Following the 2023 AGM, WCC had a fascinating Workshop on LIFE Magazine photographers with Alwyn Hanson.
“LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.” Google books.
Martin Luther King Jr. Originally snapped in 1957 at one of the early Civil Rights rallies in Washington D.C., the photo would go on to become one of the most famous of the Reverend and one of the most recognizable photos of the Civil Rights Movement itself. Despite being taken nearly nine years earlier, the photo was not published until a week after King was assassinated in 1968.
How do you take similar photos using two different cameras? For example consider an image I might take with my Canon R5 (full frame, 45 MPx) an image with a 50 mm lens. To get the same field of view on my Olympus OMD EM-5 mark ii (micro four thirds sensor with 16 MPx) I need to use a 25 mm lens. And even then the images are not equivalent because the R5 has 3 times as many pixels. And at a given aperture, depth of field is greater on the EM5 than the R5 (for example 25 mm f2.8 on the EM5 is roughly equivalent to 50 mm f5.6 on the R5). But wait, there is more … the two links below should give you a broader understanding of how sensor size, pixel density, focal length, aperture and ISO all interact.
You have probably heard of lens diffraction and its effects of softening your images when the lens is set to a small aperture (large f-number). The image above illustrates diffraction effects (Click on the image to see an enlarged image in a new tab that more clearly demonstrates the diffraction effects. Modified from https://photographylife.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/The-Kiss-diffraction.jpg.)
Diffraction is present in all your photographs, and – if you aren’t careful – it can rob some sharpness from your favorite images. However, once you see its effects in practice, diffraction will become second nature.
If you want to find out more including:
the causes of this effect
how much it might affect your images depending on
sensor size
pixel density on the sensor
and the interaction of aperture on depth of field and diffraction (wide aperture –> focus softening vs small aperture –> greater depth of field, but diffraction softening)
Here is a useful resource to help you get your head around depth of field and how it changes depending on aperture, focal length, focal distance and sensor format. You can see the effect of changing any of these parameters on the field of view and the depth of field. You can explore this simulator at https://www.samyanglens.com/en/product/simulator/lens.php.
In case you haven’t come across Samyang before, they are a well established and well respected optics maker, and produce a wide range of photographic lenses in various camera mounts.
The homework exercise is to create a “surreal landscape”. I made some suggestions in the presentation but there are so many possibilities, so feel free to use whatever approaches you like.
Seek inspiration in fairy stories, on the web etc
Will your image have a narrative or recognisable memes
Browse your photo collection to find potential source images
Play with some of the techniques I mentioned (or any others you know or find out about)
It has always struck me as dangerous that Lightroom Catalog Backups are stored in the same location that the active Catalog. If that drive fails (and they do so more often than one expects, see HERE) then you lose both your Catalog and your Catalog backups. I have finally found where you can tell Lightroom to put the backups somewhere else. The dialog is well hidden.
You can only get to the relevant menu when LR is about to start a backup, so… Start LR, and open the menu Edit>>Catalog Settings. This opens the dialog below and choose the Backup every time LR exits option. This will force LR to open the Backup dialog when you close LR.
So close LR. On the menu that appears, you can choose a folder in which to store your backup catalogs. My recommendation is to store the backups on a drive other than the one you use for your working catalog.
Click the Back Up button to make your first backup at the new location. Depending on the size of your catalog, this may take a while. You may not want this wait every time you exit LR, so next time you start LR, go back to the Edit>>Catalog settings menu and change the setting to, say once a week (or whatever suits you; or you can change this in the Backup Catalog dialog when it offers to make a backup).
