Vandyke brown print

A Van Dyke Brown or vdb print is a contact print technique  not unlike the better know Cyanotype. Unlike the  Cyanotype the Van Dyke Brown print produces a brown (actually more Sepia like) print. I always had an interest in old photography techniques but never really dove into to them in detail. When reading and researching about wet plate photography I stumbled upon a video of making a Van Dyke Brown print and decided to take a side step from my wet plate adventure and dive into Van Dyke Brown printing. I really loved the look and the relative simplicity of the processes and figured this would be a nice introduction to alternative photography in general. I’m not regretting it!

It’s really to bad that so little is know about these processes as they can compliment digital works very well. If you think that these techniques are only for the darkroom veterans think again! You can print out perfect digital negatives and start printing with these techniques in no time. Interesting enough these alternative processes have become a lot easier with todays cheap inkjet photo printers. My aim is to get you a nice head start with this post so you don’t have to do all the searching around that I had to do. A small disclaimer here, I’m by no means an expert! I’ve learned this process by reading other peoples articles and a really good book on printing digital negatives, I will link and refer to all of it so you can check it out your self. Let’s get started!

Although I did make prints with 4×5 negatives I will focus this post more towards the digital workflow. I shoot mostly film these days but when making a Van Dyke Brown I have the habit of scanning the negative (16bit) and convert it in photoshop to a perfect Van Dyke Brown negative, more on this later.

Let’s start with what you need and why

• Van Dyke Brown emulsion is only sensitive to UV light. Some people will also refer to Van Dyke Brown to Sun Print. So what you need is an UV light source. The sun of course will work fine I made my first prints this way. Even on a cloudy day you’ll have enough UV light to expose, although your exposure times will increase. Because the sun will output a different amount of UV light depending on the weather and time of day I decided to buy a 15 euro UV face browning unit of e-bay. Even new you can get these units for around 50 euros. They work really well and produces a constant amount of UV light. That’s really the only thing that’s important if you want reproducible results, it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes as long as you make the same mistake every time (not counting forgetting to switch the light on of course).
• You also need something to press your negative against the paper when exposing. The best thing would be a split back contact printing frame. Instead of me using a lot of words to describe what that would look like or what it is just watch this video on youtube, it also provides a nice overview of the complete processes, be sure to return though as there is some more information I can give you to make your VDB life easier, here it is. Impressive isn’t it? As you can see this guy made a beautiful home made split back contact printing frame. He really needs it to as he’s using sunlight to expose. The good news is that you probably already have a contact printing frame and never knew it! A plain picture frame! This is what I use, I just went out and bought one of those really handy a4 sized frames they sell now, be sure to get one with a wooden back and not cardboard. When you get home just grab the thinnest saw you have and saw it in two at about 1/3 of the back, grab some ducktape and duck it back to gather. There you go, a split back contact printing frame. Presure between the print and the negative is important so later on you can always buy some screws and metal plates that you can move around to make a better fit, I’ll do a write up on that as well and show you what I did. But don’t worry to much about it now, just get started. If you can’t wait to start building here’s a really good how-to
• Okay, Moving on! Now for the really easy part. Getting the chemicals needed, if you’re living in the US you’re in luck, you guys got all the cool shops that sell everything for alternative processes. I bought my first set from Bostick & Sullivan. I recommend getting this set as it contains enough chemicals for lots of prints and it includes the fixer, everything you need and you don’t have to mix chemicals your self. It also includes a nice manual which will give you a couple of good tips. In my experience the amount of sensitizer they advise to use is a bit on the high side, however this also depends on the paper you use. In europe we have Moersch for all your photo chemical needs, they also sell the VDB sensitizer, this set only contains the sensitizer so no fixer.
• A brush to paint the sensitizer on the paper. I like to use a nice soft goat hair brush, you can get these at art shops, no problem. You can also use a foam brush, these are something like 1 euro and you can also pick them up at an art shop
• Now that you’re at that art shop anyway also pickup some watercolor paper. This is what you will use to paint the sensitizer on. I sugest starting with a bit thicker paper, Arches hot pressed and Arches cold pressed will work nicely. There is a lot to be said about paper I started out with the cheapest watercolor paper I could find. In my case that was still 100% cotton and it worked fine. Want to know more, check here they keep a list of what papers work well. And here and explanatory video on paper
• Okay, almost there! Last thing on your list should be transparency film for you inkjet printer. This last bit is important it has to be for inkjet printers, it’s really easy to accidentally buy it for a laster printer which will not work and make a big sticky inky mess of everything. The film you see everyone recommending is the transparency film from Pictorico, which you can buy here. However I had some trouble finding that here in the EU so I just went to the office supply store and bought some random stuff, guess what, works just fine. Now when I say, “works just fine” I really mean for my needs, a master printer that goes for perfection will probably have some really good arguments against it, however I’m not looking for perfection I’m looking for acceptable random imperfections. This is what make prints come alive to me.

