Photoshop-free Photography

I know I won’t win a lot of friends and influence people with a title like that, but it describes what I’ve been practising the last couple of years.  Don’t get me wrong, I quite like Adobe’s tools, they’re jam-packed full of great design, good creative ideas, etc..  They’re also over priced and d0n’t run on Linux, at least by design!

Yes, I’m one of those creatures even rarer than a Mac user, I use Linux.  Ubuntu to be specific, and because of this, you’ve most likely never heard of these applications.

But there is a nice side-effect to the Windows-free/Mac-free/Photoshop-free approach.  It is also free-free.  And while I am a pretty firm believer in “you get what you pay for”, that rarely applies in the world of open-source software.  Instead of a paycheck being the motivator for a drone in a software factory, they are often labours of love from a network of talented developers.

So here is my list of apps for photography and what I use them for.

Top of the list, the “photoshop” of open source is, of course, The GIMP.  Any of the pictures I’ve produced over the last 3 years that required more than an adjustment of white balance, contrast or a little sharpening, have gone thru this gem of software.  The best thing about it, you can get it for Windows too.

Hugin panorama generator creates panoramic images from a selection of images.

Imgseek is basically an image library-type program, but has some remarkable features:

• You can simply draw a rough sketch of what you want to find and imgSeek displays for you a thumbnail view of the best matches.
• Query images similar to one in your collection by double-clicking on it’s thumbnail.
• Group your photos by similarity for easy browsing. You may also have them clustered automatically by color, date (group events automatically using an adaptive clustering algorithm for time differences), filename or image features.

For organising images, the wonderful google product Picasa is available, but I actually prefer digiKam, which has some great features for locating shots from those sessions long ago, as well as basic and even not-so-basic editing tasks.

There are also applications for HDR, ICC colour profiling, etc, although I haven’t dipped my toes into them yet.  But with the above you can certainly keep your photography moving in a photoshop-free world.

 

Zoom Blur and Trickery

I’ve had my new camera for eight months now. It is orders of magnitude more capable than the old one, but one of the things the old point-n-shoot had going for it was…. I could trick it easily! A lot of my creative images came from me trying to do something the old girl just wasn’t designed to do. So I’d get something that looked different, unique, unusual. All good things when you’re trying to be creative.

The new camera is just a bit too smart…. It’s hard to find things it CAN’T do! It’s caused me to rethink how I add creativity to a shot. But finally, after more than half a year, I’ve gotten used to the new hotness enough that I’m experimenting more with things that aren’t just straight shots, or post-processed.

One technique that I kept meaning to explore was zoom blur. Basically you take a typical zoom lens (in my case an 18-55mm) and zoom in all the way, focus (I set it to manual) and get the shutter speed down around 1/10-1/20th of a second. Then, crank the zoom to full wide-angle and press the shutter at the same time. Seems to be a little more regular if the camera is on a tripod, and I found turning ON the shake reduction helped (usually you turn it off when on the tripod). It can take a few shots to get a usable image, but the results can be interesting.

My first experiments were out the window of a hotel I was staying in. There was an empty lot below with a well-trod path cutting through it. A couple of joggers accomodated me by running along it, so I tried it out on them. A bit jiggly, but interesting (this was without tripod).

I thought it interesting enough that once back home I put the gear on a tripod and went outside to the front garden. I focused on a bright red flower with dark greens and bright sun around it. I had to add a polarising filter just to bring the levels down a bit, but got my shutter to 1/20th and aperture to f/8. A few cranks of the zoom later I got a floral firework. Note because you HAVE to center on the point you want the zoom to radiate from, I ended up cropping these shots to put the radial lines off-center.

Although the ‘raw’ blur shot was nice, to give the final a bit more definition, I also took a straight shot from the same position. Masking out everything but the flower in that shot I merged it into the blur shot, just to give the flower a little sharp definition.

 

Windows as Metaphor

I discovered, as I tried to decipher the older, pre-computer concept of windows as metaphor in human culture, that it isn’t easy to separate the computers out of it. The strength of using windows as a view into multiple operations of your computer is a strong one. Lots of people like to write about it.

Well, here was my first solid hit.

I want to find out why pictures with windows in them are so powerful. Why many of my favourites feature them.
Book Project

Certainly I’ve taken my share.

 

Plagiarism and the sense of smell

This started as a comment to bloglily about a memory (malformed as it turned out) of something written that she had enjoyed. It involved smell and was a powerful memory. I responded with this:

Scent is so evocative, it really dredges up memories. The smell of roses always reminds me of my paternal grandmother’s house, lilac’s of my maternal grandma’s.

I remember noticing when I was in California, hiking up the Devil’s Post Pile (I think that’s what it was called) and thinking how ‘alien’ the place smelled. Like someone opened potpouri in the other room. For me home is the smell of salt air and pine.

