Take Out Photo

Photographing Hands

2009-07-09T16:37:00.001-07:00

Hands hiding from a portrait can become the portrait

I hope to get back to more frequent posts soon, but this is the busiest season for photography (the kind I actually get paid to do). Just a thought or two about hands and portraiture...

Remember that great photo of hands making bread in my interview with Brad Slade? No? Well here it is:
It shows how much meaning is conveyed in a person's hands. Brad's photo also teaches a good lesson about how to do a portrait of hands: show them in action. Capture the mechanic at work. Capture the child finger painting. Show hands turning the pages of a book. Hands holding a favorite possession. You get the picture.

The photo at the top shows a kind of playful shyness as the smile peeks out through the hands. My son's hands also suggest that he can be both playful and stressed (a nail biter like his Dad).

Try doing a portrait that focuses on the hands of someone you love. And when you do, share your results.

July Monthly Special: Fragmentary Portraiture

2009-07-01T10:09:00.000-07:00

Our son, Lucas, has his mom's lovely pout...

...and his dad's playfulness.

Introduction
Have you ever noticed that one of the first things parents, family, friends, and sometimes even strangers do when they see a baby is to play a "match that feature" game? Oh, she has her father's eyes! That chin is definitely from our side of the family. He looks just like you! Your great uncle had that exact same hair! Sometimes relatives from both sides of the family seem to want to stake their claim on as many parts as possible, each set of grandparents insisting that junior is the spitting image of someone on their side of the genetic tree. But I don't believe this tendency is actually a turf war, because casual acquaintances and complete strangers are just as likely to participate in it. I know I have. Have you ever told someone how much their child looks like them only to find out that they're adopted? I have.

In other relationships, we also focus on the parts more than the whole. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, maybe it's because each beholder focuses on different parts. At the wedding I shot last Saturday, the groom described meeting the bride in a history class where she was seated next to him. "The first thing I noticed was her perfect little nose," he reminisced.

Facial features are a pretty safe bet if you want to recognize a person's physical qualities without coming across like a pervert of a sexist pig. The line between "appreciating" and "objectifying" is often found just below the neck.

Because love and sexuality have so much impact on our choices in life, we can understand how easily a part-by-part look at a person can slip into connotations beyond our intentions. But looking at the part as it relates to the whole need not be about love or attraction. A person's hands say a lot about their occupation (manual laborer?), their personality (meticulous? stressed out?), aesthetics (quirky? minimalist?). A compelling portrait does not necessarily need a complete face. In fact, it may not need a face at all.

The challenge
This month we will look at what I am calling—for lack of a better term— "fragmentary portraiture." Had I wanted to wax literary (as I am prone to do), I could have chosen "metonymic" or "synecdochal" portraiture. But people tend to find the terms confusing. If I wanted to create a painfully stupid yet descriptive pun, I could have called this "partraiture." But then, to many people in Utah, that pronunciation just sounds like the local dialect. I also could have chosen "extreme close-up," but that's not what I'm going for. "Fragmentary portraiture" is a portrait through an isolated part of a person, and that doesn't have to mean it will be a close-up.

Fragmentary portraiture, as I am choosing to define it:

conveys a sense of the person through a depiction that is limited to a single part
includes the body and things directly attached to it (i.e. clothes count, but a car—even if you are almost always in it—does not).

That's it. The basic idea is simple, but allows for a lot of possibilities (but let's keep it family friendly, shall we?).

Hopefully, I will get this whole link problem sorted out in the next few days. If, for any reason, you want to post and share your results but can't get the link to work, just email it to me.
UPDATE to link problems: almost completely fixed! feel free to post your results whenever you have them (don't forget to use the permalink URL of your post—and check the "TOP monthly special" box when adding a link" but not just for a comment)

I don't cry at weddings

2009-06-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

Or post photos from them on my blog. So why make an exception now? Well...have you ever found yourself unexpectedly moved by something you might normally characterize as too sentimental? Tears welling up against your will? Anyone who knows me will tell you that I generally loathe romantic comedies (except 500 Days of Summer, which I saw at Sundance—and loved. It opens in July here in the U.S. Go see it). And the only way you'll get me within 10 feet of a Jane Austen novel is if you add zombies. So it came as a total surprise when the father of the bride got my tear ducts working overtime at a wedding I shot yesterday—and all to the theme song from Disney's Beauty and the Beast no less. I didn't even like that song (or movie, for that matter) back in 1991. And yet...

