Fotoviva Art Prints

On the Apple site there is a great feature on Richard Walch, snowboarder and professional photographer. In the article he talks about his new found love, Aperture on the Mac. For those that don’t know, Aperture is similar to Adobe Lightroom and is one of the prefered choices for professional photographers who handle, process and organise large collections of RAW shots.

Apple’s Aperture software running on a 15-inch MacBook Pro is the foundation of the mobile digital darkroom that he carries in his backback — rain, shine or snowstorm — when he goes on a shoot. Aperture’s RAW-focused workflow is particularly important to Walch, who shoots RAW at up to eight frames per second in a bid to capture his fast-moving subjects. He explains: “When I get down the mountain after a full day’s shooting, I normally have around 10 gigabytes of data. Aperture handles it so quickly and so easily”.

Because of these remote locations, and because Walch is himself a rider as well as a photographer, it’s important to travel light. Walch can fit everything he needs — cameras, lenses, laptop, supplies — into his backpack, so that he can begin importing shots into his MacBook Pro while he’s still on the mountain. He explains the advantage: “We normally break for food at some point, and I take that opportunity to import and organise my shots in Aperture. This is great for me, because I can isolate any shots I’ve missed during the morning session, and get them in the afternoon”.

By the end of the day, Walch is frequently exhausted, which is where Aperture’s backup facilities come into their own. Walch says: “During a shoot, I usually hike for many miles, often just to get a single shot, so the last thing I want to do when I get home is spend an extra two hours backing up my work.

“Aperture is smart enough to know which photos haven’t been backed up to my external drive. With one click I can start the process and Aperture does the rest. For me, it’s one less thing to worry about”. Apple have a short movie with Richard’s voiceover here.

Some photographers prefer Aperture, some Lightroom – it depends on your own workflow preference. They both have trial versions so why not download them and see which fits your own style best – it might be that missing part of your photography kit. If you have a preference let us know why…

We are happy to announce a new category to the Fotoviva store which is called Automotive Art. If you haven’t guessed it yet here we will be showcasing some exceptional car photography for you budding automotive enthusiasts out there!

Tim Wallace has produced some stunning images of both classic and cutting edge modern cars that really catch the eye. Tim’s own unique style brings the best out of the cars whether it’s a contemporary angle or a classic car pose. We have more breathtaking car photography coming so keep looking in on a regular basis.

You may have heard of HDR images before but what exactly are they and what purpose do they serve? Well let’s start with what it stands for – High Dynamic Range. Basically this is a technique that allows for a far greater dynamic range of exposures (i.e. a large range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDR is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows.

This effect is made by blending a minimum of 3 differently exposed images together to create the ideal exposure, which is more like the human eye would see it. There are various programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Photomatix which will help you automate the process as it can be quite difficult and time consuming doing it by hand using blending layers. There is still a lot of tweaking required as every picture requires different settings to achieve the desired result, so practice makes perfect.

With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy to use desktop software, the term ‘HDR’ is now popularly used to refer to the process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range. It is necessary to use a tripod for your bracketed exposures to ensure alignment and sharpness.

Searching through the net you will find wildly differing styles of HDR use with some images looking totally unrealistic with crazy colours and toning. On the other hand there are the serious photographers who use HDR to subtley enhance their pictures to create an image more akin to how the human eye would see the scene, rather than have to rely on filters to help improve the limitations of digital cameras’ sensors.

This HDR image of a sunset over a field of haybales was generated from 3 exposures using Photomatix Pro. It was then enhanced further with various Photoshop techniques. I have kept the HDR changes to a minimum to preserve the authentic appearance. Sunset images are a great topic for HDR as they have such a wide tonal range. Try attempting to create a similar result with one exposure and you will no doubt either end up with a washed out sky with a good exposed foreground or a nice sunset but no detail in the shadow areas such as the haybales. This hdr picture can be bought as a poster or canvas print from the Fotoviva Art Store.

