photoskop visual learning

[photoskop]

Interactive Online Learning for Photography Fundamentals, Light and Posing

Cover image: Interactive Player

Interactive learning platform Photoskop is promising to expand its database of lessons with a just launched Kickstarter campaign.

The project already has a number of useful lessons on Camera Essentials in which you can change settings and see the effects they make right at the comfort of your computer or mobile device. 

Here is an example of how different shutter speeds works on a moving object:

and here they show how white balance works:

Now they are aiming to add 3 new large Interactive Encyclopedias that will teach you Photography Fundamentals, Light and Posing. 

Here is an example of what will be the focus in the section called Art of Portrait: 

Another section will allow you to play with different light settings by adjusting intensity, adding color filters, moving the lights around and much more.

The last section will be focused on working with virtual models and it is maybe the most fun of all. In this pack creators of Photoskop project promise that you will learn how changing the pose will result in strikingly different atmosphere of the shot.

The lessons are aimed on both photographers and models.

Check out more on the project’s page photoskop.com and on their Kickstarter campaign.  

[photoskop]

Interactive Online Learning for Photography Fundamentals, Light and Posing

Cover image: Interactive Player

Interactive learning platform Photoskop (see Petapixel post) is promising to expand its database of lessons with a just launched Kickstarter campaign.

The project already has a number of useful lessons on Camera Essentials in which you can change settings and see the effects they make right at the comfort of your computer or mobile device. 

Here is an example of how different shutter speeds works on a moving object:

and here they show how white balance works:

Now they are aiming to add 3 new large Interactive Encyclopedias that will teach you Photography Fundamentals, Light and Posing. 

Here is an example of what will be the focus in the section called Art of Portrait: 

Another section will allow you to play with different light settings by adjusting intensity, adding color filters, moving the lights around and much more.

The last section will be focused on working with virtual models and it is maybe the most fun of all. In this pack creators of Photoskop project promise that you will learn how changing the pose will result in strikingly different atmosphere of the shot.

The lessons are aimed on both photographers and models.

Check out more on the project’s page photoskop.com and on their Kickstarter campaign.  

[photoskop]

Can we improve Photoskop? You tell us!💡

Hey friends!

What’s your experience with our interactive lessons? Should we add / improve / change  something in the player or the web page? Tell us now so that we can make your experience great.

Again, we are doing it for you!

[photoskop]

Dynamics of day passage in one photo by Stephen Wilkes

Fascinating imagery of Stephen Wilkes captures the whole day’s passage in one photograph. To produce one image Wilkes has to go through a very tedious process of capturing around 1500 images over the course of day and night. He is shooting from a fixed angle and then blending selected images into one that, as you can see, reflects the whole spectrum of the day and night in these timey wimey photographs.

[via mymodernmet, juxtapoz and thisisnthappines]

[photoskop]

Van Gogh’s room for rent at Airbnb

The Art Institute of Chicago built a replica of famous painting by van Gogh, The Bedroom. The replica is not just a copy of arrangement in the painting, it also features the colorful and vivid interior. It is available at Airbnb for rent with just 10$ per night.

The rental apartment is located outside of the museum’s campus in the north part of Chicago. But with such a price and location the place surely fills up quickly which makes it hard to get. Maybe having a set of apartments dedicated to different artists and writers would solve this issue.

The page on Airbnb, that shows van Gogh as the owner, also gives a reason for such a low price: “I'm charging $10 for no other reason than that I need to buy paint. However, I will be happy to provide you with tickets to my exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.”

The whole installation was created as a part of the exhibition “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms,” which is focused on three of his paintings of his home in Arles, France, dated to 1888-1889. The exhibition will feature 36 works of van Gogh and will be open until May 10, 2016.

(via thisiscolossal, Airbnb, and Art Institute of Chicago)

[photoskop]

Scenes straight out of a camera vs color graded for movies

Ever wondered how does a movie look like before it’s color graded? The video above shows how scenes in one particular movie looked straight out of the camera compared to the finished version after color grading.

The footage was shot using a Sony F55 at 4K in LOG and was then color graded by Taylre Jones of the Kansas City-based Grade. The LOG format is not to be mixed with RAW format for cameras. The benefit of LOG format is wider tonal range that can be later on extracted by dedicated person.

