Zahids Blog

I have taken some Photos in the last days – please tell me if you think they are good:

{Homepage über Breakless Bikes

A wedding is the first most memorable event in a couple's life. It's the joining of the partnership. To share your wedding experience with photo wedding announcements is a great idea. You are sharing the celebration of your love. This way you can send an announcement to those who couldn't participate in the wedding as well as sending an announcement as a souvenir of your guests' participation in the celebration. Everyone will appreciate the sentiment.

A list of websites for photo wedding announcements include: Classy Announcements, Shutterfly, and Fun Foto Invitations. These websites also do photo wedding invitations. Don't forget bridal shower invitations, birth announcements, baby shower invitations, and all these can be with or without personalized photos.

Hopefully, you will only be married once and it will be a moment you will want to remember forever. It will also be a moment you will want to share. The possibilities are endless. Vista Print does announcements for 40 cents each. You have to order in groups of 10 but that is extremely reasonable when you are comparing prices. Vista Print not only does photo wedding announcements but they also accommodate almost every printing need. They also have wedding announcements without the photo and announcements and invitations both ways for wedding, bridal showers, birth announcements, and baby shower invitations. Photo Affections has wedding announcements for as low as $1.39. This website is hosting a sale right now. You put your wedding information in to the appropriate boxes and add your favorite photo and in two days you can view your proof. For 20 cents extra they will imprint your return address. This was the most inexpensive yet professional looking announcements website I found for photo wedding announcements.

You can also make your own photo wedding announcements if you're savvy with your computer. This is a great idea because it's so much more personalized and it shows your creativity. This is also a wonderful idea because you can personalize the ones you want to go to whom. If you had guests there that were in the pictures a nice touch would be to send them a wedding announcement with your picture as the main attraction and a picture of them participating in the wedding. Sometimes we forget the things we did. Photos are a great way to remember and your personalization will be greatly appreciated. The day was still about you but it's good to share the memories.

do you really need one? The short answer is yes. The long answer is….

A reflector, as the name implies, is something that reflects light. In photography, is it usually a big sheet of something white, silver or gold, that bounces light at your subject (or at anything you want light on for that matter).

If you are not to particular about having your reflector look all nice and nifty are plenty of DIY options here, and basically any flat surface will do. Foam boards, bed sheets, aluminum covered plywood, did I say any big surface yet?

What Can I do With a Reflector?

While a reflector does not solve all the problems known to mankind, it is a versatile tool that can assist both in the studio and on location. At occasions it is easier to deal with a reflector than with an additional light source, especially if you wanna go guerrilla.

Reflectors are great as they “travel light” and need no power.

Dueling With The Sun

In this picture, we had harsh sun backlight. A golden reflector came in to the rescue for filling face shadows. This is a scenario where adding an extra light source can be kind of tricky, and a situation where a reflector shines (no pan intended).

The light coming from a reflector usually relates to the light source it reflects. This means that you usually have enough “power” bouncing off of it. No power tweaking is needed.

Reducing Shadows In A One-Light-Source Scenario

If you only have one light, a reflector can serve as a fill. And it takes on some of the qualities of an additional light source. By bouncing the flash back at your subject. In this case the light source is a big square softbox, and the reflector is a 5 in one disc with the white cover. This creates a nice diffused fill.

When we were doing the lighting modifiers cheat sheet we actually took each image twice, with a single light source and then with a huge foam board reflector. Here is a little comparison chart.

Reflector Qualities

Size: As with any light source the size of the reflector in relations to the subject will be a significant contributor to the light quality. As a generalization, you can say, that the bigger the reflector, the softer the light it produces.

Color: The color of the reflector will impact two light attributes: light color and light softness. Lets starts with color, since it is the more trivial one. A white reflector will have almost no impact on the light. What goes in, bounces off and comes out. A gold reflector will warm up your tones, while a silver reflector will cool them down. There is a cheat sheet that shows all that stuff here.

Surprisingly the color will also have an impact on how hard or soft the light is. Light bouncing of a white reflector will behave as if the reflector is a second light source the size of the reflector (let's say it is a very shiny white for the sake of simplicity). This is because the light bounces in a very diffused way. 

It may seem counter intuitive, but light bouncing of silver or golden reflectors will be harder. This is because the light behaves more like it is reflecting in a mirror. There is a very good explanation for this in Light: Science and Magic (a must read for any light oriented photographer).

Shape: this is the last of the factors that contributes to the quality of the light. some of the reflectors can be bent to focus or diffuse the light. This can help if you want to narrow or widen the light coming off the reflector. While this is possible with some of the reflectors, it is impossible to do with a foam board.

When Reflectors Are Not The Optimal Solution

This may sound trivial, but I thought it is worth mentioning, reflectors can only reflect, they are useless as a single light source.

Reflectors are also not very good when it comes to controlling spill. You can not mount a snoot or a grid on a reflector. and while you can opt for smaller and smaller reflectors, it is really easier to use a flash or strobe covered with snoot or grid.

