goldengod

I have finally purchased my first photography light kit. I now finally have some photography equipment that allows me to customize the light for photos any way I want. While I have yet to use it, this seems like an incredibly flexible and affordable lighting kit for beginners like myself.

The Light Kit

The kit I decided to start out with is a basic one; so basic that it’s called the “Starving Student Off-Camera Light Kit“. This is a kit that put together by Baltimore photojournalist David Hobby. It’s designed around being low on cost and high on flexibility. You can get the components pretty much anywhere, but it’s sold as a kit through MPEX.

I’ve been reading David’s site, Strobist.com, for about six to eight months now. He knows almost as much about light as Michael Grecco and I’ve come to trust his ideas and recommendations. After a lot of deliberation and comparisons with other options, this sounded like the best option for me to get my feet wet with off-camera lights.

The kit consists of:

• Vivitar 285HV Flash
• 8ft Light Stand
• 15ft PC Extension Cord
• 43” Compact Umbrella - Optical White w/Removable Black Cover
• 8×10 Color Correction Gel Pack
• Ni-MH AA 4-pack w/Charger
• Elastic Ties (10 pack)
• Umbrella Swivel

The Price

The whole lighting kit retails for $185USD. After currency conversion, shipping, tax, etc this will work out to approx $275CDN. I was able to lower the price in two ways. First, I dropped the batteries & charger because I already had a set. Second, my lovely girlfriend Sara had already purchased the stand and umbrella swivel for my birthday to get me started.

I could get most of the equipment from my local shop, the prices are much higher. This isn’t a slight against my local shop; most electronics in Canada are more expensive than they would be if you bought them from the US, even after shipping & duty.

My experience purchasing through MPEX wasn’t the greatest, but that’s the subject for another post. Right now, I’m thinking about spending a large portion of my Sunday playing around with my new toys. Expect the results to show up in my Flickr account soon.

Photography equipment seems to be the order of the day. Whether it’s lens rental, lens reviews, or how to customize your laptop case like a pro shooters, we’ve got it:

• Lens Lenders - Remember me complaining that there were no Canadian services in my article about renting camera lenses? Now there’s one option. Their selection is very sparse and Nikon-only, but it has the potential to grow.
• SLR Gear - Another photography gear review site. Not as comprehensive as DPReview, but I find their format for reviewing lenses handy.
• Chase Jarvis’ Pro Photographer Laptop Case - I’m drooling already, this is a slick setup. I think this video will come in very handy for me when I get my Macbook Pro down the road.
• Adobe Lightroom Colour Presets - While I have yet to try any of these downloadable presets personally, they seem like they provide a lot more options than the Lightroom defaults.go
• “Dreams Come True” by Yeon Doo Jung - I know I go on about brilliant photography projects all the time, but god-damn is this a brilliant photography project. Korean photographer Yeon Doo Jung recreates children’scrayon drawings as highly detailed photographs.
• Interview with BrandJam author Marc Gobé - Shelf Awareness has a short interview with Marc Gobé, not much is said.

I have been spending far too much time playing with my shiny new lighting kit and not enough time writing about it. This will be corrected later today.

I’ve been reading more on the subjects of productivity and blogging lately. One of the main points focused on is that you should pick a niche and stick to it. I reasoned that I could do that without too much trouble; I love photography! Then I opened my del.icio.us bookmarks and nearly lost a limb to the irony of that statement. My bookmarks are a bit schizophrenic. I kept it on topic for you this week, though:

• Desktopography - A yearly design project to create well-designed nature-themed backgrounds. It’s run by one of my favourite designers, Pete Harrison. The site can be slow but it’s worth it.
• Pleix Films- I’ve been showing people a number of their short films for years without realizing they were all made by the same collective.
• Strange Cameras from TechEBlog - More unusual cameras, from combination film and digital models to goofy wrist-mounted cameras.
• Flickr User Becomes Pro for Microsoft - This was news to me; apparently Microsoft hired a bunch of Flickr photographers to create some of the wallpapers included with Windows Vista.
• Free Photoshop Brushes at TutorialBlog - A decently-sized collection of high quality Photoshop brushes that you can use.

