Category: tutorial

Memories of The Magic Forest

Searching trough some old pictures I got some nostalgia for The Magic Forest and edited an unpublished before picture from the Summer of 2010.

memories of the magic forest


Strategy on picking photos

For a photographer, the ability to pick his “right” photos is a very important one, be it when satisfying a customer need, presenting a portfolio, entering a contest and such. Having good photos but making poor picks or having not so good photos but clever picks, this can make a difference.

We often face face this dilemma: which photos to pick? I want to share the inner of my mind on how my personal selection worked when submitting photos for the Dragobete photo contest and exhibition. Any such process is open for improvement, so it worth thinkering.

The rule was simple: submit up to 3 pictures fitting the theme, “Dragobete kisses the girls”, so kisses, nice gestures, love, relationships and such. I have quite a few of those, so in a first step I made a rough selection of over 20 photos vaguely fitting made in the past year (that’s not a contest rule, is may own, submit fresh stuff). Then in a second step I narrowed the selection to 5, which I felt are better. Just for fun, I added one more to this selection, to have 6, two full sets in the case I decide I have split personality and participate twice. Of course I am not split, so had to proceed to final 3 images selection.

I went with images very different in style, theme and technique. One of them is a sunrise, quite cheesy, but such images have usually a big impact with the general audience got decent scores on various photography websites. Another one was street photography in black and white, I knew a majority of the jury are street photographers, they may appreciate that or, by contrary, be more careful when judging it. And the other one was a “rural” one, selected knowing the exhibition take place at the Village Museum and Dragobete is a traditional holiday.

strategy on picking photos

Net result: the “rural” photo in the exhibition. Was my strategy successful? Well, I didn’t expect any prize, is highly unlikely one would win something two years in a row. Also, is highly unlikely one would have more than one picture accepted, considering the large number of participants (no one had this year). So, in a word: average.

On a positive note, I could note the placement. Whoever put the pictures on the walls, it happened for my photo to be front and center, at the entrance. Very hard not to be spotted, no matter what happens around. Also, the museum used it in a poster to advertise the exhibition on Facebook. Again, not a hard guess, since the photo was made inside the same museum.

dragobete

For me, I was somewhat puzzled, I expected the sunrise to have a better score, it scored better in all the places I submitted it, and somewhat disappointed, since it required some advanced editing for which I could write an editing tutorial.

The real disappointment is I have for quite time a few good (I think) photographic ideas in my head for this theme but didn’t got yet to shoot them. Maybe next year. Or the year after. Or who knows…

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Making of Parenting: Xmas

For those who liked my Xmas picture in the Parenting series, I am breaking some of its magic with a ‘making of’: tripod, remote trigger, multiple shots, loaded as layers, masks.

making of

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Photo editing tutorials

Lately I wrote on my general blog a couple of photo editing tutorials, both of them are targeted at GIMP, since this is what I use on my day to day work. Of course, the principles are general and can be applied to other similar tools.

The first one is about watermark removal on photos submitted to Wikipedia, this is something perfectly legal, since those pictures are submitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

watermark removal

The second tutorials refers to creating customs grids to be used on photo editing but also in graphic and layout design.

grids

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Purple haze tutorial

iphone 5I rarely cross-post things from one of my blogs to another, but now my sarcastic howto edit photos for an iPhone 5 look is somewhat on-topic here, so if you want to make a bit of fun about the defective iPhone camera while learning a tiny bit of GIMP editing, go read it.

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