Laos – houses and satellite dishes

Themes are a very good way of traveling with a camera. They give you something to look for and usually something to photograph. In Laos over Christmas I was taken by the number of houses, no matter how simple, that had satellite dishes attached so that became my theme although I did stretch the idea to include houses with solar panels and some houses without either. Here is the result of that series.

I try to collate my series of images in books; photo books are relatively cheap, about £1 a page, well cheap if you don’t have too many pages. You can see this book here

A Rough Guide to Adobe Camera Raw

Shooting in RAW and having to spend time processing your images might seem a bore when your camera produces perfectly nice jpegs as you press the shutter release however most serious photographers only shoot in RAW. This is because of the extensive image adjustments you can make to colour and density without producing ugly damaged looking images. Shooting RAW and using Adobe camera RAW found in the various versions of Photoshop and as the backbone of Lightroom has distinct advantages in the range of adjustments but also the plug ins and controls on offer.

On the pages of Lightstalking  Jason Row  gives a basic breakdown of the important options available

“Although many of us now use image management programs to process our Raw files, Adobe’s Camera Raw is still one of the most comprehensive convertors around and benefits from being tightly integrated into Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. One bonus of this, is that its user interface will be very familiar to Photoshop users. In this brief guide, we will give a rundown of ACR’s interface and most important features.

ACR’s Main Screen

When you open a Raw file in Photoshop, the program will automatically open the ACR plugin and preview the image in a large window. Surrounding this window are the important tools you need for your Raw conversion. Running along the top of the preview window are a set of image manipulation tools, in essence, very similar to Photoshop’s own tool palette.”

Click Here: A Rough Guide to Adobe Camera Raw

Tate doubles its photography collection after donation

In the BJP Olivier Laurent writes

“Tate has received a donation of 1400 photographs of London, including images shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and Elliot Erwitt among many others, doubling the number of works that form its photography collection……

The collection spans the period from the 1880s to the 2000s and include images from more than 120 photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Ellen Auerbach, Eve Arnold, Ian Berry, Dorothy Bohm, Bill Brandt, Horacio Coppola, Martine Franck, Stephen Gill, Karen Knorr, Marketa Luskacova, Roger Mayne, Chris Steele Perkins, Marc Riboud, George Rodger and Chris Shaw.

Some of their images will form part of Tate’s upcoming Another London exhibition, which opens on 27 July 2012″.….MORE

It is the last point about an exhibition opening on 27th July that caught my eye. The home page of the Tate website doesn’t mention this exhibition and I had to search their site to find this info for you

Tate Britain will hold an exhibition of 180 classic twentieth-century photographs which take London as their key subject. In the years between 1930 and 1980, some of the best-known photographers from around the world came to London to make work about the city and its communities. This exhibition will bring together some of the biggest names in international photography, to explore the ways photographers, for whom London was a foreign city which they either visited briefly or settled in permanently, saw and represented the subject in their own unique and distinctive ways. Artists represented in the show include: Bill Brandt, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Robert Frank,  Marketa Luskacova, Dora Maar, Irving Penn and Willy Ronis.

Another London

Tate Britain: Exhibition

27 July – 16 September 2012

£10

Girl with kitten 1960 © Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos.

So thanks again to the BJP for having it’s very sharp eye on all matters photographic

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2172088/tate-doubles-photography-collection-donation#ixzz1vaXXWEm3
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What You Need to Know About Night Photography

From the pages of Lighstalking another great article By Jason Row . Now the days are at their longest you can be out shooting those lovely dusk images right up until bedtime…..

“Night photography can be split into to distinct timeframes, the hour just after sunset, l’Heure Blue as the French call it, which translates as the Blue Hour and the time after, the night proper. The two need slightly different approaches and can give very different results.”

Old Dubrovnik during the Blue Hour

“Tips for Shooting in the Blue Hour

l’Heure Blue is in many ways perfectly described, it is the time after the sun goes down when the sky and the shadows become a dark rich blue. The first thing you need to do is pick your subject carefully, by its very nature the Blue Hour still leaves a little ambient light mixed in with the artificial light. Architecture, bridges and other large infrastructure subjects are good things to shoot at this time. Look for a subject that is well lit with artificial light as well having enough space around to show some of the detail in the sky. It is that combination of the rich blue with the orange, red and yellow of the artificial light that makes these images so potent.”

Click Here: After Dusk – What You Need to Know About Night Photography