MIMI MOLLICA . PHOTOGRAPHER

György László at  L1GHTB1TES keeps finding gems to tantalise us with, this one is from his first post.

GL: Your pictures from Dakar are currently on display at the Somerset House in London. When I saw them I sensed a mixture of immediacy and formal discipline. How did you take these pictures?
MM: While working on En Route To Dakar, I was lucky enough to be mentored by Mr. Martin Parr, whom I like to call Mr. Martin. Once, as he was commenting on my photographs, Mr. Martin told me, to spend much more time on taking my photographs. “Mr. Martin, more than one hour per photograph?”, I asked. “One hour? Mimi, you must stay one day, one week, one month on a photograph… until it is good!”
So I went back to Dakar and applied the methodology suggested by him. This picture must have been taken in March 2008. There was this spot along the motorway, where a bridge was to be built, but at that moment people still had to just cross the highway to go from one part of Dakar to the other. Every day from early morning until the evening, commuters, school kids, vendors, women… Everyone was flowing from one side to the other and I thought this was pretty symbolic, important for my story, and mostly, it was visually compelling!
I waited in the middle of the carriageway and stayed there all morning and the day after all afternoon and the following day from morning until late afternoon and so on… I have a lot of photographs of people jumping across the highway. This is one I am quite happy about. I like the colors, and I like the posture of this lady imposing her elegant and eloquent figure on my frame.
GL: How do you get ready for such moments mentally? And how do you make sure that the image is going to be okay technically?
MM: Generally speaking, I believe in the photographer’s expertise to be able to catch volatile moments, to be able to render them universal in a photograph. This is what is exciting about reportage/documentary photography. Only by doing so can you maintain a good honest balance between you, the photographer, and the reality you are trying to capture.
It’s a bit like fishing. If you go out to the ocean, place a bomb into the sea, detonate it and then come and collect the dead fish, this is not what I call fishing, this is plain and simple mass murder! But when you go out and spend a day with your rod waiting for the good catch, not only you’ll feel more in balance with nature, but you’ll have thought a great deal during that day. That’s why fishermen and photographers are usually wise people, because they learn to observe and to listen. The means are as important as the end!
I am always aware of the moments I would want to catch with my camera, even if for some reason I do not have the camera with me. This is my natural attitude towards life. Yes, I do go to places where things are more likely to ‘happen’ but photographs are virtually everywhere!
As far as the technical aspect of capturing the right image, here you need some skills, you need to know your tools, you have to master your camera and be ready to capture the moment without hesitation. I must admit that I did loose a few photographs along the years, but this is also part of the game. If it is true that you learn from your mistakes, then I must be very clever by now!

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Has Instagram made everyone’s photos look the same?

From the BBC

“Instagram, the photo app, has been sold to Facebook for $1bn. But has it sparked a wave of generic retro-looking snaps, asks photographer Stephen Dowling. Instagram – and its bedfellows such as Hipstamatic, Camerabag and Picplz – have brought to digital photography a fever for a certain style of imagery. Smartphone photos are given saturated colours and Polaroid-style borders, dark vignettes, light leaks and lens flare like those that plagued the Kodak moments of previous generations. It may be 2012, but popular photography hasn’t looked like this since the early 1970s.

The trend began a few years ago with Hipstamatic, an app which apes the look of lo-fi toy cameras. Now Instagram allows a pic to be taken on your smartphone, a digital “filter” to be applied, and the resulting pic made viewable to the site’s ever-increasing community. Chances are that that artfully retro pic of a display of cupcakes your friend showed you at the weekend was an Instagram pic.”

Continue reading the main story

Before and after…

Applying Instagram’s X-Pro II filter to the image for a more “vintage” feel

“Launched in March 2010, Instagram took until the end of that year to notch up its millionth user but from there its ascent was dizzying. Just 15 months later there are more than 30 million account holders and a billion pictures on the site’s servers. That’s a lot of cupcakes.

Instagram’s use of filters mimics some of the processes photographers used to push photographic boundaries – such as the super-saturated colours created cross-processing slides in negative chemicals, or using expired film’s palette of soft, muted colours, or playing around with camera settings or darkroom equipment to boost contrast.”.…..MORE…….

I think this conclusion is where my thoughts lie..

“The ability to turn an everyday pic into something “artistic” at the click of a button is the very embodiment of digital photography’s curse of convenience – no long learning curves, or trial and error with expensive rolls of film. But is it creative?

Writer and photographer Kate Bevan doesn’t think so.

“Do I think it’s artistically valid? No. I think it kills the creative instinct. However, I do love sharing and I understand the mindset that wants to make his or her pics stand out, even though Instagram does the opposite of that.” The first time one sees a picture with an Instagram-type filter applied, it might be impressive. But the thousandth time? “I’m all in favour of people experimenting with pictures, and I’d never be elitist about photography,” suggests Bevan. “But I don’t think it encourages experimentation – it encourages the use of lazy one-click processing.”..…..MORE

What do you think?

 

Setting Up A Successful Photography Business

Diane Smyth writes in the BJP  ”

“Do you know your legal obligations on a commercial shoot? Do you know what the CAP codes are? And do you know what a Recce Fee is? If not, maybe you should take a look at Lisa Pritchard’s new book, Setting Up A Successful Photography Business.

