Category: Photos & Art

How to Photograph Christmas Lights

Strobist has some tips for photographing Christmas lights. They begin with this advice:

The problem with 98% of the photos of Christmas lights is that most people wait until way too late to start shooting. After it gets completely dark, you can either have the lights or the surroundings properly exposed. But not both.

Conversely, if you were to shoot the lights in the middle of the day, they would not show up at all. The trick is find the sweet spot (actually there is a whole range of sweet spots) where the ambient light and the Christmas lights balance.

Scenes from Life

The concept is simple. Each day, one new photo will be posted on the site. A photographer is assigned to shoot one photo a day for seven days. The photo can be of anything the photographer wants. The only guideline is that the photo that’s posted has to have been taken within the past 24 hours. After the week is up a new photographer in a new location will contribute a week’s worth of photos and so on. Our archive section will contain every photo posted on this site.

The purpose of the site is to show a wide range of photos from a wide range of place from an eclectic mix of photographers. You don’t need be a professional photographer to contribute as this is really more about snapshots from our daily lives.

scene from my life

Thanks to Veronica for the tip.

More Pixels Than You Need

David Pogue ran a test:

On the show, we did a test. We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference.

Even the technician at the photo lab told me that I was crazy, that there’d be a huge difference between 5 megapixels and 13.

Bottom line, no one could tell the difference: “I’m telling you, there was NO DIFFERENCE.”

Daguerre

Daguerre 1839

Parisian Boulevard, Daguerre, 1839.

Click image for larger version. Note the man who stopped to shine his shoes near the lower left. Most moving objects were not captured by the lengthy exposure needed. So far as known, that individual is the first human ever “photographed.”

I Wonder What Daguerre Would Think Today

If you’d prefer, you can hear Garrison Keillor with the following:

It’s the birthday of the man who helped invent the art of photography, Louis Daguerre, born just outside of Paris, France (1789). He studied to be an architect as a young man, but instead he went into theater set design. He was famous for the lifelike detail of his work, and he began to experiment with hand-painted translucent screens and elaborate lighting effects. He could use his screens and lights to create the illusion of a sunrise or a sudden storm onstage.

At the time, most painters were using a device called a camera obscura, which could cast a silhouette of an image onto a canvas for the artist to trace. But in the early 1800s, many scientists were looking for a way to capture the projected image forever. Daguerre wanted to do the same thing, and in 1829, he met an amateur inventor named Joseph Niépce, who had developed a light-sensitive pewter plate that could hold the image projected onto it. But the images took eight hours to develop, and the quality was extremely poor. Niépce died before he could improve the process.

Daguerre spent the next few years expanding on Niépce’s experiments, and he eventually came up with a combination of copper plate coated with silver salts that could be developed in about 30 minutes with the application of mercury vapor and table salt. He then set out to take a series of pictures of Paris, capturing images of the Louvre and Notre Dame. The camera needed about 15 minutes of exposure time to capture an image, so most of Daguerre’s early pictures don’t show any people. The one exception is a picture of a boulevard that shows a man in the foreground who has stopped to shine his shoes. He was the first human being ever caught on film.

Daguerre announced his invention in 1839, and the images he produced became known as daguerreotypes. It wasn’t photography as we know it today, because it only produced a single unique image, rather than multiple copies of the same image. But people were amazed at the level of detail it could reproduce.

Louis Daguerre said, “I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

November 15th is the birthday

… of Judge Wapner, 87. Raymond Babbitt sends his greetings.

… of Ed Asner, who will always be Lou Grant to me. He’s 77.

… of Petula Clark. She’s 74.

When you’re alone
And life is making you lonely
You can always go
Downtown

… of Sam Waterston. Jack McCoy is 66.

… of our governor, Bill Richardson, 59 today.

… of Kevin Eubanks. The Tonight Show bandleader is 49.

Justice Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965), artist Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986), Field Marshal Edwin Rommel (1891-1944), Governor (of New York) Averell Harriman (1891-1986), and U.S. Air Force General (and George Wallace running-mate) Curtis LeMay (1906-1990) were all born on this date.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is in Santa Fe. American Masters has a brief biography.

