• William Hundley’s Photography - I totally don’t know the name of this, but William likes to hide people. He takes photos of people jumping behind sheets, coats, and other obstructions. He freezes the action, making the person disappear but leaving behind a mysterious sheet. I can’t explain why I like these so much, but I do. They make me giggle. Added bonus, I found his Flickr account!
• Justin Quinnell’s In-Mouth Pinhole Photography - Justin takes extraordinarily surreal pinhole photographs using a tiny camera mounted inside his mouth. You really need to see these; talk about getting a unique angle for your photos.
• Uncredited Photos of One Man’s Struggle - One man and his family deal with the pain of a man’s heroin addiction and ongoing fight with aids. If you know the name of the photographer who took these, please tell me. They are powerful photos and I haven’t been able to find out the name of the person behind the camera yet.
  
• Convert an old Mouse Into a Shutter Release Cable - The inventiveness of the DIY crowd will never cease to amaze me. Simple instructions for making your own cable release; you do need to know a little bit about electronics before you get started though.
• Using Your Scanner as a Camera - Haje Jan Kamps takes a brief break from the hectic life of a magazine editor to give his readers an article on a new way of taking photos. Use a scanner! Makes me wish I hadn’t sold my old one.
• Why Bubble Levels Are a Waste of Money - I always have problems getting my horizons, or anything else, in my photos straight. After reading this article, I’m with the author. I don’t think a bubble level is going to help me that much, I’m better off using the three techniques he outlines.

I’m totally impressed with the response you guys gave on yesterday’s post. I’m looking forward to digging through those photos tonight this weekend.

I’m prepping the next batch of Flickr testimonials for later on this week, but it’s not enough. I want more! Not just testimonials to write, but more photos to pore over and comment on.

I’ve spent some time on Explore, I’ve browsed through my contact photos, checked out other people’s favorites, and it’s fun! I’ve forgotten how much I enjoy commenting on and tagging other people’s photos.

So now that I’m revitalized and wired to check out what the internet has to show me, I’ve decided to start the flood of comments at home:

What’s the best photo you took last month?

I want you to comment on this entry with a link to your best photo from the month of September. You can explain why it’s the best or your favourite, I’m interested to hear it. I’ll keep accepting entries until next Tuesday, when I’ll post a bevy of beauteous links along with my own personal best September photo.

I’m hoping to see some photos of fall leaves, because I haven’t really taken any, but feel free to submit photos of anything you like. I’m looking forward to it!

Send me your photos!

Firstly, a very heartfelt thanks to everyone out there for weathering the post drought while I took some time off. Not having to worry about my online presence was a massive help and gave me some breathing room. I’m feeling much better now, more focused in a way.

Secondly, I am so back. Obviously, right? I’m testing the waters with a posting schedule of five days a week. This leaves my weekends free for panicking about articles for the coming week and wishing I was out taking photos.

Next week, I’ll have posts on taking photos of pumpkins for Hallowe’en as well as a large batch of Flickr testimonials.

I never know how to finish these posts.

The legendary Diana camera is finally re-entering production after a 35 year absence. Unica Home is currently taking pre-orders for the popular toy cameras and hopes to start shipping them later this month.

I’m far from being old enough to properly get excited about the “return” of this, but I’m intrigued. I like what I’ve seen from the images shown so far, and I like the idea of using a previously rare camera instead of some $20 lomo I can buy at 7-11.

If you aren’t enough of a lomography nerd to know about the Diana or why I think it’s cool, that’s okay. I still like you, just not as much. Here’s a quick blurb from the product page:

Originally produced by the great wall plastic factory in Hong Kong in the 1960’s the Diana has become a cult classic, known for producing soft and dreamy images due to light leakage. Given away by Reader’s Digest as a freebie, the Diana has been out of production for almost 35 years.

A light, inexpensive medium (120 film) format camera, the ‘new’ Diana has 4 f-stops and comes with a booklet, camera strap and lens cover. An additional change is that the camera has a removable lens, allowing for pinhole camera action!

At $50, this sounds like a pretty awesome toy. I’m flat broke at the moment, due a number of other shiny toys recently purchased, but I will probably be picking one of these up sometime in the near future. I need to broaden my horizons beyond my DSLR and lomo cameras are a bit more affordable than professional medium format cameras.