We are happy to announce the arrival of Peter Paterson to the Fotoviva Team. He has been taking photographs for over 35 years starting mostly in monochrome which was processed in the darkroom. During this time he gained the Associate distinction from the Royal Photographic Society and also recently gained the EFIAP award, together with the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain Distinction DPAGB.

He exhibits photographs nationally and internationally in various Salons around the world and has also had photographs published in Digital Photo Magazine, Photography Monthly, Digital SLR Photography, FPME, and Creative Mono Yearbook.

Great credentials and wonderful pictures indeed. We will be uploading many of Peter’s great work over the coming days so check back regularly. We have a really nice abstract beach image in our ‘Modern Art‘ collection which is perfect for adding a summer feel to any room.

If you are interested in space and all the unkown that goes with it, you could add Astronomy Picture of the Day to your bookmarks for a daily feast of photography that is literally out of this world. Each day NASA bring a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

Today’s stunning digital view, entitled ‘Sagittarius Triplet‘, is actually a collaborative composite recorded by 2 cameras and 2 telescopes about 2 thousand miles apart! The deep, wide image field was captured under dark Arizona skies. Both M8 and M20 were recorded in more detail from an observatory in Pennsylvania. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae, with contrasting blue hues, most striking in the Trifid, due to dust reflected starlight. These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way.

And how about this for incredible stats – all three nebulae are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant. The expansive M8, over a hundred light-years across, is also known as the Lagoon Nebula.

NASA certainly has the technology to shoot some incredible images that reach deep into space. Their telescopes and observatories are so advanced these days that they can – excuse me, just had to get it in – boldly go where no man has gone before! Forget pictures of the moon, head over to APOD and see what lurks in the far reaches of our galaxy

Over the weekend the floods hit across the country and even our quiet little village was cut off from the rest of civilisation! The main road from Pershore to Evesham had a 30ft section just disappear as you can see from these photographs. The road left a 30ft deep hole so I can’t imagine they will be fixing this in a hurry!

We lost power and water for nearly 24hrs and were stranded for a couple of days, though thankfully our house did not flood – although other residents were not so lucky. A friend of mine spent the night in his car on the M5 motorway, whilst another had 3ft of water in his house – and there are reports of more rain yet to come over the coming week

Is this all to do with global warming or just good old Blighty weather? I could understand it happening during the rainy season but not July! It should be BBQ weather not floods.

Since launching the Fotoviva Blog it has steadily gained a strong following and now gets more and more hits each week. Whilst this is great we have discovered a downside to this! As the blog got more visitors it also got more spam

Too many comments made from automated spammers trying to sell gawd knows what – from viagra to holidays and gambling – you know, all the stuff we love to get in our inboxes every morning! Why do these people even bother? Does anyone actually click their links? You’d have to be pretty dumb to do anything but delete them.

So regretably we have had to add an anti-spam method for posting comments. Don’t worry, it’s just a simple plugin where you have to add up a simple maths equation such as what is 329×7445-154%+339 – nah just kidding! Something like ‘what is the sum of 5+4′ is all you’ll encounter. It just makes sure that you are indeed human when posting a comment. Feel free to take it for a test drive if you don’t have anything better to do with your day

Are you off on your travels over the summer, or have you been and come back with a collection of pictures you feel the world should see? Well Travel Photographer of the Year has announced that the overall winner of TPOTY 2007 will have the unique opportunity to spend up to two days photographing His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, the Tibetan settlement in Northern India.

This opportunity to photograph the daily life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama is part of an unforgettable visit to India, much of which will be spent in and around Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan Government in exile, allowing the winner time to capture a superb photo essay. But it doesn’t stop there! In addition, the Travel Photographer of the Year 2007 will receive an Apple MacBook with Aperture 1.5 software, Adobe CS3 Web Premium software, a £2,500 TPOTY bursary, and a Plastic Sandwich leather portfolio book. Hows that for a top prize?!