Aimed at emerging or amateur photographers making the transition to professional life, it’s broken down into 11 concise chapters on subjects such as Business basics, Marketing and promotion and Pricing photography. Pritchard focuses on commercial photography so it’s geared towards that world but, with clear advice on legal issues and breakdowns of the finances of photography, it should be useful to photographers working in other areas too. Some of the UK’s most successful photographers have contributed their thoughts and photographs to the publication, including Harry Borden, Tom Stoddart, Steve Bloom, Nadav Kander, Laura Pannack and Perou.”

Setting Up A Successful Photography Business by Lisa Pritchard is published by A&C Black, ISBN 978–1-4081-2577-9, priced £12.99. For more information, visit www.acblack.com.

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2137846/set-successful-photography-business#ixzz1jirWLfIB
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Seeing Pictures – a course in Composition In Photography

Many of our students take our Composition – Seeing Pictures course after completing either of our DSLR courses (the 4 session or 1 Day version). It seems a natural extension from learning about how your camera works to learning about how to see and take better pictures.

As Dorothea Lange said “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera”

The course is not just about the design rules that dictate some forms of photographic composition because rules and laws are there to be broken. We do look at the ways that photographs can be read to be better understood. In pursuit of this each class is arranged around the work of a prominent, some might say, masters of photography. People whose work is so lauded that not to use them as a basis for understanding photographic composition would be a failure. We can learn so much by looking at and understanding the photographs of the best practitioners of our art and craft, learning by looking helps us to see.

“Many thanks again for another fantastic course it has filled many a gap in my knowledge and helped me no end”

“I also did the seeing pictures course in October and will certainly be recommending both to anyone who’ll listen!”

The next course starts 6th October, 4 sessions, 2 hours each the cost £80

More information here

 

Photoshop Layer Masks, how and why

Layer masks are a great asset to Photoshop and can open up an entire new world of photo editing – once you know how to use them. If you already understand the concept of layers, you know that layers can be adjusted in transparency – referred to as the opacity level in Photoshop. This makes the top layer invisible to a certain extent and allows the bottom layer to be seen. This is adjusted using a percentage rate – 90% opacity would be barely see-through, while 10% opacity would make the layer virtually invisible.

Wouldn’t it be great to select which areas of your layer you want transparent, and which remain visible?

This is entirely achievable with layer masks by adding one to your layer – which you can then use your brush tool to paint on. A black brush will remove parts of your layer that you don’t want visible, and a white brush will do the opposite – in other words, it will reduce the transparency.………more

by Christopher O’Donnell

Enhance your pictures, make them tell stories

Making photographs has many purposes, for many people an image is just a decorative artifact but most photographers want more than decoration or even mere representation of a scene. You often hear photographers talking about how they like their images to tell stories, sometimes these are obvious, sometimes obscure and the story is in your head, just prompted by the image. Any picture that keeps you thinking longer is better than one that you think is nice and forget about immediately, most sunset pictures fall into this latter category in my opinion.

This article by scottbourne helps to set out some basics in making images that tell stories, as he says it is not definitive but I think the article touches on the necessary elements that you need to start telling stories with your pictures.

Here is that article

KGB

Understanding depth of field and showing some self control

This is a really useful article from Jim Harmer at Improve Photography. Regularly in the classes I teach I find people who are so absorbed by shallow depth of field that they fail to see that some of the most important parts of their image are out of focus.

“I get it.  Depth of field is fun to play with and makes our pictures look amazing, but I’m here to say that more of a good thing is not always better.

Look at the image featured on this page of my beautiful wife, Emily.  The depth-of-field adds to this image to make her stand off the page; however, this image suffers from too shallow depth of field.  The depth of field was only about two inches in this picture because I used an aperture of f/1.8, a 50mm lens, and I was only two or three feet away from the subject.  You can see that part of her face is out of the plane of focus, and that is a bit distracting.  What I really wanted was to make her completely in focus and just blur out the background.  You might not be able to tell this on the small preview of the image, but it’s obvious if you click to make it big.  This post is for those of you who always crank the aperture down to the lowest number available.”…interested?...more

Too shallow depth of field – Jim Harmer’s mistake

7 Post Production Tips for Striking Landscapes

Now that you’ve captured some beautiful landscapes (hopefully in RAW format for optimal versatility in editing), it’s time to bring them into Photoshop and make some improvements. Confused on where to start? Below is a detailed, but certainly not exclusive, list of popular editing techniques….more of this article You might also want to consider our Photoshop course, the next one starts 4th May

from

Christopher O’Donnell at Lightstalking

How to Use Natural Frames to Enhance Photographic Composition

“In a lot of photographic situations, a photographer will often come across a natural object near the scene that can be used to “frame” the main element of the image. It’s a common photographic composition technique and one that can be used to great effect if you can pull it off. Here are a few things to think about when you next have the opportunity to frame your photograph as well as some examples of successful images that use framing.”…….more

 

Frames are one of the subject areas discussed in our Composition – Seeing Pictures course which starts in March