Note that LR never deletes older backups, so from time to time it might be worth going in to the LR backup folder and erasing the oldest backups to save disk space. Keep the most recent two or three, just in case there is a glitch (unlikely, but always best to be safe). I also copy the most recent backup onto an external backup drive from time to time, to ensure that I have an additional backup of the catalog (without the catalog you lose all the edits you made, even if you have the original raw files still). And, of course, you should keep backup copies of all your image files too, preferably kept somewhere away from your main computer. If flood, fire or other disaster strikes, you don’t want your backups to suffer the same fate as the working files. See HERE for more suggestions on backup strategies. External hard drives are relatively cheap these days – as I write this, I see I can buy a 4 TB drive for as little as $140. 4 TB is enough for about 100,000 raw images from my 32 megapixel Canon, or double that for my Olympus micro four-thirds camera. That works out at under 0.15 cents per image for backup.
Creative competition and Creative SIG Meeting Timetable 2023
Creative image entries due
Judging and Creative SIG
NOTES
Tuesday, 31 January 2023
Tuesday, 14 February 2023
judge: Heather Prince
Tuesday, 28 March 2023
Tuesday, 11 April 2023
judge: Brett Ferguson
Tuesday, 30 May 2023
Tuesday, 13 June 2023
judge: Doug Porter
Tuesday, 11 July 2023
Tuesday, 8 August 2023
WCC-Geelong Creative interclub comp. judge: Gary Beresford (Caulfield CC)
Tuesday, 31 October 2023
Tuesday, 14 November 2023
judge: Steve Scalone
Competitions
Bi-monthly (every 2 months) competitions (may be adjusted occasionally depending on availability of a convenor)
The bi-monthly competitions are OPEN – ie no set subject. There will be both an open and a set subject section (Surreal Landscapes) in the WCC-Geelong creative interclub.
The general rules are the same as last year. For within-club competitions we allow some acquired content, though preferably you will use your own photographically derived images, textures etc where possible. Acquired content should not be used for the Interclub competition.
From WCC by-laws https://www.waverleycameraclub.org/uploads/2023/01/WCC-By-Laws-Issue-4.pdf page 3, section E. Creative (Internal WCC competitions only) – An image which depicts an imagined scene, or unusual combinations, alterations and/ or perspectives of reality. Content requirements set out above apply, with the following exceptions/ variations: o Acquired content is allowed but must not be Predominant content. (The WCC competition upload site for Creative competitions requires the Photographer to declare whether there is any Acquired content or not.) o Computer generated content may be Predominant content
Link to PPT handout of the meeting notes (only available after the meeting).
Heather Prince (the Judge for the comp) suggested use of the Harmonization Neural Filter to help blend layers in composites. Here are some links on this:
I have set some homework to encourage you to practice your skills. Please feel free to send me your completed homework images before the next meeting so we can share and discuss them at the next meeting. Even if you don’t want to share, the homework is still a learning exercise you can play with in private.
Place the armoured man on the image provided (or another image of your own if you prefer) onto a different background. Think about the skills involved:
Selection and masking
Using layers
Positioning and scaling
Matching lighting – image selection and image adjustments
Making shadows
Feel free to use the image below, or choose one of your own.
The rules about what is allowed in your competition entries can be tricky, so this is an attempt to clarify what is and isn’t allowed, and is provided as a guide. The full details are available in the WCC by-laws available on the main club website.
Content
Acquired content
Generally, use of acquired content is not allowed. You should use your own images for textures, skies etc. However, this rule may be explicitly overridden by a specific subject definition. Make sure you read the subject definitions thoroughly.
With the power of sophisticated software at your disposal, it is easy to add elements to your images that you have not personally created. For example you might add a texture over your image that you have bought (or got free) in a suite of textures made by someone else. You might want to replace that flat grey sky with something more dramatic, and have a library of skies made by other people available to choose from. How much of such acquired content is allowed in your entries depends on which category you are entering.
Note that you must have legal right to use any acquired content. For example, purchasing a set of textures allows you to use them, but creating a texture overlay from, say, an image of a rusty steel panel that you found on the web, is most likely not allowed, as you do not have copyright or legal permission to use that other person’s image.
Whose art work is this?
Being a camera club, the main content of your entries should be your own photographic work. Problems may arise if the photographic subject is “someone else’s art”. A straightforward image of, say, a street-art painting might be disqualified. However if the photographer has added their own artistic content or interpretation then this may be acceptable as an entry. Acceptable images based on this street art example may include:
An image with the street-artist at work, where the image is more of the artist than of the artwork per se.