I’ve started experimenting with a few brush sets from the last link and it’s interesting what you can create. I get the distinct impression that it’s easy to learn, hard to master. I’m a long way from being able to mock Pete Harrison’s design skills with impunity.

On an unrelated note, I want to welcome all my new readers! Regular readers may not have noticed, but my post entitled “How to Find Great Free Photos for Your Blog” has been receiving some pretty heavy traffic. I’ll be posting the follow-up post on how to use these photos next week.

PingMag is hosting an excellent interview with photographer Bruce Osborn about his Oyako series of photos. The project is simple, but Bruce has been pursuing it for twenty-five years.

Bruce takes photos of a Japanese parent with one of their children in a plain white studio setting. He conveys a full range of emotion between the parent and the child using their expressions, body language, and outfits. He will use this to portray differences or similarities in job, lifestyle, or looks.

The project focuses on the generation gap between the two individuals or in some cases, the lack of one. He brings out opposites by putting a calm, middle-aged mother next to her mohawked son. That’s a pretty easy decision for a mildly interesting photo. Bruce goes one step further and allows each photo to project the love and care of this family.

I’ve browsed through a few dozen of these photographs now, some in the PingMag interview and some on the official Oyako site. Every single one of them shows two people who love and care about each other. This can be despite or because of their lifestyle differences. Mixed in are photos where there is no lifestyle difference; the son who has chosen to follow in his father’s footsteps as a sushi chef.

Not every photo is perfect; the pet-shop owning father posing with his nude porn-star daughter does come across as a bit creepy. Strange little quirks like that give depth to this series because they don’t shy away from the seedier side of life when dealing with family. When I hear about someone disowning their child over something trivial like religion or sexual preference, I want to send them a booklet of these photographs.

Printable Cold Sores is another graffiti project that repurposes and defaces advertising. Their message is similar to that of the Abstractor I blogged about earlier this week; modern advertising is damaging.

The mischief maker behind the curtain at PCS created a set of printable stickers featuring a variety of ugly cold sores. The idea is for you to print them out and stick them on the massive lips of advertising models in your city.

It’s a small way for the average person to fight back against the increasingly unrealistic advertising of the beauty industry. After all, someone’s gotta bring these Photoshopped proto-humans back down to reality.

Nowhere in advertising is the gap between natural beauty and manufactured perfection more apparent than on subway posters. As we wait for transportation, we are unwillingly assaulted by larger-than-life representations of supposedly beautiful salespeople.

The site is still small, but invites you to submit your photos of the stickers in action. The usual disclaimers of illegality and non-responsibility apply. The photos will presumably be posted on the PCS blog at a later date.

I haven’t seen any alternative uses online yet, but I thought of a simple variation. Use the stickers on election posters, make Harper look like he’s been gettin’ passed around. Election posters irritate me more than any eight foot tall Revlon lips ever could.

Related:

• Abstractor - Turn Video Billboards Into Graffiti Art
• The Ad Generator
• “Your Ad Makes Me Sick” at Adverblog

One of the most common gripes I hear from bloggers is that it’s impossible to find good free photos for their blogs. In some cases, this means a lot of text-only blogs. In most cases, it means blogs hijack other people’s work without permission.

Both of these options suck, particularly for a blog that’s just starting out. I’m going to show you a better way; how to find some free high quality photos you can use on your blog.

Where to look

Knowing where to look is just as important as what you find. I know most people’s first instinct is “Google Images!” Ignore that instinct. Google Images is useful for some things, but not really for this. There’s too much of a legal quagmire regarding usage rights and let’s be honest, the photos you find are pretty lame.

Irvine Beach by mike138

Flickr is the first place I look when i want a good photo for my blog. The field is massive, searching is top notch, and the quality is nothing short of outstanding. You can’t just grab any photos on there, there are rules that you should abide by. In order to legally cover your ass, and respect the work of others, you need to be aware of these rules.

Licensing

The rules are simple: Every photo on Flickr has a license and there are two ‘major’ categories of license: an “All Rights Reserved” license and a “Creative Commons” license. A photo that’s marked “All Rights Reserved” means hands off!

