Stitches

Something I’ve been getting into recently are “Stitches”. I just love the messiness of them.

So, how do I make them? Do I use any fancy software? Nope, it’s very straight forward! All you really need is a photo editor of some kind that will allow layers, personally I use Photoshop Elements. If you have Adoboe Lightroom you can really speed up this process by importing all your photographs and exporting them all as a smaller size (you’ll probably be dealing with a lot of photographs, e.g. my Trafalgar Square one is about 40+). Next, just open them all up in your editor, manually place them on your canvas 1 by 1, and roughly line them up. For a more arty effect don’t be afraid to keep it somewhat messy. To achieve something closer to a smooth pano then somewhat line them up as best you can. That’s pretty much it really.  You can now create a final merged layer at the top (in Photoshop Elements select top layer, hold down alt+ctrl+shift and press E, merged layer at the top). Perform any further edits you deem necessary to this merged layer.

Here’s a few samples:

The life of a studio photographer

I had a shoot with a girl called Kamillah recently. Really nice model and very easy to work with. This one seems to be the most popular from the shoot:

Anyway, it got me to thinking about studio photography in general, it’s almost the office job of a photographer. The way I see it is you spend all day  in box or room lit like a football stadium, or at a PC editing/choosing photos. Granted, at the higher end of the studio photographer food chain they probably have light “managers”, make up artists, photoshop wizards, even in some cases (*cough* Rankin *cough*) you might have a “button clicker”!

This actually begs another question, at the top of this food chain what exactly is a studio photographer? Think of it like this, you don’t edit the photos, or decide about the light. You might tweak the light or make decisions, but effectively you’ve got some poor guy/girl in there doing the grunt work for you. Even funnier, you don’t even press the shutter button. So, aren’t you actually a shoot director?

Sure enough, that’s a very small percentage of the chain. But what about the rest of us? Are we effectively the office workers of the photography market?

The rule of thirds or the rule of turds?

This photography rule never ceases to amuse me in several different ways. But the main reason why it amuses me is how many times I have seen long established photographers get extremely annoyed with it and will argue it’s validity to the death.

Firstly, for those of you who are knew to this, let’s explain what the rule is. Basically, you put important objects or things of interest on a “third”. This “third” depends on the object or “thing of interest”. Let’s go really basic with this to show you what it means and only deal with 1 third at a time.

Horizontal and Vertical thirds
If it’s a horizontal line you’d place it on a “third” so that you divide the photo into 1/3 and 2/3 each side of the horizontal. A good example is the Horizon. As you can see from the following photo the horizon in the distance divides the photo so that the top third is sky and the bottom two thirds is everthing else.

Speed

This was inspired by a weekly theme which was speed. Now when you say speed, I put my money on it that first thing you think of is traffic. I find it crazy how fast people drive these days, including busses. Some of the drivers on my work route are some crazy ass drivers. Sometimes I wonder is it because I’m a bad passenger or are they actually lunatic drivers. You see, about 8 years ago I broke my arm in a car accident, and I’ve been a rubbish passenger since.