An image depicting the interaction of spectators with the art work
Using the street art image as part of a composite image, where that image supports a visual narrative created by the photographer
This image incorporates some artwork from the National Gallery of Victoria collection in their Federation Square gallery. It is more than a simple reproduction of someone else’s art. I lined up the sculpture *Circe by Bertram Mac Kennal) with an elaborately framed painting on the wall behind, and asked a gallery visitor to pose in interaction with the sculpture, effectively creating a scene quite different from the vision of the original artists back in the 19th century.
Computer Generated Art
Computer generated imagery can be very creative. Examples might include digital images that you paint using packages like Photoshop or Krita, or images generated by computers using algorithms like fractals. There are a couple of elaborate examples below, but you might, for example, use a fantasy creature as part of, say, a composite constructed faerie/mystical kingdom sort of image. These sorts of images are non-photographic in origin, so not allowed as “predominant content” but may be OK if acquired content is allowed, as minor element in your composition.
For digital images that contain a lot of black at the borders, it is not uncommon for the authors to add a stroke to define the edge so when it is projected, the audience can see where the image ends against the remainder of the screen (black). This is computer generated material, but is generally uncontentious. A couple of examples are shown below.
Images are projected onto a black screen. A thin stroke (here a 1 pixel wide grey line) has been added to the edge of the image so the viewer can tell where the image ends against the black background.Image by Tim Keane. Here an electric blue border defines the image area against the black screen, as well as helping tie together the 3 separate variations on the peg.
More elaborate borders are sometimes used, for example to give an olde-worlde appearance, as illustrated below.
Image by Tim Keane. Here the added border is computer generated, but this sort of border seems to be acceptable in serious external competition.
If you make an image in multiple panels – for example a triptych, there is necessarily going to be some computer generated pixels in borders and white space between the panels.
This triptych contains cpmputer generated pixels – in this case the white space around the 3 panels. I’ve also made it a little more elaborate by using a drop-shadow to give depth. Because it is clear that the drop shadow is part of the layout and clearly is not part of the photographic images, I think this is OK.
Not allowed???
Here are some example images with problematic content.
The image on the left is OK. I constructed using a composite of photos: a cicada shell; a night sky; the moon. I took all these images. The version on the right replaces the moon with a “blue marble” image of earth from space, from NASA extensive resources (https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/79000/79790/city_lights_asia_720.jpg). This is clearly acquired content, and as it is one of the predominant elements, would not be acceptable. Sadly, I am never going to be able to take an image like that myself 🙁
The edited image below (image compare, slide the middle divider to see the before and after) is more challenging. The background was hidden by painting over with black (computer generated) pixels. But is the effect distinguishable from what you would get by masking the area and dropping the exposure by, say, 4 stops or more?
Slide the spearator to se original/edited. The black to the right of the leaf is computer generated black fill. Again, this is probably not a major issue in terms of “computer generated” art.
Another example …
This image is a photograph of a wall of street art in AC/DC Lane in Melbourne. Interesting paintings, but photographically this is a record of someone else’s art so it would not rate well in competition.
Text??
Text may be an issue. Text may be part of something you photographed, which causes no issues other than text tends to grab the eye and take the eye away from the subject. Think, for example of a busy street scene. It is quite likely there will be text there in signs, hoardings and the like, or maybe text on someone’s t-shirt. There is some text in the wall of street art in the example above, for example, and the text in the image below poses no issues.
Text added during computer editing is by definition “computer generated content” (as defined in the WCC By-Laws as at January 2023), and as it draws the eye of a typical viewer would also be considered predominant content and not allowed in most of our competitions unless explicitly allowed by the definition. The image below text was added in Photoshop to emphasise the facial expression. The added text conveys a message consistent with the intent of the image, and is predominant content, so the addition of these computer generated pixels would be an issue unless the completion rules allow it.