You can ask the photographer for permission to use it and some will likely just ask for photo credit or a link. Some may ask for money, which you probably don’t have if you’re reading this. I don’t ask the photographer for permission very often because it’s time consuming and stressful waiting on someone else.

What is a Creative Commons License?

On the other hand, a photo marked “Creative Commons” is the best thing you can hope for. It means that the photographer has reserved some of their rights, but lets people use their photos for free under certain conditions. Each Creative Commons license can be different, but there are 4 major components that you can mix and match. They are Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works, and Share-Alike.

Based on what you’re doing with the images, you need to keep the restrictions of these images in mind. The most important restriction is that you can’t use Non-Commercial images on a monetized blog. The Attribution component is always part of a Creative Commons license, so you will always need to provide credit for the photo with a link to them. I’ll show you how I integrate these photos and links into my blog next week.

How to Search for Creative Commons Photos in Flickr

Sunset by iessi

I use the Flickr advanced search feature. Make sure to check the box stating that you only want Creative Commons photos to display. If you make money off your blog, you also have to check the box to look for content that can be used commercially. Plug in your keywords and it’ll bring up a page with an immense number of results.

By default, the photos are ordered by ‘relevance’. Flickr’s relevance search is pretty useless. So if I’m writing a post about something that’s happened today, instead of sorting by relevance, I’ll sort by “most recent”.

Most of the time, I use the “most interesting” search filter. If you’re not familiar with Flickr’s concept of interestingness, it shows you popular and/or high quality photos. Flip through the first five pages and I guarantee you’ll find something that works!

Other Options

Other photo storage websites, like Thomas Hawk’s Zooomr, also allow you to search through Creative Commons photos. I haven’t tried the search on Zooomr myself, but I have seen photos on there that are every bit as good as what you’ll find on Flickr.

Transparent
by Jurek Durczak

Another option is the free stock photo agencies, such as everystockphoto or stock.xchng. I have no experience with either of these, so I can’t vouch for their usefulness. My friend and fellow blogger Greg G. of DingoRUE swears by free stock photo agencies, but I’m not sure which ones he uses off the top of my head. If you use either one, feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you’ll find that people have a more positive opinion of your blog. When the quality of your images goes up, that helps bring up the quality of your entire blog. Also, Flickr photographers will sometimes link to your site when you use their photo. This can help you get more exposure by increasing your Technorati rank and the number of sites that link to you.

Where do you get photos for your blog? Have I made missed anything important? Comment and humiliate me in front of everyone!

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Theresa
by Andrew Ferguson

I’m talking online with a friend the other day and they asked me what I’d been reading lately. So I told him and he was a bit shocked by the list. Apparently, “most people” don’t have five books on the go.

“Most people” are therefore pansies. I, on the other hand, am a voracious reader of the highest non-pansy order. I get frustrated when I run out of ink-splattered tree corpses to cradle in my tiny hands. Some are for entertainment value only, my trashy ‘boy’ fantasy books come to mind, but I always need to be reading.

We’re not going to focus on my trashy fantasy books though. We’re going to look at the ones I’m not embarrassed to admit I own.

Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait: The Art of Celebrity and Editorial Photography by Michael Grecco

This purchase was a recommendation from an off-camera lighting site I enjoy called the Strobist. I hadn’t really heard of Michael Grecco before; I’m shockingly ignorant of who the big players are in the photography world. I spent about twenty minutes browsing his portfolio and that, combined with the Strobist recommendation, sold me on the book.

I bought it right after Christmas and I’ve found myself reading and re-reading it. It’s full of amazing photos, complete with lighting diagrams showing how he achieved the effects. More importantly, he tells us what the proper rules for lighting are, what moods and feelings different combinations convey and why he’s chosen to break those rules to make a photograph feel different and stand out.

BrandJam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design by Marc Gobé

This is an interesting one. It’s not something normally on my radar because it sounds less like my style of interesting non-fiction (Freakonomics, Tipping Point, etc) and more like a textbook.

I was sent a review copy by Allworth Press (thanks, Nana!) and have spent the idle moments of my last two weeks reading it. It’s a lot more interesting than I expected. Marc weaves his experience in the ad world with old-media brand ideals to come up with a new philosophy; one where design is king.