Maybe this is what happens when you have a four-year-old daughter and suddenly find yourself relating to the father who still remembers the bride as that little girl who loved nothing more than to dance around the living room with him to the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack. And so, saccharine lyrics notwithstanding, when the father took out an artificial rose (straight from the Disney store) and then danced with his daughter to that song one last time before ceding both daughter and rose to the groom for the second half of the dance, I was moved in spite of my inherent cynicism.

And because June is the month for weddings, I give all of you softies this image of love and romance. And for you cynics...trust me. You had to be there.

William Klein Style Contact Sheet Photoshop Tutorial

2009-06-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

My Klein-style design, inspired by one of his many contact sheets.

Introduction

Last December I focused on brushes. I taught how to install and use brushes and even how to make your own. I made my own first set—a collection of Paris flea market brushes you can download for free. Using brushes, I decided to try a William Klein-inspired "contact sheet" montage that, to me, has a real album cover feel. Read on and see if you get inspired to try a contact sheet look of your own.

Photoshop enthusiasts have paid homage to the art of Andy Warhol , Roy Lichtenstein, and Barbara Kruger in the form of tutorials, but William Klein has been ignored until now.

If Wikipedia entries are any indicator of public esteem, then Klein—whose entry is currently a seven sentence stub—could use some good PR .

William Klein’s innovative street photography in the 1950s and ‘60s has influenced everything from documentary to fashion work. Equally impressive is his vast filmography , some of which has been canonized in the form a Criterion boxed set. Born in 1928 in New York, Klein’s style has been linked to his “mean streets of Manhattan” (you will see that phrase in almost every biography of Klein) upbringing. Equally important to his artistry, however, are the forty years he has spent living in Paris. You can read more about Klein’s work on the Masters of Photography site, or view interviews and film clips on YouTube.

The tutorial

This tutorial will focus on Klein’s distinctive enlarged and painted contact sheets.
Designboom has three excellent examples of his contact sheets to give you a feel for his style.

The key elements are:

The contact-sheet look (which he usually blows up to a large size)
High-contrast, grainy black and white photos
Painting, usually in a grid-like composition with bold strokes in primary colors or simply black and red.

This tutorial will stick closely to Klein’s style, but your own less literal adaptations might be good inspiration for web design.

The contact sheet

1. Open a blank document 10x8 inches at 320 dpi with a white background. Note that I am going for a print size, but you can re-size to suit your needs.
2. Copy the white background layer (Mac: Command-J, PC: Ctrl-J). This is where you will create the look of the contact sheet.

3. Stamp on the film border in the center of your document. I used photoshopgurl’s Freedom of Preach Brushes Brush 400 set to the maximum size of 2500 px

4. Extend the sides of the negative frame. Unfortunately, the side frames of the brush do not extend as far as we need. If you want to make your own brush you can skip some of the following steps. If not, it’s time to get copying. If you have CS3 or CS4, you can clone the sides and line them up with the help of the clone source overlay. Just open the clone source window, check “show overlay” and clone.

But unless you have the hands of a surgeon, cloning will lead to frustration in earlier versions of photoshop. For an alternative to cloning, select the rectangular marquee tool (M) and make a selection of the edge you want to extend.

Copy the selection onto a new layer (Mac: Command-J, PC: Ctrl-J), and use the move tool (V) to bring it over.

Repeat the process as needed until you have extended all the film borders to the edge of your image.

When you have finished, merge all the layers of your negative frame.
5. On the bottom right side, you will be left with a series of arrows (see above picture) the last two of which you will want to clone out. For the sake of realism, you should now add a “24A” to the right of the remaining arrow by cloning the “23A,” and replacing the “3” with the “4” from the previous frame. Since the “4” is too big, I suggest you do the following: Select the “4” with the rectangular marquee tool,

copy your selection onto its own layer (Mac: Command-J, PC: Ctrl-J), drag it into position with the move tool (V), and then transform it to the right size (Mac: Command–T, PC: Ctrl–T). A seemingly more elegant alternative may be to clone source with scale, but I find it easier to eyeball the scale with Transform.

