What to keep in mind when doing portrait photography

Taking photographs of people requires a good deal of concentration and skill. While technical issues remain more or less smilar (it's still a matter of lights and shadows, depth of field, etc), the approach is very different than in the case of landscape photography, for instance, where it doesn't matter how much time you need to take that perfect picture. It doesn't quite work like this with people. Some get bored very quickly and get restless, others don't want to stay put all day on behalf of your creative urges... Doing portrait photography requires social skills as well as technical ones.

The result we usually try to achieve in portrait photography, is to capture the most interesting aspects of a model, and that's also what's generally expected from the photographer. The picture should suggest sincerity and fulfilment, which means avoiding stupid-looking and forced smiles, but does not rule out joy, if it comes naturally. Getting people to be engrossed in something they enjoy doing often gives good results too. The expression reflected by someone who fully lives the moment you shoot will no doubt give you some of your best pictures, and those that'll be most popular. A musician playing his instrument, or more generally a person engaged in a creative activity are good examples of this sort of subject.

Another thing that shouldn't be overlooked when working on a portrait is the background. This is particularly important if you don't own a studio and have to work outdoors. I'll say more about this in my next post.

New review of an old movie

I've just hit upon this recent review of an old movie, and one I've always really liked: Ladyhawke, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Rutger Hauer. I couldn't put it better than this. Oh yes, there may be just one thing: they say about the directing that it's "your regular hollywood movie". I wish...

iphone vulnerability: what's at stake

After its launch boosted by feats of advertisement and cleverly induced impatience and enthusiasm on the part of gadget lovers in general and Apple supporters in particular, the iphone got on the news again a little while ago... Experts of a computer security consultancy (Independent Security Evaluators) said they had managed to take full control over an iphone, which Apple would readily describe as a mobile phone ahead of its time.

It is by observing how the iphone connects to the Internet that our experts have discovered the flaw. They claim that the wireless connection device used by the iphone to access the Internet makes it possible to hack, thus enabling a third party to completely control the phone and take a peek at any private information stored inside.

To the experts of Independent Security Evaluators, it meant that the handset was vulnerable to attacks. In two weeks they were able to discover a flaw, and what flaw: the targeted iphone disclosed all sort of personal data, from SMS to call history, not to mention contacts... In fact, according to ISE, any file they wanted, they could get.

To cap it all, there was suspicion that a hacker could make phone calls at the expense of the iphone owner and perhaps even use it to spy on them...

The safety of mobile phones has become a hot topic as they get more powerful and come to behave more and more like home computers. And in this context, the launch of the iPhone - which adds a music player, an Internet browser and the touchscreen to the old regular mobile phone - puts the computer security industry in an stronger position than ever.

More on digital photographs: editing and printing.

Photoshop now includes (since the last two versions) support for raw files, which, unfortunately, is not the case for all cameras. This refinement is the privilege of relatively top of the range devices; however, as the very first ones appeared around 2003 - 2004, there is undoubtedly a few bargains to be grabbed on e-bay.

If your camera does not support the raw format, you'll still have lots of possibilities to get your shots to look better and more appealing, and even downright stunning. But before doing anything else, if you intend to print them yourself, your first task should be to properly adjust and calibrate your printer. Once done, you can then fire up your image editing software and go to the image menu and select the type of editing you think is needed. You'll find there is a wide variety of options there. It is advisable to begin with adjusting levels, i.e. setting the white and the black point, which will allow for deeper blacks and brighter whites. Using an adjustment layer can be a good idea, since it makes it possible to obtain the desired result by successive trial and error, with no harm done to the original image. The hue and saturation controls will let make subtle color adjustments, until the hue and intensity are just what you want.

Digital photographs: how to make the best of them

While a few years ago, taking photographs would stop for most people when they had pressed the button, with the advent of the digital era, making that same picture is something which can now be seen as a two-step operation: first we take the photograph, which requires a good understanding of the various camera settings; and then comes the editing phase. By using software like Photoshop or The Gimp, we can adjust the contrast, saturation, balance colors, and so on.

