Vlak voordat mijn zoontje Jelle geboren werd besloot ik eindelijk iets sociaals te doen en me in te schrijven in een foto cursus. In de kunstlinie wordt beginner cursus georganiseerd voor mensen met een spiegelreflexcamera. Eind oktober ging het dan eindelijk van start.

Initieel dacht ik nog dat na al die jaren van fotografie de cursus misschien wat moeizaam op gang zou komen voor mezelf maar direct werd ik al op mijn complete onkunde gewezen door diep te kijken naar foto’s van professionals in bladen en hierop een analyse te doen van ‘wat is mooi?’. Dit verschilt natuurlijk per persoon, maar er zijn een stel grondregels die op zich voor elke foto gelden. Dit zijn compositie regels.

Wikipedia heeft een set interessante artikelen hierover in het Nederlands en Engels.

De eindopdrachten waren ook een setje hersenkrakers. Naast 2 foto’s geënt op compositie en kleurstelling kwam ook de twist op het geheel; fotografeer een emotionele vork.

Tja, en daar ben ik wel een week mee bezig geweest. Helaas mag je een foto niet bewerken, dus qua licht en compositie moet je het eigenlijk meteen goed doen. Ik heb een aantal lampen met wit licht bijelkaar gescharreld, een aantal vellen A3 neergelegd en na een hele hoop geëxperimenteer toch nog een redelijk resultaat weten te krijgen.

Zodra de volgende les voorbij is zal ik hier het resultaat posten.

When editing a set of files you might want to perform the same adjustments to each individual photo. This can be quite an hassle if you make many modifications. Luckily Lightroom 3 allows you to copy the individual settings you made to one photo over to any other you choose. This is done via the menu Photo > Develop Settings > Copy Settings (keyboard shortcut Shift – Cmd – C) on the photo where you already performed your modifications and then via the same menu, only then Paste Settings (Shift – Cmd – V) on the photo you wish to have the same modifications.

Exploring these types of handy features saves a lot of time on processing your photos and is a worthwhile effort to stroll through the Adobe help files.

Panoramas are, generally, many pictures combined to create a large rendering of a scene. They are mostly used in landscapes or architecture shoots where the scene is just too large to capture in one frame. I say “generally” because there are also some special purpose cameras available that are designed for panoramas, i do not have one of those.

I do, however, have a camera and some patience. So what do you need to do to create some cool looking panoramas? Well you have to take a series of photos of course! Important here is that they are all the same with regards to exposure, aperture and focal point. If you vary these settings across the board then you will get, ummm, interesting results.

When shooting a series of photos you need to make sure there is enough overlap between the photos, this is to make sure that the software will be able to ‘see’ where it needs to stitch each photo together. It seems wise to have at least 1/3rd of an overlap between the photos.

Once you are home you upload the pictures to your computer and then? Then you open up a program called Hugin. Hugin is an open source tool that is specifically designed to create panoramas. You then load all your images and let Hugin do the initial analysis. If you did it right there is little need to do further tweaking, however generally you need to add more control points (points that hugin uses to determine which picture stitches to what other picture).

Once done you can generate the resulting panorama. Generally you need to post-process it still in your normal photo software, but all the really hard work is done for you

Results

On a vacation to Barcelona, Spain, there is lots to see. Along the waterfront is a very nice park with interesting spikes. The below picture is composed out of 3 individual shots.

My hometown of Almere is relatively new. It was built in the last 35 years and is a city in which lots of architects went wild with new ideas. The skyline of the city center consists out of apartment buildings, the art center, shopping center and the hospital with next to it a large park. In the park I took 20 pictures that I then stitched together. It is best viewed very large (click on it and then click in the right hand top for the full view).

Later I added some fancier borders and introduced tabbed browsing to the website and started talking more and more about technology and sharing photos. I also started hosting some open source projects. Then it basically went dead. I used it for personal email and I posted my resume, that was about it.

In the past years I spent a lot of time on photography and more and more enjoying it. I maintain a Flickr profile as well as a much newer 500px profile. In order to showcase myself and my favorite photos to the world I thought it would be fun to design a photography site on here. I like the different style, more in line with modern browsers and devices, and I hope you do as well!