Fine-art photography for home and office
Ansel Adams developed the Zone System as a tool to help film photographers adjust the tonality and dynamics “seen” by the camera (and envisioned by the photographer) to the “light-space” of the finished photograph. By adjusting the negative’s exposure and development time, he could compress or expand the dynamic range of the scene to “fit” … Read more
Anyone who’s spent a little time with Vibrance in Adobe Lightroom’s Development module knows what a great tool it is. It is “smart saturation”; which is to say it saturates unevenly, raising the saturation levels of the desaturated colors in the image so as to even out overall color saturation. Taking the slider negative desaturates … Read more
“He had his little Leica,” [fashion photographer Helmut] Newton remembers, “and he simply would point and shoot.” Since Cartier-Bresson’s hand isn’t as steady as it used to be, some of the pictures were a bit fuzzy. “Sharpness,” he told Newton, “is a bourgeois concept.” Newton sits back and laughs: “I thought that was just divine.” … Read more
In the YouTube video Camera Tricks are not Magic, magician Penn Jilette aims a broadside at fake magicians who substitute camera trickery for skilled slight-of-hand. That question, what is magic? dovetails with an oft-quoted dictum of science-fiction writer/futurist Arthur C. Clarke. His “Third Law“ regarding the future of scientific development states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is … Read more