Schonhose

Recently I have moved from shooting landscapes to shooting people. Don’t worry, instead of a gun I use a camera to do all my shooting. One thing I find fascinating working with people is how to make them look their best. We all have some unflattering photographs which we rather want to hide in the back of the closet. Not only does that prevent other people actually seeing them, it appears they also scare the rodents away.

If you scrounge the internet you will find various resources detailing with tips and tricks on how to look thin in photographs. It is no secret, the camera usually adds about 10 pounds (around 5kg) mostly due to unflattering lighting. In a studio shoot you can control the lighting but outdoors this is somewhat of a challenge (although not impossible).

However, as a model you can do some things as well. Here are 5 secrets you can use to loose the 10 pounds the camera adds (courtesy of Julyne Derrick of About.com):

1. Turn partially sideways to the camera, planting one foot in front of the other. Point your toe to the camera and place your weight on your back foot.
2. Pull head forward slightly to minimize any appearance of a double chin.
3. Hold arms slightly away from your body. This keeps upper arm flab from flattening out and therefore appearing flabbier (much like thighs do when one sits on a couch).
4. Pull shoulders back, chest forward and gently suck stomach in. Be careful not to suck stomach so far in that your ribs show, thereby causing those who later see the photo to cluck to themselves in a bemused, sing-song voice, “She’s sucking i-in.”
5. If you can get away with it without looking like a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover Girl wannabe, try the look away trick. To do this, look away from the camera, then turn towards it, breaking into a smile just before the camera clicks. Your smile will appear fresh, not frozen. This trick takes practice behind closed, locked doors.

Recently I have been in a photoshooting slump, I haven’t made any shots for a few months. This is mostly because I have been real busy but last week I really picked up the slack.

Over the course of a week I shot around 950 pictures, including some kickboxing games, landscapes and other things that interest me. It seems to me I’m back on track again.

Just the other day I had a lively discussion with a friend of mine about photography. One of the points we discussed is the RAW vs JPEG issue, which is haunting so many people out there. Well, here is my take on the whole RAW vs JPEG issue.

I shoot RAW, it is an essential part of my preprocessing. At the early stages I shot primarily JPEG, but I found I was limited in my preprocessing using Adobe Photoshop. With the arrival of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom working with RAW files became so much easier and allows me to really push it to the limit in terms of preprocessing. Learn more about RAW @ Wikipedia.

Let me make it clear, I’m not against JPEG. If you’re the type of guy/girl that only wants to make nice pictures and do not care about preprocessing then JPEG is definitely the way to go. However, in my humble opinion (and I’m sure people will hate me for saying this): don’t use a fancy DSLR just to shoot JPEGs. It will be like using a Ferrari to do grocery shopping at the store just around the corner. Sure, it works (depending on the amount of groceries, there isn’t much space left in a Ferrari) but you’re not using the car to its full potential.

One of the major arguments of my friend to not use RAW is the space it occupies. This a non-argument, prices of both storage cards and hard drives are really low. Space is not an issue anymore. Another argument he had is more or less valid. Processing RAW, especially when you have a lot, it time consuming and the effects are not always eminent.

My feeling and experience is that shooting RAW puts lots more control at your fingertips than using JPEG. Instead of letting the camera decide what is good, you can make you’re own decisions. Perhaps you don’t know this, but if you use JPEG your camera makes some predefined decisions about boosting colors and other preprocessing steps and save the image in a lossy compression file format. Besides loosing perhaps valuable information you need if you do want to edit your image, you have to live with what the camera thinks is right. And to be honest, on average the camera will get it right. But there are some situations the law of averages does not work out well.

But to each his own, I’ll just continue shooting RAW and by doing so, spend a considerably amount of time doing preprocessing. It is, after all, my choice.

Even the photobook has been put on hold for a few weeks, but I created a mockup of a page example. The mockup can be seen below. I (not being a photoshop wizard) am very pleased how it has turned out.

(click for a larger version)

Hmmm, that makes two posts for today. Somehow this feels strange.

John Godley over at UrbanGiraffe.com has released the updated DrainHole plugin, which is compatible with Wordpress 2.7. This means the downloads are up again! Happy leeching everyone!

At the end of November I blogged about my idea of taking 40 of the highest rated images and turning it into a book. In the post I have described a method for selecting the highest rated images but there were some flaws in my reasoning.

So I took another approach, which is much easier. Let’s assume everyone who has visited my photoblog has voted, but (and this is it) people who didn’t vote actually voted zero stars. In other words, they didn’t found the picture worth at least 1 star. When we assume this, the selection of the images becomes easier because now we only have to select the pictures with the highest total. But to narrow the selection a bit down I have included another rule: an image must have at least 5 votes to participate. Perhaps you’re wondering why I enforce this rule? The reason is quite simple. This way I know at least 5 people found the image good enough to give a rating between 1 – 5 stars.

Furthermore, whenever there is a situation in which two or more images have the same total rating the image with the least votes will be given the highest ranking.

For those of you wondering what the SQL looks like (you do need to have the AjaxRatings addon installed and I assume the prefix of the tables is “pixelpost_“) I have it included below. As can be seen I also let the statement I used earlier (weighted ratings) in the SQL for comparison:

SELECT
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value`,
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`headline`,
`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`body`, `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`image`,
((`total_rate`/5)*`total_votes`) as weighedRating
FROM `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`
WHERE `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`id` = `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`
ORDER BY `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value` DESC, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes` ASC
LIMIT 0,41


So, how does this look compared to my earlier approach? Well, the top 30 of my images stayed the same, some images shifted a bit but there were no real surprises. At the bottom of the list there were some small changes which has surprised me a bit. For instance: on number 37 (at the time of this post) was the Mosaic image I created containing the 200 images I had on my blog at that time. I’m not sure if I have a high resolution of the image lying around somewhere. In case I don’t I have chosen to omit this file.

Anyway, have a peek at the current output of the script.