Launching a career in advertising

While updating my photography page, I came across a photo that I had taken two years ago at Cape Agulhas in South Africa, the same location where The Edge of Africa was filmed. This place just seems to lend itself to automotive photography. This time the subject was an Audi A4 (as you can tell I'm not partial to any particular brand, but I do lean towards German car manufacturers). The photo looked almost like it wanted to be an ad, so I decided to rework it a little bit in Aperture and try my hand at ad design. The result is below. Do you think Audi would buy it? 

Exploring iPhone photography

I've been post-processing some images from my iPhone lately using various iPhone apps, sometimes augmented by some extra tweaking in Aperture. It's interesting to see that in areas where I would have expected the tiny iPhone camera to fall short, like subtle gradients and low contrast areas, it actually creates an interesting grainy texture that's quite pleasing to the eye. Some extra sharpening usually brings this out even more. Gives the photos a little bit of an analog feel. Below are some recent examples.

Through the lens

A different kind of TTL flash photography... Normally light is supposed to go into the lens and out again via the viewfinder, but the opposite is possible too. For this shot I fired a flash through the viewfinder at the back of a Canon 5D mk2. Part of the light reflects against the back of the camera and lights up the background, revealing the silhouette of the camera.

On the rocks

I took this photo a while ago but have been experimenting with it again lately because I wanted to achieve a certain look. What I was going for is a soft, almost painting-like background, and a more contrasty, slightly oversharpened subject and foreground. I’ve seen those two style applied separately, but I thought that by combining them I could really make the subject jump out and at the same time create a somewhat surreal effect.

When I took the shot I purposely placed the flash visibly within the frame. One reason was that when shooting with a fisheye lens you have such a wide field of view that it’s almost impossible to place a flash outside the frame and still cast any significant amount of light on your subject. But it also makes the whole scene look a bit less serious.

One frame at a time

If you haven't already, you must check out Tom Lowe's timelapse videos. One frame at a time, he creates awesome shots of the night sky and mountain landscapes by stringing together hundreds or even thousands of individual long exposure photos. To create some extra depth, Tom puts the camera on a computer controlled dolly that moves along a track at precise increments. The resultng effect is that you see not only the movement of the stars, but also the changing perspective of objects in the foreground. Watch a little behind-the-scenes video after the break.

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Timelapse experiments

Here's a little timelapse photography experiment I did for my wife Brit. It was created from around 6,000 photos taken while she was working on an artwork called "Under Pressure".

iPhone fun with The Best Camera

Having a lot of fun lately with The Best Camera iPhone app. The nice thing is that it not only lets you apply filters to you iPhone shots (a lot of apps do that), but that you can subsequently modify the order of the filters, or even delete one or more of them. This way you can try a lot of different variations quickly. It also lets you post the result to multiple sites simultaneously, as well as to it's own community site.

Enlightening lighting

If you like Joe McNally's back-of-a-napkin lighting diagrams you have to love Maciek Lesniaks take on this. His lighting diagrams are little artworks in themselves: photos of the lighting setup with notes scribbled on them, see the example below. Check out more on Flickr or on www.macieklesniak.com.

iPhone snapshot