johnrochaphoto.net

Archive for August, 2008

Dandelion Clock

Some time ago I promised to come back to what you might call the non photographic aspects of photography – particularly Stock Photography.

Perhaps looking at some of the wider issue such as a workflow involving computers and computer programmes, storage and websites, Stock Agencies and so on.

As this is a photo site I decided when writing this sort of post that a good idea might be to start with a picture of a successful Stock Photo and then go on to the post theme.

This post starts with a photo of a Dandelion Clock.

I’ve taken hundreds of dandelion photos over the years but this one shows the influence of digital imaging techniques.

It’s a studio shot taken using electronic flash against a black velvet background.

I used my sensor cleaning blower to puff a little and loosen a couple of spores as I took the picture.

Later I made several layers and created a pattern based on repeating the individual spores.

No point in pretending that this is a straight shot – nevertheless the final image matched very closely the image in my mind’s eye.

And so to the “business” side of Stock Photography.

This was originally inspired by a comment from a reader called Mary – I responded to her personally but it seems to me that her query opens up a number of interesting avenues that I have had to encounter over the years.

My husband is interested in starting his own website for his photos. Because there are so many sites available, how did you choose yours? Did you find others just as good or are you satisfied with this one?

One of the main problems is the ever changing nature of photographic practice in a digital age.

I think it’s fair to say that this comment is pretty vague – the expression “sites available” is a bit confusing, perhaps it’s webhosts.

Anyway, I thought it was worth looking into a bit more.

First of all, I think it’s certainly helpful for a photographer to have web presence but exactly what sort needs a bit of thinking about.

If you want to have a presence of your own, you’re going to need to host it somewhere.

So, next time let’s have a look at some hosting options

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Oops! I thought I’d arranged for this post to go out in the middle of my holiday! It didn’t. Still, don’t worry, Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

In my last post I emphasized how important it is that people in a stock photograph should be either:

Not be recognizable
or
Have signed a model release.

The reason, as I said, is that photographs with recognizable people in them cannot be used for commercial purposes such as advertising.

In my photo “a stroll through the park” we removed the two men strolling by using a rub out and replace technique.

Now we are still left with the man sitting on the bench, It’s clear from the blow up that he is recognizable.

We have a number of options:

We can crop the picture to exclude the recognizable figure – this will not work in every case and will always alter the composition and reduce the picture area.

We can use copy and clone techniques to eliminate the figure altogether – this needs some skill and will, of course, alter the composition and content of the picture.

We can replace the recognizable figure with information which will be acceptable from the legal/commercial point of view.

The key to this approach is to have a collection of faces and figures which can be used legally.

One source is pictures of friends, family and other model released pictures – we can shoot a whole variety of these especially for this purpose.

Another source is royalty free pictures with the appropriate rights. These are widely available and need not be large or high resolution.

For this image I have used a royalty free image obtained from the disc provided with Steve Caplin’s must read book “How to Cheat at Photoshop”.

The final, corrected image, depends on two procedures:

First – replace the original head with an appropriate model released/licenced head.

Next – as a finishing touch, select appropriate items of clothing and change important features such as shape or colour. Here I have selected the blue clothes and changed them to green.

The final image is no longer recognizable as the original figure, but the basic information and composition of the picture is preserved.

This is a post in haste as I’m off for a family holiday. See you when I’m back.

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