Where Everybody's Crazy

Christopher Phin has a lovely tutorial on making fake model photographs - pictures of scenes that look like they're minature models.

It's a pretty good tutorial, but there are two ways to improve it. First, the model look works best with very clear, consistent skies - you're trying to look as if the model is placed against a backsheet, so no clouds. In particular, a slight gradient and well-saturated, polarized blue skies look great. So my tip is to go to the Mediterranean in the summer, and wait. If you can't do that to get a clear sky, just make one yourself: select all the sky bits with a lasso or magic wand tool, and apply an Average blur filter.

The next thing is the lighting. As Christopher says:

But almost as important is the lighting in your photo. Models are usually lit by a lamp, so you'd expect to see sharp, directional shadows and bright, almost harsh light. That's partly why the picture of Charing Cross station, with its dull, omnidirectional light, doesn't work as well as the picture pointing towards the London Eye.

But hey, we've got Photoshop. We can create our own lighting. Go to Filters > Render > Lighting Effects, and dot a couple of lights around. Use an omni directional light for basic lighting, then a couple of spots to pick out interesting features. Ensure you've got the sliders set to "Matte" and "Plastic", like so:

You'll have to fiddle about with this a lot to get the feel right. Here are some of my experiments.

Venice	original
Hagia Sophia	original
Dubrovnic	original

So I've been looking at moving my iPhoto picture library to.... anything other than iPhoto. iPhoto has been unreliable, and slow to the point of unusable for me. Unfortunately, nothing really managed to cut it as a replacement until I had a look at iView Media Pro.

Damn, it's fast. It has a pretty decent first-pass editor for the times I don't need to bring up Photoshop. It handles keywords well. It has a range of ways of slicing-and-dicing the view of the library which seem to fit my head pretty well. And best of all, it's scriptable, so I spent a happy hour or two this evening rewriting my Memories exporter to work with it. So it looks like a winner.

I also refactored said exporter to have a separate Memories::API module, and I spent a while making Memories have RSS feeds for any page with pictures on it. A happy afternoon's recreational coding.

As you can probably tell, I'm going through a bit of a phase of being into photography. I'm sure it'll pass in a few months or so, but at the moment I'm getting as many pictures of things as I can. However, it does mean that I can lay claim to the stupidest statement of the year.

The stupidest statement I have made so far this year has been: "I don't really need to pay attention to that bit about how to make sure your snow scenes don't come out looking grey, because I'm hardly likely to be taking lots of photos of snow."

Snow photography and night photography - I'm just trying to give myself a hard time.

Before I went on the photography course, I was very much of the opinion that I shouldn't mess with the photograph before putting it on the web or whatever. What the camera saw, the viewer should see. Yeah, right.

Film photographers know that coloured filters, if used appropriately, can make a world of difference to a photograph; they know that there are things you can do in development and printing to pull up the brightness or sharpen things up or correct slight problems with the exposure. They know perfectly well that what the camera saw is not what the photographer saw, because the photographer's eyes adapt better than the lens. So Photoshop-fiddling with images is hardly new.

Which is why I'm rather happy with the photo above. It took a lot of messing about to make it look like that: partial desaturation, filters, brightness and contrast tweaks. But it looks like what I saw, more or less. In retrospect, I should have used spot metering or something to tell the camera that the majority of the light I see is reflected off the snow, not from the sodium lights of London in the horizon.

But then, you can always take a better photograph.

Today we've been on an advanced photography (by advanced I guess it just means anything more than point and shoot) course run by Nishi Sharma; a man who truly loves photography and is capable of passing on that enthusiasm to others.

He taught us a lot about composition, light, exposure settings and quite a bit more, and as you can see I've been playing around with it a bit. Hopefully, and with a shedload more practice, I'll one day be able to take photos like these