And if you want to go by professional standards, you will have to use the raw format. In a few words, using the raw format, means that your camera stores a lot of information, which will be very useful when it comes to adjusting exposure in Photoshop. The raw format is much better in that respect than jpg or TIFF, because there's always a loss of information when editing the latter. It is true that such an amount of information can sometimes seem a bit overkill, when we consider, for instance, that a computer screen can only display a small proportion of all that data: you won't be able to see on the screen of difference between a raw and a tiff format. And since pictures in the raw format are much bigger and use up a lot more resouces, it's wise to stop for a minute and ask yourself what you intend to do with this picture, or this set of pictures, before you take them. Cutting down on memory card expenses, that may be worth a little bit of introspection after all...

Kaneto Shindô - Naked island

Japanese art at its best, or the perfect receipe to create a true work of art with the smallest budget: this movie, which is almost half a century old, could just as well have been shot yesterday. It seems out of time and eternal, utterly imperishable. Shot in black and white, without any dialogues, featuring two unknown actors, it is a masterpiece of crystal purity, haunting and made even more so by the beautiful soundtrack.
Made by Kaneto Shindô while his producers were close to bankruptcy, this movie is like a long hidden treasure which hasn't lost any of its strange and mysterious fascinating power.

Douglas Coupland - Génération X

This is a rather strange book, with the friendship between Andrew, Dag and Claire, as a background. these three people seem to have the whole rest of the world inflicted upon them, while still managing to live life their own way, or more or less so... It mainly consists of a multitude of reflexions and comments on this socalled “Generation X” and everything related to it. The story benefits from a good narration, which has little to do with actual facts but saves us from what could otherwise have been a somewhat tedious read. Finally we are left with a good novel, whose chapters can each be read for itself and suitable for all generations.

Kafka: The trial

This is probably Kafka's greatest achievement. All of his universe is here in a nutshell; the force beyond - or - below- which cannot be escaped and drives the main character against his will, along the paths of a logic exceeding logic.The growing feeling of resignation towards a world which makes no sense and more. It's all there. This book is probably one of the major works of litterature of the twentieth century. It's a classic, plain and simple.

Ingmar Bergman - Autumn Sonata

A great, beautiful movie with two great, beautiful actresses: the daughter, Liv Ulmann, impressive and the mother, Ingrid Bergman, gorgeous. Only a “genius” (as Liv Ulman called the director, Ingmar Bergman) could show with such acuity the complex intrications of the mother- daughterl relationship, and describe its paroxystic crisis in this stuffy, indoor drama full of pain and unrestrained emotion.

Women grinding wheat in Palestine

Date unknown.

Kafka: Letter to his father

The letter Franz Kafka "wrote" to his father is a crucial moment in his work - and probably in his life too. It is essential to read it if on wants to understand the rest of his writings, in which the father to son relationship plays a prominent part. In this letter we discover a person devastated by a too severe education coming from father who never let him be himself. But then again without this father, Kafka would not have been who he was, and who knows, he might never have become a writer. This letter lets us discover this relationship, made of ambivalent and contradictory feelings, a letter which Kafka's father never got to read.

Missed

I'm eating, and while I'm eating, i can see a possible shape on the table opposite. I go on eating as though I hadn't noticed. But my gaze gets restless, like a disturbed mouse or insect. I go fetch my pen and a sheet of paper, and I sit down again, same place. But it's all gone. I had set out to draw and now I find myself writing I had set out to...etc. Was my getting up enough to disrupt this organised, accurate and rigid world of lines and proportions? The shape came back in the end, it did. Where from, I don't know. Too late anyway: drawing had left me just like the shape had disappeared from the table. And it will come back too eventually, but these two, the shape and my drawing urge, will probably never meet.

Blogging

Blogging is like saying something to someone who's not there, and who never will be. Or if they are there someday, we will be gone.