Where Can I Get One And How Much Do They Cost?

The good news is that you probably already own a reflector. A white T can serve as a reflector, and so will a pillow cover or a white bed sheet, assuming you have a way to stretch and stabilize them. Cost here (assuming you have one of those items @home) is 0.

Next in line is the foam board. A foam boar is basically a sheet of foam trapped between two sheets of paper. That gives the foam some sturdiness, and it feels kinda like plywood only weighs very little. You can get those pretty much any size you want. and they are very cheap. On the negative side is that they don't bend or roll for storage and travel.

Foam boards can also be coated with aluminum foil to create a 2-in-1 silver/white reflector.

If you have a car, you are probably familiar with the Sun shield. They come in both foldable and collapsible forms and are usually silver reflective. If you take the foldable type, make sure you get the bubbly kind. it will help reflect the light in a more diffused pattern.

For the “store bought”-unmodded equipment there is the standard 5-in-1 reflector (which along with foam boards is my favorite reflector). It is a collapsible disc with a coat. The coat has 5 colors: white, black, silver, translucent (which is more a diffuser) and gold. Those will cover any reflecting need and can easily be carried in a bag. This is one of my favorite items in the bag and I use it a lot on sunny days.

At the high end there is the California sun bounce line of products. Those are used by pros and “high end amateurs”. They cost a nice arm and a leg but are very sturdy and fold really nice. I have never used one of those before. So I can only tell from the experience of others. If the price tag is too high for you, you can try a DIY version instead.

PR Log (Press Release) –
Jun 03, 2010 – Santa Barbara based photographer, Whitney Elizabeth, spent ten days in April in Port au Prince, Haiti, photographing and documenting the days of volunteer doctors and nurses from the organization, New Reality International.  Whitney was able to capture poignant interactions through her photographs, and would like to encourage continued awareness towards the relief efforts in Haiti.

Even though media attention has waned, the relief efforts are ongoing in Haiti.  The group of 15 doctors, surgeons and nurses that Whitney accompanied saw 2,000 patients in mobile clinics in the nine days that were spent in Haiti. The group performed 43 surgeries during their stay in a Haitian medical clinic 40 miles east of Port au Prince.

Whitney was able to photograph the clinics, surgeries, the emerging tent cities, as well as candid shots of the people of Haiti.  To see more of her work, view her blog: http://www.whitneyelizabethphoto.com/blog/haiti

(Please email for permissions to use the photographs).

Whitney says of the experience, “It was the most incredible nine days of my life and I hope that my photographs will bring much needed attention to relief efforts for Haiti as the people are still struggling, especially with the rainy season upon them.”

After spending ten life changing days in Haiti, Whitney would like to spread the word across Santa Barbara that the relief effort is ongoing.  Tents, medical supplies, eye glasses and financial donations can be donated through http://www.newrealityinternational.org or through Whitney at  whitneywhitneyelizabehtphotocom.

Whitney Elizabeth is a wedding and fine art portrait photographer here in Santa Barbara, CA and in her home town of Charlotte, NC.  For more information about Whitney, please visit http://www.whitneyelizabethphoto.com.  To set up an interview with Whitney, please contact Jennifer Neisse at 805-450-2541 or jneisse@gmail.com.

A self-portrait by British photographer Brian Duffy, 1968. (Photo by Duffy/Getty Images)

It’s with much sadness that we received news yesterday that photographer Brian Duffy (1933-2010) has died. Although unwell for some time his passing was nonetheless unexpected, and comes just as his body of work was beginning to enjoy a re-appraisal and return to the spotlight it deserves.  There is much that can be written about Duffy: how he helped shape our image of swinging London in the 60’s, how along with David Bailey and Terence Donovan he trail blazed and helped change the face of magazine photography, and there will be rightly much talk of that in the obits.

On a personal note, over the last 18 months  I was lucky enough to have worked with Duffy’s archive, and had the opportunity to edit work that hasn’t seen the light of day for decades. Uncovering shoots with the movers and shakers of  London in it’s swinging heyday was quite simply the picture editors holy grail.

I met Duffy for the first time at our London gallery when he came in to see if he ‘could do business’ with Getty Images. Thankfully it turned out he could, but not before he gave me the grilling of a lifetime in which time his conversation turned from photographing horse droppings  (in not so many words) to why he never got punched using a Rolleiflex. And going through his negs in the subsequent weeks and months (those negs which survived the burning his archives in 1979) to me they spoke volumes about the man; artful, difficult, baffling, irreverent,  insightful,  charming and quite unique. The sad loss of a true great indeed.

Take a look back at the man himself and the incredible imagery he created.

Tags: Archive, Brian Duffy, London gallery, magazine photography

Digg This!
 
Tweet This!
 
Share on Facebook
 
Stumble It!

This entry was posted

on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Archive.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

from: Josobelles Site