Would you consider purchasing a Diana Camera? Why or why not?

Nikon has finally announced the 2007 winners of their ‘Small World’ micro-photography contest! My sincere congratulations go out to First Place winner Gloria Kwon of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute.

Her entry, seen left, is titled “Double transgenic mouse embryo, 18.5 days (17x).” The image details state that she used “Brightfield, Darkfield, Fluorescence (GFP and RFP)” microscopy techniques to create the image.

My two personal favourites actually wound up being the first and second place winners of the popular vote, but were deemed an ‘image of distinction’ and 14th place, respectively. The bright colours in Christian Gautier’s photo “Cedrus Atlantica (cedar) leaf crosscut (200x)” really jumped out at me; I gave it my vote for top honors and it came 14th overall, 2nd in popular vote.

Marc Van Hove took the top honor of the popular vote with his image “Crystalized solgel chemical (50x)” and earned the ‘image of distinction’ label as well. The oil-slick rainbows and light green parts that looked (to me) like plant cellular structure really drew my eyes.

Entries are already being accepted for the 2008 Small World competition. If you missed your chance in 2007, get a jump on next year’s contest and submit your microscopy photos now.

Related Posts:

• Dear Scientists, Nikon Wants Your Tiny Photos
• High End Nikon D3 Digital SLR Rumors
• Nikon’s Clever Camera Ads

For those of you new to the internet, NSFW is shorthand for Not Safe for Work. This means that the link leads to something your boss might fire you for. It’s usually nudity, but it can be other things that the puritans consider vulgar.

Enough of that bollocks, on with the links:

• “The Park” by Kohei Yoshiyuki (NSFW #1)- Japanese photographer Yoshiyuki explores the weird phenomenon of sex in pulic parks, and the peeping toms who spy on them in this series of photos from 1970’s Tokyo.
• Shocking Anorexia Photo at Milan Fashion Week (NSFW #2) -I don’t know how ’shocking’ it is, but it takes a lot to scandalize me. However, it does a good job of getting the message out there about eating disorders. Much like this commercial, which has been doing the rounds.
• How to Gracefully Accept Criticism (SFW #1) - ZenHabits hits the nail on the head with this article. This is must-read material for any photographer expecting to show another human their work. These rules are totally optional if you’re dealing with the Delete Me crowd on Flickr; I like to be snarky right back to them.
• Twelve Essential Photographic Rules (SFW #1) - You can’t break ‘em if you don’t know ‘em, so head over to PopPhoto and take some notes.

Now I can start digging through the 150-odd photography articles that piled up in my RSS reader on my hiatus. Link roundups might be a bit heftier in the coming weeks.

Yes, I intended to take most of last week off. That wasn’t intended to spill into this week, but the world had other ideas. I’d rather not go into it, but I had a pretty personal tragedy hit me over the weekend and I’m not really doing anything more complex than tinkertoys for the moment.

Posts will be sporadic, if up at all, until next week. I’m really sorry to let all of you down like this but I need some space, even if it’s only a week.

Thanks for understanding.

• Malacca Strait Pirates - A National Geographic photo gallery about the pirates of the Malacca Strait in Southeast Asia. Particularly appropriate for today!
• New York Rises by Eugene de Salignac - A Smithsonian article on the works of Eugene de Salignac, the previously anonymous photographer responsible for thousands of beautiful New York photos dating back to 1906. The photo of the Brooklyn Bridge painters is my favourite; the lines are gorgeous.
• The Daily Lives of SS Officers at Auschwitz - A photo album was recently discovered, showing the daily lives of officers who worked at Auschwitz. None of the photos in this audio slideshow are graphic in any way, but that’s what makes them so powerful. It reminds us that, as the narrator says, this was an atrocity perpetrated by human beings with families and pets, not some amorphous group of boogeymen.
• Canon Firmware Hack to Unlock DIGIC-II Cameras - A fancy firmware upgrade for some of the Canon A and S series’ of digital compacts that unlocks a whole host of features. Most of these features, like being able to shoot in RAW, are normally only found in their digital SLRs.
• Photoshop Question: Save as vs. Save for Web? - A pretty good comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of using ‘Save As’ and ‘Save for Web’ in Photoshop. Personally, I *always* use ‘Save As’ but that’s mainly because I’m addicted to EXIF data.