I’m someone who regularly goes to the Cannes Advertising Film Fest but I also ignore most ads I don’t think are well-designed or clever. His philosophy of ‘jazzing up’ brands and making a more emotional connection to the consumer through design makes sense to me. I’ll be posting a full review when I finish the book.

Best Business Practices for Photographers by John Harrington III

I’m barely past the index, but I can already tell that this book is going to be with me for years to come. It covers all aspects of the photography business in a surprising amount of detail. John’s a D.C.-based photojournalist with years of experience and innumerable successes to back him up on the opinions in this book.

I’m hoping to be able to turn my photography into a business at some point, and this book has all the information I need to do it. I just need to get my photography skills to the point where I feel ready to apply it. This was another recommendation from the Strobist.

What’s next on my list:

• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams
• Recommend a book for me before I run out! Fire off an email or leave a quick comment with the title and why you think I should check it out.

I’ve got a smaller list for you this week, only three links and all of them unconventional photography projects. Behold my meager offering:

• Sleepyurbanite - The impromptu art of Yvonne Doll. She takes strangely compelling photos of people who’ve fallen asleep on the NYC subway with a cameraphone. (via Josh Spear)
• Photo Art of Jeffery Scott - Jhayne showed me his stuff almost a year ago and I thought it was amazing. Warning: awful website. The man is a brilliant artist, but his website brings to mind the olden dayes of faire Geocities.
• Palla’s Architectural Photo Cut-Ups - Kaleidoscopic images of Japanese architecture gone terribly right. A former architect takes urban landscape photos and uses a variety of mirroring techniques to turn them into these surreal worlds.

These are the kind of projects I hunt around for when I’m feeling uninspired about my photography. I recommend it to any photographer, having an inspirational book or folder can help pull you out of the doldrums when you need it most.

Advertising is Graffiti by urban_data

Abstractor is a brilliant piece of guerilla art created by Ji Lee. You can use it to change any television or video billboard from an advertising annoyance into art.

I like this style of anti-advertising graffiti because it creatively repurposes annoying video ads. I’m also a fan of the fact that it can do so without damaging anything.

Because of this, it doesn’t conjure the image of the ‘vandal’ type that we normally associate with graffiti. Instead, it has more of a ‘clever artist’ feel to it. Here’s how it works:

Anyone can easily create an Abstractor by attaching two black boards to any TV screen. These boards cover the screen entirely – except for a small horizontal gap between them – allowing a narrow beam of light to escape from the TV. All TV programs and commercials look beautiful through the Abstractor.

The video of the Abstractor in action really speaks for itself; funktastic afro for the win. Video billboards seem to be a lot more common in NYC than up here in the frozen north.

I poked around online a bit and the ‘horizontal line’ method shown in the video is the most popular one so far. Other people, like Graffiti Research Labs, have come up with their own variants. As pictured above, you can stencil any message into the black boards. It will still cover up the ads and make your message stand out.

Who wants to be the first to Abstractificate the screens at Robson & Granville?

Related:

• The Ad Generator
• Make Magazine article on the Abstractor

This week my browsing is all over the proverbial map. I blame my increased activity on digg / reddit / stumbleupon. Enjoy the fruits of my rather delicious labour:

• Ad: Children Kill Themselves for Chupa Chups - These two amazing looking ads have children contemplating suicide because they can’t have lollipops. Great example of suicide in advertising. (via Duncan)
• Pentax Reveals It’s Own 31 Megapixel Camera - It looks like they’re trying to compete with the Hasselblad H3D.
• Photographer who covered all 41 Super Bowls dead at 68 - Richard Raphael, one of only five photographers to have ever covered all forty-one Superbowls, recently passed away
• Russian Mafia Gravestones - English Russia gives us some strange photos of the etched tombstones that mark the passing of a lot of people with mob connections.
• Fake Explosives ‘Safety Ads’ in Indian Mall - Clear plastic bags with big red explosives in them left lying around a mall? That sounds like a great idea!

I’ve set myself a goal of having a couple longer articles ready for you early next week, so let’s see how that goes. Remember, if you’ve got any links you think are worth posting, fire off a quick email or post it in the comments.