On top of being a model this week-end I also took my round as a photographer and my imposed theme was about a shallow depth of field. And a real difficulty of such a shot, beyond overcoming your own lack of technical and artistic knowledge, is to make a, relative large, group of unprofessional models to behave and pose for you. My failure was epic, as usual.
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Is not like I’m starting a new career as professional model or something like that, it was late in the night, only a few of us remained at the photography course and she was stuck with me and an imposed theme (high light contrast on two subjects). So I pretend I’m taking photos (well, I really took some photos, but with the lights laid for another photographer in the scene they are all crap and unusable).
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This week’s homework for the photography is about storytelling: take a known picture, The Marriage Feast at Cana by Hieronymus Bosch in my case, and cut it in pieces telling a story, just like a story board, pretty much a cinematographic experience.
So I took the picture and told the story as straightforward as I could (the text in the picture is in Romanian, read below for an approximative English translation):
![[cana storytelling]](https://nicubunu.ro/pictures/cana.jpg)
I found the story too predictable and thus boring and uninteresting, so I tried another version, telling something different than the old Bible story (again, an approximative English translation below):
![[cana storytelling]](https://nicubunu.ro/pictures/cana-blasfemie.jpg)
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Since I received complaints about the portraiture "making of", I reduced the number of uploads and avoided posing some portraits candidly shoot this week-end at the "object photograpy" session of the photography course. So don’t blame me for the lack of content :p
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This week-end at the photography course we did practice on shooting some objects. Since I don’t have at home any interesting [which I didn’t already shoot], I went empty-handed, hoping to find something interesting on the spot and found a bronze reproduction of an ancient Grecian helmet, something ringing home with all the Leonidas based stuff I did lately on the Fedora land. What can I say more? I am quite unhappy with the photos I made: bad focus, bad light, bad framing, but I wasn’t in the mood to try harder… needs some kicks in the pants :p
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To finally put the portrait and its photomanipulation to rest, I feel like a screencast (a video tutorial) is in place.
Note1: the soundtrack is made from freely licensed music by Severed Fifth;
Note2: I have the video available in its original format, at an incredible image quality, but the file is large, too large for what vide sharing sites allows, so I’m looking into the right way to publish it.
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I take seriously the freedom thing so my photos are never photoshoped, they are gimped instead :p So I used GIMP to touch the portrait I made the other day.
A first step was to play with the saturation, the initial colors are a bit too strong and the black and white is not bad at all:
Another interesting operation is to play with cropping and put in the spotlight what you think is the most interesting part of the picture:
And of course, unleash the gimping extravaganza going for a "glossy magazine cover" type of photography: heal the unwanted spots, soften the skin with selective gaussian blur, sharpen the eyes, lips and hair, other important details (the ring in this case) and, why not, alter the color of the eyes and lips. And stop here, while a bit of sanity is still preserved…
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When doing studio portraits, the other photographer have to get themselves busy and find something to to: snapshots of the surrounding events, a so-called “making of”, a collection of candid, but technically bad, pictures.
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In the portrait session of the photography course we had to take in turns photos of our colleagues. And, as a consequence, when asked model for our colleagues. Don’t know if my beard was the reason or maybe the finger showing T-shirt, but I opened the session as a model.
I don’t turned into a smoker overnight, the smoke is not from a cigarette behind me, but is coming straight from the Hell (sure!). Now I think I can use as an avatar for my Baldur’s Gate character (maybe after a bit of darkening and pixelation).
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Sunday was an exciting day at the photography course: we took portraits in the studio, with camera on a tripod and studio lights. Since most of my colleagues did shoots they can’t to at home (low key, dark with strong small lights and big shadows), I went the opposite way, with a high key photographs, for which I asked Anca, a blue eyed blonde colleague, to pose.
The main light is quite close to the camera, almost like in fashion portraits, with a second light on the right to ease the shadows and a yellow backlight to give some contour of the hair and make it golden. This photo is touched just a little (saturation, sharpness, a few blemishes removed), will follow later with more photomanipulation (I need time to play with GIMP and try various things).
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Obsessed with this week’s homework for the photography course I made a third composition, this time using some AA batteries.
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After turning the Thinker of Hamangia at various angles, I tried another take at the homework for the photography course and shoot some balls. No, no that kind of balls, but shiny moving balls made from steel.
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This week’s homework assignment for the photography course was to take photos of a subject from 3 different angles. I got the idea to shot a reproduction of the Hamangia Thinker and, as usually, went overboard and selected 6 angles (as the ultimate proof I don’t have self-control).
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Another self portrait experiment is far from good photography, it is more about the fusion about two type of graphics: photography and illustration. So there is the basic decision, good versus evil. What’s your bet?
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My home work for this week at the photography course is a self portrait so I have to experiment with a kind of photos I do rarely (I like to do portraits, not to myself). This is why here the focus is on the toys, the activity, not on my face.
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