In the exemplary footage you may see that there is not just one layer of adjustment to each scene. Jones says that some scenes required up to 15 layers of adjustments to give them the real cinematic look we enjoy so much.

(via Reddit and Petapixel)

[photoskop]

Science side-by-side with Art

Cambridge University holds engineering photography competition each year to provide a chance to see pure esthetic side of multitude of sciences. The qualities to value the most in the competition are expanded dimensionality, a richness, the capacity to trigger a cascade of unrelated ideas and many more.

The Van Gogh’s starry night is an artistic perfection on its own but augmented by machine learning reveals one possible picture beyond the frame. The other winners show the beauty and complexity of microscopic world sometimes of very usual objects.

Glass Shear Pattern

Starfish

Birefringence

Scanning Electron Microscopy of Metallic Nanospheres 

Graphene

Fluid dynamics

(via Mashable and Petapixel)

[photoskop]

This Book is a Camera

Wonderful and simplistic idea was realized by Kelli Anderson in a book that is unfolding into a pinhole camera. One can find multiple uses of the Kelli’s project from educative travel into the world before the CCD technology and canistered films all the way to the creative tool to give a kick for your own inspiration and artistic projects.

Upon working out the books’ method one can simply learn to build own pinhole cameras and capture images lensless. The next big project of Kelli is forthcoming This Book is a Planetarium from Chronicle Books.

(via Quipsologies and thisiscolossal)

[photoskop]

How to make a studio in unconventional locations

Nick Fancher released a guest blog entry for Scott Kelby page where he describes how to have a photography studio.. well, basically anywhere. The blog entry is based upon Nick’s book Studio Anywhere: A Photographer's Guide to Shooting in Unconventional Locations. 

The idea behind the book, according to Nick is that photographers can get away with shooting without a conventional studio most of the time, as long as they can learn to make the most of their environments; all with the use of minimal, affordable gear.

One light with grid

Three lights gelled cyan, magenta and yellow

Two lights gelled cyan and red

Two lights, fired into white bounce and a red wall

[photoskop]

Man Took the Exact Same Picture Every Day for a Year to Highlight Beijing’s Air Pollution

Remember NASA’s elegant way of proving the existence of water on Mars? Well this type of imagery performed by orbiters is not the only effective way to show climatic or seasonal changes.

Zou Yi is a resident of Beijing, the city famous for its bad air quality. For the past year Zou has taken the same picture at the same time of day. When you see the resulting collage of photos it appears quite as a striking piece of information.

“Like a lot of people, I forget readings as soon as I read them.” he recently told CEN, speaking of the PM2.5 fine particle readings. “I hope that after seeing the pictures people will start to pay attention to and protect our living environment. Data and theories are too abstract, but pictures are direct.”

To see more of his images or keep up with Yi, visit his Weibo microblog by clicking here.

(via that’s and petapixel)

[photoskop]

One Picture Explains Effects of Aperture, Exposure Time, and ISO settings

(via New Mobile Life via Lifehack)

[photoskop]

Interactive Depth of Field

In new interactive lessons photoskop tries to show the effects of aperture, focus point, and focal length on the Depth of Field.

The first part of the lesson shows just the effect of the aperture values on the depth of field. The other part allows change the focus point and confirm the well known rule to focus at 2/3 of the frame for sharper images even at lower aperture values.

The last part of the lesson adds one more parameter to play with: focal length of the objective lens. Here you can see why longer focal length is better for portraiture when you want the background to be separated by blur from the object in focus. And again you can vary both of other parameters as well as the focal length.

Wanna see how the beautiful handmade cubes are getting sharp and blurry with different aperture settings or get more information about our project on interactive learning of photography? Please visit photoskop visual learning page.

[photoskop]

Negative Space for Better Photos

One of the most effective composition tricks is a negative space. Negative space is the area between the objects in the frame. In this case we are talking about outstanding objects, or objects that are giving strong contrast. One the image below the cliff and the person on the cliff are both positive space. While the sky and the sea are the negative spaces. They are continuous and lower in the contrast. Although one can argue that the sea is also a positive space. It will be indeed a positive space if you remove the cliff and the person away from the frame.

There are few simple and important uses of negative space for better message or visual appeal of the photographs.