Fall

A couple of nice shots taken recently by official NewMexiKen siblings John and Debby. Click each photo to see a larger version.

Leaves in Water Butterfly

In the Tetons, Claws for Concern

Tetons

A good article in The Washington Post, with a great photo slideshow. It begins:

There’s wildlife you don’t mind surprising in northwest Wyoming — like the family of elk my daughter and I stumbled upon on our otherwise deserted trail early one morning in Yellowstone National Park; we detoured, wide-eyed, around them.

Then there’s the other kind, and it’s this that has me worried as I eye the scat — hiker-speak for animal droppings — along our steep, 10-mile round-trip trudge to Surprise and Ampitheater lakes, some 9,700 feet above sea level.

When Laura and I decided to go hiking this summer in Grand Teton National Park, just south of Yellowstone, the iconic mountain landscape was only part of the lure. We also hoped to see large wild animals. When people talk here of moose jams and buffalo jams, they’re not referring to spreads for your breakfast toast but traffic bottlenecks caused by drivers stopping to ogle wildlife. Still, some creatures you’d be thrilled to see from the roadside you’d just as soon not startle on a mountain path.

Ursus arctos horribilis tops that list for me.

Follow the link, if only for the slideshow.

The Pageant of the Masters

Two-time cast member NewMexiKen was pleased to see an article in The New York Times on the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters.

Is the tableau vivant passé? Not for the 155,000 fans who flock to this beachside town each summer for the pageant. For them, the two-month extravaganza — a $4.1 million production that includes sets and lighting for nearly 40 art pieces on eight staging areas with live narration and orchestra — weaves a magic that is a welcome palliative to the freneticism of modern-day entertainment.

The Pageant of the Masters dates back to 1933, when a much smaller version was organized to publicize an arts festival featuring local artists, which is still held in tandem with the pageant each summer (this year from July 7 to Sept. 1.). Today the tableau vivant pageant has an all-volunteer cast of about 300, and over the years it has added themes, movement, singing and surprises — from a cowboy on a real horse to the uncorking of a 20-foot-tall champagne bottle — to maintain its appeal.

Jill and Emily, official daughters of NewMexiKen, were cast members, too; Emily twice, first at age four. Jill was six. Son Ken made a one time guest appearance as well. He would have been eight. (They depicted children, though often children were needed just for their size to portray characters in the distance — that is, proportionally smaller.)

It was great fun, especially in the first few weeks. They had two complete casts so that you got a week on and a week off, though as the summer passed the drive to Laguna Beach, the application of makeup and costumes, the brief actual performance, and the cleanup and trip home could grow wearisome. Still, one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

Oh, yeah. I was part of a depiction of a famous set of figures from the Lisbon harbor, “The Discoverers,” and a card player from one of Cezanne’s paintings. The children were in the Ted DeGrazia UNICEF plate, “Los Niños.”

The wonderful Thurl Ravenscroft was the narrator in those days — you know him better as “Tony the Tiger.”

The Pageant is really something everyone should try and see at least once. It’s grrrreat!

In case you’re uncertain, a tableau vivant is a recreation of artworks, with humans “positioned to take the place of characters in reproductions than can be as big as 35 feet wide and 14 feet high. The models are then made two-dimensional by lighting and the elimination of shadows.” Generally you hold the pose for 90 seconds, though in “The Discoverers” it was seven minutes.

Is it art, or is it abuse?

Steal a toddler’s lollipop and he’s bound to start bawling, was photographer Jill Greenberg’s thinking. So that’s just what Greenberg did to elicit tears from the 27 or so 2- and 3-year-olds featured in her latest exhibition, “End Times,” recently at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles. The children’s cherubic faces, illuminated against a blue-white studio backdrop, suggest abject betrayal far beyond the loss of a Tootsie Pop; sometimes tears spill onto naked shoulders and bellies.

The work depicts how children would feel if they knew the state of the world they’re set to inherit, explained Greenberg ….

Read more from the Los Angeles Times.

Here’s the exhibition.