6. To complete the frame, you will need to grunge up the edges. Select the Eraser tool (E) with a medium-soft brush at about 35 px and 60% opacity.

Erase the edges for a less clean look. Next, with the eraser tool still selected, load your favorite grunge brush (I used Recife dirty 2 brush 684) and chip away a little more at the edges.

NOTE: You will want to rotate brushes often in this project, so if you have never done that before now is a good time to start. To rotate a brush, bring up the brushes menu on the right (hit F5). There, you will see your brushes and various presets. If you highlight “Brush Tip Shape” you will see a compass shape. You can drag the arrow (or type angles in under “Angle”) to modify the brush direction.

The photos

7. Prepare your black-and-white photos. I used photos of skaters that I took at Place de la Bastille in Paris. I converted the photos to a high-contrast black and white using the channel mixer method and then added grain with Filter—>Texture—>Grain with a “contrasty” setting.

8. We are going to sandwich the photos in between two layers of frame, so before putting in the photos, we will need to create the top of the sandwich. On your frame layer, select the black film outline using the magic wand tool (W). Click on the black (tolerance was set to “5”) to get a selection,

and then click “Refine Edge” from the top magic want toolbar to pull up the Refine Edge dialog box. With the “Preview” box check, adjust the settings to get a selection that feathers gently for a soft edge without including too much white.

When you are satisfied with your selection, copy it onto its own transparent layer (Mac: Command-J, PC: Ctrl-J). This will become the top of the sandwich.
9. Now its time to bring in the photos. With the move tool (v), drag one of your photos into the center frame. Transform it (Mac: Command–T, PC: Ctrl–T) to the approximate size needed to fill one of the frames. Don’t worry about extending into the sprocket area or into neighboring frames. Just put the photo layer in between your base frame (the one with the white background) and your top frame (the one with the transparent background).

10. You will now see something like this:

With your photo layer selected, you can now select the Eraser tool (E) and erase the areas that extend into the sprockets or neighboring frames.

Repeat the process for the right and left frames and you will end up with something like this:

11. If your frame is looking a lot less black than your photos (as mine did), add a curves adjustment to that top frame layer to darken it up.

12. You are almost ready for the fun part. But first, we need to darken up those sprocket holes. They should be mostly black with a thin white border. With the bottom layer of your “sandwich” frame selected, go to Image—>Adjustments—>Replace Color. We are going to replace the white with black. I set the fuzziness to 45—enough to see rounded corners, but not enough to fill in the holes completely. I used black as the replacement color.

Next, add a black mask,

and paint in the holes with a quick stroke (brush set to white) across the top and then the bottom of the negative (if you accidentally paint into the numbers or letters, just switch to black and paint it back out).

The paint

13. This is where it gets fun. You will need to select your color palette. I used bright red (RGB 204, 0, 0) and Yellow (RGB 255, 215, 1). There is no right or wrong at this stage—only choices. But here are a few tips:

For the large splashes of color, stick to the same brush. I used Thick Heavy Brushes, brush 104. You probably won’t want something with built in canvas texture because it just doesn’t make sense. Stick to brushes that give the appearance of enamel paint.
Switch to a pencil brush for thin white lines.
If you need a more distressed texture in your large brush strokes, remove some of the paint with the Eraser tool (E) set to a textured brush.
For the jagged paint, you will want to vary your brushes, adding with some, and erasing with others. I used a combination of Recife brushes for the messier look of the central frame. Change the rotation often (as explained in step 6) and don’t try to everything on one layer.

Once again, the finished product:

Technical difficulties with comments (Again!)

2009-06-22T21:05:00.001-07:00

The latest in the never-ending comment problems is that many many comments have disappeared and every post seems to have the "your first" linkies of the monthly special. If I didn't care so much about having the "monthly special" be a place where people can link their work, I would have abandoned the every-buggy Mister Linky widgets long ago. But alas! There seems to be no good alternative, so I will keep working on a fix. And I do LOVE to see what people come up with each month--even though actual participation is a small fraction of my readership.

So let me recap: love comments, love you links, hate the constant bugs of the Mister Linky widget. Hope to get this resolved with the help of the web genius I hired to revamp my pro site.