As for correctly remembering things from books, some of my more creative work has come from getting something I remembered completely and utterly WRONG! It’s like I have a copper-tube memory that ferments everything put in it. Apple juice in, cider out. Vinegar if I’m having a bad day!

It’s such a fine line sometimes between creativity and ‘copying’. I myself have had a few creative moments that were the result of an attempt to copy something but getting it wrong! I suppose I would be in trouble if I had a better memory .

What does plagiarism, the sense of smell and creativity have in common? If you read the last post, you saw me whining about the uber-academic discourse regarding creativity from the wikipedia entry. One thing struck me though, creativity is all about connections, especially “off-side” ones. The connections come from our conscious and sub-conscious ‘muck’ that is the great holographic mish-mash of memory. Smell is such a powerful trigger for memory and connection, but so difficult to quantifiy that I think it is always at work making those off-side connections. You don’t sit at a coffee-bar with your friends and talk about the smell of the library yesterday (“I found the mold a bit off, and the BO was giving it a tart edge”). But the smell of coffee triggers all sorts of connections with me. Especially in the morning. Especially right now.

Something to smell:

PS: I know it looks like a rose, but it’s actually a closeup of a bud from our geranium.

 

What am I doing?

This month is a busy one. I have pieces in four different galleries in our town, so there isn’t a stitch left in the house. Walls covered with little nail heads and thumbtacks!

In the process of trying to put down an artist’s statement so I could drum up some publicity I went from writer’s block to “Run Martha the dams a-breaking!”. So I thought I’d share one excerpt from it with you lot. I’m pretty sure there are other artists out there that sympathise. Drop me a line!

I’ve started a series I’ve variously called “lost worlds” or “dark and blurry” (depending on how I feel about it that day). It is a revolution against the perfection of my camera lens. Not that my lens or camera are particularly advanced. The average photographer has far more sophisticated gear than I do. But the camera companies, in their quest for optical perfection, make gear that, to me, is just too good!

I feel the camera and its lens contributes as much to the image as the light falling on the scene. The interaction of all these parts make the whole, but the camera and lens have become almost ‘transparent’ to the scene. Not that it’s a bad thing. I’m sure there are more people out there who would rather get sharp images than blurry ones, but there can be real magic in those wonky accidents from less-than-perfect gear. The $30 Holga camera is a perfect example. Professional photographers gladly dish out the cost of a good meal to have a badly made film camera that vignette’s the image, leaks light on the film and has poor optical quality, because of the amazing images they can create.

The LensBaby is another great example. A tool for making your photo’s sharp at a spot and blurry everywhere else. But it is a wonderfully creative tool! So if you’re part of ‘the revolution’ then drop a comment and link to your ‘lost worlds’!

 

Liquid Nitrogen

The members of the club that attended the liquid nitrogen night all brought objects to photograph. Three green cups become mysterious monoliths in the fog.

A flower was included in the mix. Placing it in the tray with the water produced a dreamy landscape. A very static yet interesting mix that contrasts greatly with the next one, where the liquid nitrogen was blown over a mirror holding the flower.

 

Playing with Liquid Nitrogen

I promised a description of the liquid nitrogen session at the Truro Imagemakers Club, so here goes!

Cliff originally thought of using dry ice, since it sits in the water and sizzles away, producing nice fog for atmospheric effects. But the price was much higher than previous years. Some digging revealed that liquid nitrogen could be had for a very reasonable price. The thermos you see in the picture being tipped cost $40 and was still half full after we had been using it for 2 hours.

Some notes about using this technique. The fog dissapates rapidly, so you need to be close to the object you want to create the fog effects around. Also we discovered that a constant trickle of liquid nitrogen from the thermos seemed to make a more consistent fog than “gulps” of liquid nitrogen poured over the tray.

In the example shown the flowers are actually in the tray of water. This water tray is important for helping to create the fog. However normally we set a mirror next to the tray with the object on the mirror. A little helpful breeze from a small fan moved the fog over the mirror.

 

Drops

Well, when there doesn’t seem to be anything going on outside to take pictures of, you look indoors! I put black bristol board on a table, then wax paper on that (to make the water bead). Had a container of water, and another of blue dye. Add and stir as needed. Lit by incandescent but manual WB to white. Underexposed 1EV and then darkened the shadows more to give the paper more texture. I also ended up pushing the color temp way toward the yellow.

(c)2005 – Doug Merrett

 

Twain on Photography

I couldn’t help but reprint this here.

“No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody–hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the meekest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and a fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom. If a man tries to look serious when he sits for his picture the photograph makes him look as solemn as an owl; if he smiles, the photograph smirks repulsively; if he tries to look pleasant, the photograph looks silly; if he makes the fatal mistake of attempting to seem pensive, the camera will surely write him down as an ass. The sun never looks through the photographic instrument that it does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints it on is well named a “negative”–a contradiction–a misrepresentation–a falsehood. I speak feeling of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Soloman, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot, and I am neither.”

- Letter to the Sacramento Daily Union, written July 1, 1866