I read this interesting article today dealing with the the truthfulness or the veracity of photography. I thought it quite interesting and definitely a read if you consider yourself a photographer who tries to represent the truth.

Download it here!

Before

After

Watch the tutorial:

Just click the zip file below and download the snow filters.

Post ‘em on flickr and add them to our site so we can see your creations!

Welcome to WTFotography.com, formerly baconlettucephoto.com. You might see some bacon bits floating around in our archives but we’re going a new, healthier direction

I hope that we can continue to bring you guys some rockin’ and inspirational images with the instruction and tools to help you get out there and take your very own kick ass photos!

I’ll start out with a snow filter set coming soon! I’ll show you how to fake some snow falling…

Get ready as we unleash the awesome.

The image is part of a series called watch. Sometimes you get a vague suspicion that you’re being observed, and I was/am trying to relay that feeling with this series. It’s not particularly strong on its own this way, but I’m planning to have the rest of the series finished sometime this summer.

As for the technical aspects, it was fairly quick and dirty. I used 2 Nikon SB800 speedlights triggered via CLS. One was set on the ground behind the crate and aimed through the handles to cast the shadows. It was set to 1/4 and had a florescent gel on it. The second light was fired into a wall at camera left about chest level at [I think] 1/64 power and had an amber gel. I used a Nikon D300 and 28mm f2.8 prime – the exposure was 1/250th at f8 to kill ambient light and provide the depth of field I wanted. Also, shot in 14-bit to retain better colour tonality and shadow detail.
For processing, I did minor curves and white-balance adjustments in Adobe Lightroom 2, exported as a 16-bit TIFF. Then, some selective dodging to the tv and legs, and colour balance adjustments in Photoshop CS3.

Lighting, whether natural or artificial, is the most important element of photography. Lighting can create the mood and add an element of emotion to your images. This is a perfect image to display the eerie feeling created by just adding some lighting.

Make sure to check out Levi’s blog to see what else he’s up to. Also his awesome Royksopp post.

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If I tell you how this shot evolved, you will probably laugh at me. It goes something like this: as I walking my son to school, I noticed this stick in a neighbor’s yard. I immediately thought, “Hmm. I could use that stick.” I decided to pick it up on the way back home. After I dropped the boy at school, I decided to see if I could find anything in the charity shops that would go with …. a stick. This dress was hanging there, in my size, and cheap enough to buy with the change I’d grabbed on my way out the door. So. We have a stick and we have a dress and we have…absolutely nothing else. I let my mind wander on the bus back home and as so often happens, inspiration struck out of nowhere.

I was going for a civilized wildness with this shot. It took about 15 takes to get the look I was attempting to capture – the kind of look you might see on the face of a woman who has integrated herself into polite society but remains shrouded in a cloak of the wild wood that spawned her.

I shoot in natural light exclusively – in this case, it was the window the my left. My settings were f/2.8 and ISO200 with a Sigma 30mm 1.4 lens. I work with textures a lot, and there are several overlayed here to give the wall behind me some texture, and add to the overall organic feel of the image. This would be an easy PP technique to replicate as it only includes a basic sharpening, color balance, texture overlay, and vignette.

What caught my eye with this shot is the “dark” feel of it. The vignetting and texture overlay give it that grunge feel while the model has this eerie look about her.

Cassie has a great imagination with her work. Make sure to look at some of her other photos.
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by Brian

This was originally shot on film using a Nikon N80 and scanned with a film scanner from a slide. I think it was Velvia but I don’t recall. One morning a buddy and I drove around Palo Alto to take photos and I think this was some hill behind Roche. Not sure, but the narrow depth of field is from my 50mm f/1.4.

The larger version is much better. Click here for the larger version.

There is nothing particularly exciting about how I took this picture. I’ve been a LEGO builder all my life and while sharing pictures of the models I build through sites such as flickr has become a major part of the hobby in the last few years, taking the actual picture generally is only a very small part. It took about forty hours to build the model, whilst taking the pictures took little more than half an hour. I usually take pictures of my models on my kitchen table. The background is formed by a blue-painted wall and there usually is plenty of natural light coming in through the window. The camera is a four-year old Olympus Camedia C-470 with pretty much everything it can do itself switched on. It was mounted on a small tripod. Rather than using photo-editing software to make my pictures look better, I take a large number of them and then select the ones that I like best -an obvious advantage of having a model that isn’t about to go anywhere any time soon. What made me select this particular picture is the focus on the gun barrel and the shape of the turret when seen from this angle. It may be obviously built with LEGO bricks, but it looks like a tank to me.

I picked to feature this shot because I thought it was cute LEGO army guys in a tank! That’s pretty awesome. Not to mention the GREAT use of lighting to display the subject. You can do this by using a softbox.

If you’d like to build your own softbox here is a great website with step by step instructions.

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The photo was on my “short list” of things I needed to photograph here in Seattle. I’ve gone a couple of times, but decided to wait until I had a super wide angle lens to take the shot. I finally got the Tokina 11-16mm for my Nikon D90 so I went down to the tunnel to try it out. The tricky part is getting the correct perspective. If you’re slightly off, the photo won’t work, especially with the vanishing points. I had to try a couple different aperture settings to get the result I was looking for as well. I then shot a few sets of bracketed images (-2, 0, +2) and then went home to post-process. My workflow is pretty standard. I tonemapped the bracketed shots using the Details Enhancer mode in Photomatix to pull out detail and color in the marbled floor and then made basic adjustments (levels, curves, and color) in Photoshop. The final step was to apply Noiseware noise reduction to the image. Pretty simple. Feel free to contact me via flickr if you have any questions.

Info about the shot: Nikon D90, Tokina 11-16mm @ 11mm, f11, ISO 100 – 3 bracketed shots (-2, 0, +2), Photomatix Details Enhancer. (HDR)

Peter is a photographer living in Seattle, Washington.

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