Use Space To Emphasize What’s Important

Use Negative Space To Balance Positive Space

Include Open Space To Add Context

Capture Empty Space To Convey A Sense Of Scale

Leave Space For Subjects To Move Or Look Into

Exaggerate The Negative Space

(via iphonephotographyschool and photographylife)

[photoskop]

The Motion of Dance

Maria Takeuchi and Frederico Phillips used Xbox One Kinect sensors to explore how to use technologies not only to create something of scientific value for studies of motion, but as well to create a beautiful work of art picturing the complexity involved in human dance moves.

The dancer Shiho Tanaka was the one performing while Maria and Frederico performed the hardcore data rendering. One of the unique features of the project they’ve called Asphyxia is the fact that they used a relatively inexpensive equipment proving that with modern technologies such computationally and instrumentally demanding tasks as computer vision and image analysis are available to anyone and it requires only creative thinking to realize such powerful ideas.

(via Prosthetic Knowledge and Thisiscolossal)

[photoskop]

New Interactive Lesson on Shutter Speed and Motion Blur

Do you remember how many times your photographs were ruined by the motion blur? In one of the interactive lessons photoskop shows how the shutter speed affects the motion blur.

The lessons shows the simple example of a moving person on a longboard and the scene’s settings go from 1/250 up to 0.5 sec. Adjusting the shutter speed will result in the figure to move in different phases of motion receiving more and more blur with ‘slower’ shutter speeds.

Wanna see how the longboarder goes to warp speed, see other lessons or get more information about our project on interactive learning of photography? Please visit photoskop visual learning page.

[photoskop]

How to fight sun with strobe and the sunny 16 rule

One of the fundamental film photography rules of the era when light meters were not available for everyone or not precise enough is the Sunny 16 rule. The rule states that if you have a bright sunny day and shooting with ISO speed of X, and your aperture is set to f/16, then your shutter speed can be safely set to 1/X for a good exposure.

But this simple rule is also applicable to strobes and mid day shooting. Photographer Neil van Niekerk suggests that it can come in handy while you are strobe-fighting to compensate the difference in brightness between your subject and the areas well lit by sun. And his method means you can get a great exposure with no metering. 

Neil advises to set the flash to a full power and use the Guiding Numbers for the positioning of the strobe. Remember that the guide number is the distance from the strobe to the object times the aperture value. Here since you know your optimal exposure from the Sunny 16 rule, you can set the aperture value fixed and as your strobe is at full power you can assume it to be maximum (check your strobe manual). Now you just got to divide your Guiding number by the f-number and you will get a distance at which to place the strobe.

It should give you a decent first exposure with which you can start and adjust the parameters slightly for the perfection.

(Via B&H Photovideo, DIY Photography)

[photoskop]

One of earliest color photos captures the essence of photographic realism

The photographs of British engineer Mervyn O’Gorman of his daughter Cristina taken a century ago (1913) show very important side of photography, and especially of a color photography, which is realistic representation of the moments. The realism is given to a such extend that it is hard to tell whether these images were taken on an old Kodak camera 10 years ago or if there are just a lot of popular film filters. What is stunning is how vivid look the colors taken that the Autochrome process used by Mervyn was indeed the very first color process.

At photoskop project we like to analyze things like and here’s what we think. The standard Autochrome process was a big and innovative leap that in fact most probably inspired modern sensors design in a way. Autochrome plates were basically attached to a color grid as much as most of modern sensors’ pixels are equipped with color filters of Red, Green, and Blue colors so that the color information in the taken image can be recorded (pixel’s material on it’s own see’s only intensity, not colors).

"Microphoto of Autochrome plate" by Janke via Wikipedia

One problem is much lower sensitivity of light of the Autochrome that generally required a use of tripod for longer exposures. But look on the scenes Christina was captured in. This a summer shore of England which were extremely bright. 

Also the depth of field is so shallow that we can assume he knew exactly what he was doing with the camera and the process to get the most optimum shutter speed for the shots.

And it worked out. All the images have that vague atmosphere of momentary and timeless at the same time. And the red color, the color that was very effectively captured by the process, and more to the esthetic beauty of the pictures.

And another important thing, apart from the process and tricks with the camera settings is Christina’s poses that would work for most of the modern fashion blogs and magazines.

All of these creates remarkable and powerful series of photographs that are so hard to believe to be taken a hundred years ago.

(viaPetaPixel, Thisiscolossal, Mashable, and National Media Museum)