TPOTY organiser, Chris Coe, said, “We are honoured to be able to offer such a magnificent prize for the overall winner of this year’s competition. The High & Wild trip to Dharamsala offers everything a serious travel photographer could wish for; incredible mountain and forest scenery, historical architecture, fascinating Tibetan, Buddhist and Indian cultures, the Tibetan Children’s Village, amazing people photography and, of course, a priceless opportunity – the chance to document a day in the life of the Dalai Lama.”

“This trip, together with the other elements of the prize, provide a once in a lifetime experience and one that travel photographers across the world would want to win. We very much look forward to seeing the entries submitted for this year’s competition. In order to give people as much time as possible, we are extending our closing date to October 3rd.”

TPOTY 2007 also offers splendid prizes for the winners of the three Portfolio categories and the One Shot category, including trips to Tanzania, the Swiss and French Alps and China, the latest professional-level photographic equipment and software, TPOTY cash bursaries and an exhibition at a central London gallery. In addition, TPOTY 2007 has a New Talent category, designed to kick-start or to give a major boost to a new career in photography, and a Young Travel Photographer of the Year category, for those aged 16 and under.

Entries for TPOTY 2007 are now open and close on October 3rd. The competition is open to amateur and professional photographers, and full information and entry forms can be obtained from the website.

We recently came across a website that offers an online course for bringing out the better photographer in you at Proud Photography. The 13 segment interactive course has been developed by prize-winning professionals who will give you personal feedback as they help you develop at your own pace.

Once enrolled you can expect comprehensive and thorough lessons loaded with information designed carefully to teach you how to take over your camera. Online quizzes will refresh your memory from every lesson and homework assignments will give you the confidence you need to put your skills to the test. You will also receive a personal 500MB online gallery that will give you more than enough storage to organize, share, send e-cards and even order your selected prints online.

And if that isn’t enought to get you excited, they are so confident about the quality of the course that they offer a full one year money back guarantee. What’s more right now they have 35% off the enrollment fee so there really is no better time to sign up.

Peter Timko, the CEO of Proud Photography, sums it up perfectly when he says “Unlike other online photography courses, we don’t just gloss over the basics, take your money and run. We cover everything, from the most important basic techniques to how to take the best photos in very specific situations.”

Researchers in Germany have developed the first liquid camera lens. The lens has no moving parts and is capable of switching between two levels of magnification and is considered an important step on the development of liquid zoom lenses. It works by bending light using the curved boundary between watery and oily liquids, and focuses by the application of a voltage.

Although this sounds like something out of Star Trek, it is potentially smaller and cheaper to build than conventional optics and could have a major impact on camera technology in the near future. Samsung have already begun using liquid lenses by building them into some cellphones.

“The creation of a liquid zoom lens would remove the need for mechanical parts, which would be a major advantage,” says Peter Schreiber, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute. Changing a zoom lens’s magnification also affects its focus, and causes problems such as pincushion distortion and chromatic aberration. In order to preserve image quality across a range of magnification, zooms require 20 or more lenses. So far nobody has come up with a liquid lens design that can do that. A first step, however, is to design a lens that offers different levels of magnification rather than a continuous range.

Schreiber and colleagues worked with Varioptic, French pioneers of liquid lenses, to come up with a design that switches from a normal view to 2.5-times magnification. The design consists of four liquid lenses and three fixed plastic lenses and offers a magnification of 2.5 times, while when all four lenses are at their flattest there is no magnification.
“The complete length of the system from outer lens to image sensor is 29mm, but it should be possible to reduce that,” says Schreiber. Varioptic is now considering how to take the design on to the prototype stage.
“The lenses are arranged to prevent image distortion while minimising colour distortion. Red, green and blue images must be recorded in sequence and then combined digitally, a process that would increase exposure times,” says Schreiber, “finding less distorting liquids to build the lenses out of is the answer to that problem.”

So although it potentially sounds like great news, this is probably another new technology which won’t find its way into  DSLR cameras for a few years yet. For smaller lenses such as camera phones it could find a market, but we’ll have to see how this one pans out.