You should also be headin’ into me gallery to see Talk Like a Pirate Day photos from the 2006 Vancouver flashmob.

Flickr’s search page is one sexy feature of the photo-sharing site that’s designed to be comprehensive. Almost overwhelmingly so: You can search with the basic boolean “twiddly bits”, a SafeSearch toggle, by content type, date, license, camera, or any combination of the above. You can get intensely specific with your search results.

So tell me Flickr, why can’t I search through photos by orientation?

Is it so much to ask? All I want is to only display results taken in portrait or landscape mode, or even perfectly square photos! It’s not so hard, is it?

You’ll let me search for only screenshots tagged with ‘cats’ (but not ‘dogs’) that are CC-licensed for commercial work, taken between 09/04/2006 and 09/04/2007. Naturally, the only result is a LOLcat.

Why can’t I just tack a ‘taken in landscape format’ on the end of that? My knowledge of database processing for search engines is admittedly quite thin, but it seems like a simple thing to implement.

Flickr already tracks dimensions as part of the EXIF data, as well as for creating thumbnails of photos. It should only be a minor task to return search results where the width is greater than the height or vice versa.

What additional search functions would you like to see Flickr add?

Fall photos are a challenge for photographers and amateurs alike, but the effort can be worth it. The combinations of deep red leaves, bright green grass, and electric blue skies make autumn photos a universal favourite.

With that in mind, here are five solid ways to make your photos impress:

Get in Close to the Leaves

Trees are tricky because they overwhelm your digital camera’s sensor with detail. This can make your photo look overly busy if you’re not careful. Rather than trying to frame the whole tree, move up close and capture just a few autumn leaves.

Zoom lenses are excellent for this if you don’t want to get dirty. Wide angle lenses give a different look to fall photos, but to get up close you’ll have to climb the trees!

Shoot Autumn in Black and White

Another way to make photos of this season interesting is to eliminate the colour. Fall photos are often full of heavily saturated colours; having a photo without them can make people stand up and take notice. Get your audience to focus on the texture and shape of the leaves by converting a few of your fall photos to monochrome.

Use Leaves as a Background Element

Using trees as photo backgrounds in the fall is a no-brainer. You capture all the colour of the season and you can adjust your aperture to give a really pleasing, soft bokeh. Done right, this effect can look almost like an Impressionist painting.

Having the leaves as a prop is also fun. You can shoot portraits of people holding leaves close to their face and kids jumping into great big piles of ‘em. Unlock a host of possibilities by using such a recognizable symbol of the season as a minor element in your composition.

Take Your Fall Portraits on a Cold Day

The chill will make your model’s breath visible when they exhale. That tiny wisp of breath can communicate so much in a photo. Breath and clothes are the simplest way to communicate the coolness of the scene. Giving a photo full of warm, vibrant reds a crisp cool feeling can be difficult, but it will make your photo stand out.

Warm Things Up a Bit

Leaves that have been on the ground for a bit can look dull. Warming the photo up can make people really see the dusky oranges and deep reds of fall. Those of you with compact cameras can try adjusting your white balance or make adjustments in Photoshop later.

If you’ve got an SLR though, here’s where we get a bit technical. When you’re shooting available light, use one of the 81 series of warming filters. The filter will help pump up the oranges and reds. As an alternative, you can put a polarizer on your lens to maintain a crisp blue sky and gel your flash to warm the leaves.

I’ve become a bit obsessed with the look of the Rosco #18 Flame gel, but I’ve also been reading too much Bob Krist lately. A 1/4 or 1/2 CTO gel should be more than enough to give the leaves in your photo a bit more oomph.

Whatever skill level you’re at, taking photos of fall leaves provides a unique challenge that only comes around once a year. Get out there and shoot!

Related Posts:

• 5 Ways to Make Your Texture Photos Pop!
• How to Take Great Photos at High Noon - Part One
• How to Improve Your Photos by Ignoring Them

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