In Photos dot Org

The Photocritic wants your glamour and nude photos

The Photo Critic is looking for nude and glamour shots to critique next week.

Would you be interested in having your risque photos reviewed / critiqued? I can’t offer payment, but if I use one of more of your photos, I’ll add a link to your blog, web site or Flickr stream, like I did for the previous photo critiques I did…

He’s quite serious, here’s a previous critique and he has written an introduction to nude photography. I wouldn’t know where to start if asked to to critique a nude. Shooting portraits is hard enough but nude is much harder by all accounts; clothes hide blemishes, spots and other imperfections. The lighting is very important as a shadow in the wrong place can ruin the image. The introduction above goes some way to explaining the problems associated with the format so you can expect some good advice if you submit photos.

The broom at 187

The broom at 187

Walking through the urban environment the seemingly normal assortment of rubbish or objects can make an image that bit more interesting. This was taken in August, but guess who forgot to bring in the Christmas lights?

Oh yes, a small tip if you’re adding noise to an image. You’ll need to do it twice. Once for your full size image, and a second time when you resize. After resizing noise, it gets blurred and is nowhere near as effective.

PS. I really like An Incidental Shot – the photographer who’s quick off the mark will get the shot!

PPS. Micki has finished blogging on Shutterbug Underexposed and she’ll be missed. Many blogs have fallen by the wayside over the past 2 years, but it takes time and it’s not always easy to find that time.

Aperture	ƒ/6.3
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	1/100s

The red and white man

The red and white man

A street entertainer on stilts entertained the crowd at the Midleton Food and Drink Festival last September. I took photos of him in Cork too and I think he recognised me and my wife as he made a beeline for us and stopped to chat.

This was shot from below as he was towering over us, but I cropped a much larger shot. I used flash to illuminate his face against the bright sky.

Aperture	ƒ/9
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	18mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/250s

San Francisco DPT on the job

San Francisco DPT on the job

The San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) have painted the kerb of the sidewalk in the city to designate different parking areas in the city.

Wandering around the city I was struck by the startling paint job on the ground, especially the “warning” colours used. It didn’t stop people double parking though, but I didn’t spot any traffic cops around either!

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/125s

Caution Children

Caution Children

A sign at the entrance to my estate warns motorists to watch out for children playing on the street.

Just to prove that you don’t need a big digital SLR to take interesting photos, this was taken with my Panasonic FZ5. I saw the great cloudscape in the sky and illuminated the sign with the onboard flash.

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	DMC-FZ5
Focal length	6mm
ISO	80
Shutter speed	1/1600s

Alcatraz Staircase

Alcatraz Staircase

A lonely staircase on Alcatraz is off-limtis to tourists but not to the eye of my camera.

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	1/125s

Sailing In San Francisco

Sailing In San Francisco

A yacht sails past the waterfront in San Francisco Bay. There was plenty of activity on the waters with ferries, yachts, kite surfers and even helicopters fly overhead.

Aperture	ƒ/9
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	200mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	1/400s

We’ve got your picture, now what’s your name?

RTE Radio 1’s Flux ran a programme on the treatment of a community following the death of a woman and her two sons in Firhouse, Co Dublin. last year.

Local community members were interviewed almost a year later by Flux to find out how journalists and photographers treated them. Some of the stories are shocking, others have been discounted as pure fantasy, and the newspapers are defended by a member of staff from the Irish Daily Mail.

I’m writing this from memory because the sound on my desktop box is broken and the sound on my Macbook is just too low for comfort. I used mplayer to record the stream using the following command, mplayer rtsp://streaming2.rte.ie/2007/0129/29012007rte-flux.rm -novideo -ao pcm. That dumps the realaudio stream to a file called audiodump.wav. I wish mencoder worked on audio streams…

It’s well worth a listen though.

Corrugated Prison Roof

Corrugated Prison Roof

Visitors to Alcatraz Island walk about on the broad path up to the main prison building.

Some of the buildings on the island are in a bad state of repair, lacking everything but the brick walls that stand like a whitewashed skeletons. This building is about halfway up the hill and in much better condition.

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	1/125s

Alcatraz Tower and Prison

Alcatraz Tower and Prison

The prison tower and buildings of Alcatraz provide a stark welcome for visitors to the former penitentiary.

Despite my close investigation, the tower in this picture was off limits. Pity, because I bet there’d be a great view from up there!

Aperture	ƒ/11
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/320s

This old skool Flickr user doesn’t care

From: FlickrHQ
Subject: Update for Old Skool members

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

It seems that everyone is up in arms about recent changes at Flickr:

Flickr and Yahoo! accounts must be merged into a Yahoo! login. If you have multiple Flickr account then you’re logging in and out of Flickr all the time, now do it with Yahoo! Surely you do most of your Flickr work in one account anyway, so why not make that the one your main Yahoo! account?
Tags and Contacts are going to be limited. I see that this would affect a tiny minority of the userbase on Flickr, unfortunately for Flickr it’s likely to be the most active (and vocal?) membership. I also feel for Thomas with his Where I’ve Been Lately image because a lot of those tags will be removed but does anyone else have more than 75 legitimate tags on a photo? I’m sure I only have 15 at most on mine. Limiting contacts will hurt the most prolific users of the site such as Thomas Hawk, but others are probably just spamming the system.

Yes, the changes to tags and contacts will hurt a tiny minority but for almost everyone on the site it won’t make any difference. Yes, the change to using Yahoo! IDs will mean Yahoo knows about your photos, but if they know about your email and stock portfolio already what are you worried about? They’ve got more than enough demograpic data to go on to market to you!

Unfortunately I can’t recommend Zooomr either because their service is so slow – images take an age to download, and when they do download, they aren’t cached by the browser. It’s really frustrating using Zooomr.com when it’s so slow as it has so much potential and the people behind it are so smart and full of ideas! Fix the slow connection, caching and add a “blog by email” feature and I’d be over to Zooomr faster than you can say “Flickr sucks!”

There are plenty of pissed off Flickr users, but I’m not one of them. Have a nice day!

Update: Treasa is as upset as I am! Oh Lordy!

Update 2: Richard isnt worried either. Definitely a storm in a teacup.

Cobh at sunset

Cobh at sunset

The tide is out in Cobh, Co. Cork while the sun sets in the west casting an orange glow over the water and boats in the harbour.

Method
This required some work to expose properly. The sky is bright while the harbour, houses and landscape are in shadow. Out with the layers, top layer for the sky was darkened and the opposite was done for the ground.
Then it’s the simple task of adding a layer mask to the top layer and rubbing out the dark bits to expose the brightened landscape.
When using a layer mask, never paint with an opacity of 100%, try 30% or even 5%. Don’t be afraid to do a rough job of exposing the bottom layer because with a layer mask you can always reverse the procedure by swapping the colour of your brush with an opposite colour!

Thank you all for the comments on yesterday’s post, The Lonely Swan, it’s great to get feedback and I’m glad when people get something out of my methods when I describe them. See what you’ve done? I did it again!

Aperture	ƒ/4
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/20s