People who look at my flickr stream mostly ask what these acronyms are because they are seen often in photography:
DOF: meaning “depth of field” and providing you either with sharpness in every detail or just a range, hence often called shallow DOF.
POV: meaning point of view and speaks for itself
What are your favorites?
Sometimes it is hard to make a good picture. It is hard because you made the decision to go to a place which is described in all the books written on the city you live in. This can be odd. But it can also be fun to sit on a bench and count the people taking the exact same picture from the exact same spot (with the exact same phone or ultrazoomsuperportableplasticlensthingy). So I walk through the Belvedere and I cannot make a straight shot because the place is crawling with people who have their heads in guides, maps, phones and so on. It seems to me you have to have no camera at all to actually see the beauty. I wonder how many people saw the bumblebee flying in and out the sphinx’s ear…
So there are the ones who think the best approach to solve the tourist problem in Belvedere is to feed them to the sphinx, but who knows. The other possibility would be to allow everyone only three shots within the park. They would look closely and discover so much beauty. Maybe they would take the only shot tourists in the Belvedere do not take. Like the following one. Please be patient as I was looking around only for 20 minutes or so…
I can hear the statues already looking from the roof: What are all the people doing in our garden? And I wish to hear the following answer: They want to see and feel the beauty of the place. But nobody has a better view than us…
Who thought wide angle lenses are for architecture and landscapes might be wrong – very wrong. Some people do not like wide angles for the effects the lenses have on straight lines and space. There are two projects you should definitely try with your lens to get a feeling what the lens does to your surroundings.
It is said that it is a good thing for a photographer to use prime lenses. The funny thing is that I was planning on doing something absolute different, which is another project.
What is so different when using a prime lense? The difference lies not only in the elimination of the variable zoom. It is also the emphasis on the composition of the picture and the variables DOF (depth of field), focus, aperture and shutter speed.
Finally you will realize that the zoom is still there. Your legs and arms are the zoom.
One of the biggest advantages of shooting in RAW is that the final version of the picture can look very different. In the examples below I did only use different color profiles for Canon Digital Picture Professional. It is not changing much on light and contrast – obviously you do that when you work with curves – it is more on changing colors and mood.
Have a look yourself. From left to right it is a picture in Velvia-style, natural and retro style.
I really enjoy playing with these styles from time to time. Strangely you can see another effect here: With some pictures some curves do not work. What do you think?
I always was a big fan of M.C.Escher and his recursive and impossible pictures. When I saw the first escheresque photograph I could not resist to search the web and find out how it is done. A few days ago I rediscovered the technique of the Droste effect. A Droste effect picture is a picture within a picture within a picture within a picture… a neverending spiral.
This tutorial is based on the tutorial by Josh Sommers, which is a little outdated so I wrote a short guide on how to do it with current versions of the tools. As the original this version is directed at Windows users.
There is one question I get asked a lot: Can you suggest a camera? And my answer is always the same: There is no simple answer to this task, but I am glad to give you some tips.
