Animal Portraiture

The new series is the result of some Photoshop experiments. Of course I photograph every animal whenever I have a good chance to approach one. These ones are taken in the Bronx Zoo and Brooklyn Zoo. Except the mean looking gull which I crossed way with in Santa Barbara. Credits for this Photoshop technique and textures go to Anita Schneider. You can get her tutorial by ordering this issue of DigitalPhoto. I actually don't think I used her method very gracefully, but I liked to put the animals into the limelight this way.

Just Got a New Camera - for $14.95

I flipped through this British photo mag the other day when this toy came to my attention the first time. Now I'm proud owner of a Holga 120N - my very first not-digital camera. It's all plastic (even the lens) and very cheap. Those cameras are built with many mistakes and almost no functionality, causing effects you usually try not to have in your pictures. However, the results are very unique looking. I bought it with some professional black & white film and I'm looking forward experimenting a bit with it.

- Check out Dave Nile's website to see some very nice Holga shots. He uses this camera since a long long time.
- Toycamera.com is another great place to get inspired.

White Balance

I made an interesting observation: Somehow the majority of my male friends become daddy this year. Congratulations! A somewhat natural reaction once the baby is delivered is grabbing a camera and go crazy with it. So I got an email from a friend who played with his camera asking: "what is 'white balance' all about?" He asked me to answer this shortly and in clear words. I will try:

A camera is not as smart as a human eye. Your camera is like a person suffering from Alzheimer's disease. You have to say: "hello camera, this is white". Then the camera says: "well, if this is white, than this must be red, this dark red, and this light red, and then this is blue...". If you don't do this whenever the lighting situation changes, the camera gets confused.

Imagine the following: You take a nice landscape picture where the sun is your light source. You have green grass in it and a white sheet of paper somewhere in the picture. If you set the white balance correctly, the paper appears plain white and the grass green.
Now you take this sheet and bring it inside your house. You lower all the blinders and the only light source you have is a bulb. Now the same sheet appears rather yellowish (warmer), due to the warm color temperature of your light source. What you have to do now is, show the sheet of paper to the camera and tell: "The light in this room has a different color temperature than the light outside and white looks now like this." If you don't do this, the colors in the final picture will appear very warm, so that the sheet looks very yellow and people's faces even more yellow.

Fortunately, almost all cameras can be set to automatic so they figure this out by themselves whenever you take a picture. Some cameras are good in this, some are less. Most cameras also have presets for different situations.

In case you want to know what I do: I don't take pictures in JPEG format but in RAW. The RAW format allows me to set the white balance after taking the picture.

The Princeton Photo Club

I became a member of the Princeton Photography Club yesterday. This is a good chance to get in touch with other local photographers. So yesterday was the first meeting after the summer break and people were showing what they did during the summer. It was impressive and entertaining. The club is preparing an exhibition right now and I'm thinking of contributing one or two pictures. Most likely things you haven't seen on my website yet.