channel Mixer
2. Click okay in the New Layer dialog box.
3. Click on Monochrome in the Channel Mixer dialog box.
4. Tweak the slider bars till you get good contrast.
5. Use Layer>Flatten Image

To find out why you do it this way (and what all this stuff means if you don't know), make sure and pick up a copy of my book.

A Candid Photographer's Must Have

No candid photographer's portfolio would be complete without a picture like this. This was shot in Paris.

Modern Furnishings and Boing Boing

Funny thing happened today on my way to blogville.

CA MODERN magazine (a freebee that's mailed to homes in CA, it's very slick, large and glossy) asked to see my photos after I'd done some work on ads and photography for Modern Living Spaces.

For some odd reason I went to Boing, Boing (I usually don't visit the place often) and found mid-century style furnishings, yes, but as tattoos on people.

Here's the link to Designboom that was listed on Boing, Boing.

Matthew Bamberg Upcoming Events

Thursday, March 9th 6-10 p.m. Book Signing Palm Springs, California Village Fest

Saturday, March 25th Teacher's Day Book Signing Event, Borders, 71800 Highway 111, Rancho Mirage, CA

Monday, March 27th 12:15-1:15 p.m. "Teaching Vygotsky's "Little Bit More" Using Your Digital Camera" Teched Conference, Pasadena Conference Center, Pasadena, CA

Wednesday, March 29th 10:30-12 noon, Palm Springs Photo Festival Seminar held at Palm Springs Public Library, 300 South Sunrise Way, Palm Springs, CA

Saturday, April 15th 2-5 p.m. Book Signing, Borders, 900 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA

Optical Illusion Photography

Guess what this is? It was taken in Paris.

Shanghai Train Station

One of my favorite places to go and photograph is the train station. Doesn't matter where I am, there's always something going on.

Usually train stations are in the middle of the city and it's usually easy to navigate to well-known landmarks on foot. That is not the case in Shanghai. While it's a modern city, there is so much constrction going on that you can't walk from point A to point B easily.

I can remember wanting to go from the train station to one of the more popular tourist spots (where there are Western restaurants and cafes) and walking for over an hour, thinking I was almost there.

To my dismay I only got as far as the other side of the train station. The place is huge.

Here's more from another blog.

Photojournalism Moment-- Frank Sinatra's Mystery Recording

Since I'm in the process of cleaning out my computer so I can place my images on the Web by category, I came across a photo that I took of Frank Sinatra's lost tape recorder.

Let me give you some background first. I had been writing an article for Homestore.com when the person I was interviewing at Frank Sinatra's Twin Palms house in Palm Springs showed me a tape recorder he had found between the walls of the house as he was remodeling it.

I asked him if he knew what was on it. He said he tried to play it but the tape broke (see picture).

About a year later the a documentary film maker from BBC called me asking me if I still had the photographs of Frank Sinatra's house. I said yes, and then he asked me to get him anything I could about him. Well, it was then I told him about the tape recorder.

I phoned the owner of the tape recorder (now the ex-owner of the Frank Sinatra house) asking him if we could hear the tape recorder or get the tape fixed then hear it. He said no.

Last year, the person who I owned the tape recorder called, wanting to buy some of my photos he had seen in a local store in town. After I made the photos, I delivered them to his house in Pasedena.

We started talking a bit, and he brought up the tape recorder again. He said that he hadn't done anything with it, and had no plans to. He also said he had no intention of giving the tape to anyone. It was then I asked him if I could photograph it. Well, I didn't have my camera, so I ran to the local drugstore and bought a disposable black and white film camera (why black and white, I don't know).

Here's the photograph. What's on this tape is still a mystery!

What Kind of Photographer Am I?

I got an Instant Message from a member of the AOL photography community yesterday that asked me what kind of photographer I was.

Well, that was a good question and got me thinking about what kind of photographer I am.

In the book Digital Art Photography for Dummies there's a section where you evaluate yourself to find out what kind of photographer you are.

It's really a kind of self-help thing.

All art comes from the person making it--our feelings...our eye...our hearts, body and soul...

Many photographers settle into their equipment--cameras and lenses or their technique--perfectly set f stops and getting the light just right.

Yes, that's part of it, something many people perfect without considering much about their subject matter's relationship with themselves. What they get are a plethera of what's already there--insects, flowers, roads following the rule-of-thirds, etc...

To be sure, all of that type of photography is nothing less than gorgeous, but noting more than common.

I can do that type of photography, but that's not the type of photographer I am.

I want to:

1. Take risks
Climb trees, then zoom in on the most unusual item I can find.
Something like this "Cheeta, Tarzan and Retirees." Don't kid yourself, 70-something apes are not safe to be around and think about it--How in the heck did I get to Cheetah's house?
2. Get dirty
Sit or lie on the ground or shove myself into bushes to get the best angle possible.
Something like these.
3. Being myself
I don't feel I'll get anything worthwhile if I photograph something that bores me.
Okay, some of my best friends have SUVs, but, really now, the world would be better without them.
4. Go with my gut
Even if it means I upset some people.
Something like "Send Our Boys Home"
5. Constantly be on the lookout for freaky/odd/unusual/surprising stuff
Something like "Backlight Photography Mediation"

America, G-D Shed His Sense on Thee

As I was blogging this morning I found my fingers dancing on the keys responding to someone else's blog...

Here, here, secularism in society brings about new art, new ideas, innovation.

I think if we all took photographs that showed our cracked roads, maze of freeways, big SUVs, blazing night lights, pre-packaged items that are wrapped in three layers and then thrown in a big box, exurbs that intrude on wondering mountian lions, McMansions for two, strip malls that people stay away from, huge buildings surrounded by even bigger parking lots and a president who prays for other people's oil.

That's what I came up with.

Picture scanned from my film negative libaray is of the Albert Frey Welcome Center at the enterance to the city of Palm Springs, where developers are consider littering its view with hundreds of McMansions.