So after you collected all this you’re basically ready to start with the processes. I realize there is a lot of basic info here and you really haven’t got any instructions yet on how to actually start coating the paper and printing the negative. If you visited the links I provided you at least seen a movie that shows the process from beginning to end so you know where we’re going.

In version 2 of this article I’m going to explain how to print the negative. We will be using a nice Photoshop plugin that is going to create a correction curve for us to make the perfect Van Dyke Brown print, you will be amazed how beautiful and full of detail these prints can be. The closing 3de article we will go into more advanced techniques like toning and when to double coat or single coat and how to deal with delicate papers.

But for now keep an eye out for part 2 of this series coming soon.

Coy

Finally after having it on my todo list for close to 8 years I did a nude shoot with a profesional model. I absolutely love artistic nudes but I found it to be somewhat intimidating to get into my self without having any experience what so ever. Ideally i thought it would be best to learn from an experienced photographer in the field by means of assisting on s couple of shoots. However that opportunity  never arose so at one point I decided to just go for it. I hired an experienced model (which was also a first) and planned a shoot.

Although I was very nervous on the day of the shoot I couldn’t wait to get started. The day before the shoot I decided to go online and collect works in the style and atmosfeer I like. This preparation payed of, on such first shoot you’re going to be nervous and being able to just show a set of 12 images to a model which visually explain the direction you want to go into is a lot easier then having to explain it verbally. I wasn’t planning on copying work (although i think there’s nothing wrong with that for learning purposes) it was merely to set the mood.

As the model got undressed I did a final check on the lighting equipment and made sure everything was in working order and roughly setup for the type of light I wanted. After that I switched the heating up a bit so my model wouldn’t be cold and feel uncomfortable. When she came we started up with a couple of simple standing shots. The first lesson I learned was that shooting a nude model really isn’t that much different from shooting a dressed person. When I’m shooting I’m fully focussed on the result, thinking about light, composition and of course keeping up rapport. Between my preparations and her professionalism we got of to a flying start. I found I could focus much more on the photo as I didn’t have to coach a nervous person intimidated by my camera.

As the marks on the skin left there by undergarment faded so did the remainder of my nervous. Ideas developed further and the images were getting better and better. Every now and then I offered my model to hand her the drink I pored  or if she was warm enough. No matter if I hire a model or working with a client I always try to make sure they are comfortable and treat them with respect, what you give you’ll get back. And it almost goes without saying but I never ever touch a model or client, not even to brush away a stray hair. If I can’t communicate something I lead by example, which obviously has let to hilarious moments. The shoot of that day was no different.

That days shoot turned out to be one of the most fun shoots I ever had. The model I was working with was interested and really joined in. So what did i learn from this experience? Lets sum it up:

• Will I pay for a model again for my own creative outbursts? Definitely! First thing I did is ask when she would be available again.
• Will I plan an artistic nude shoot again? For sure. When shooting cloth people I always prefer that there clothing is as neutral as possible, if not you just run the risk of the clothing stealing the attention from the person/expresion/character. Shooting nudes is wonderful, not only the shape but every edition you make in the form of a prop becomes stronger. But maybe even more important, it inspires and feels right.

Hope you enjoy the image as much as I enjoyed making it.

portrait photography

You have no clue about framing or composition, you just shoot it the way you think it looks best in the frame you see when looking through your camera’s view finder (or at the display of your digital compact). Often you’re surprised by your own work, people compliment it even!

If you have real passion for it you probably want to discover what makes a pleasing image just so you can make more of them. You browse around for tips on composition, pretty soon you find photography forums and galleries where fellow “photographers” burn each other for putting subjects in the middle and many more rule of third based preaching. Photos also get shot-down for having blown-out highlights and no shadow detail. You realize that many of your own pictures you like so much would get burned in almost all of these online forums, all those “expert photographers” would rip them apart.

However your passion for photography is strong, you decide to learn everything about the rule of thirds, complementary colors and all the other rules that should tell you what looks good and what doesn’t. You even switch on the grid in your view finder so you can really nail those thirds.

Months go by, maybe even years, you shoot and post the photos you like to those online forums. You always select them strictly, “Details in the shadows, CHECK! No blown out highlight, CHECK! All that is interesting on the thirds, CHECK! No horizon in the middle, CHECK!”. You’re making real progress, and no one ever writes a bad comment under your photographs! Surely all you need to do is continue like this and it won’t be long before you get recognition for your work and people will start writing positive feedback.

You upgrade your gear and you buy a full frame digital camera with the best (and most expensive) midrange zoom, more vivid colors and sharper images. You buy a Scott Kelby book and pay for a subscription on one of those video websites where real photographer tell you how its done.

On Flickr you sometimes get a nice comment, “nice work, thanks for sharing”, “cool <insert big group banner>”, “Nice colors”. On the critique forms you also sometimes get something that looks like a compliment. You start to doubt if this is really for you, maybe you’re just not good enough, maybe you do not have that special something that makes a great photographer, maybe you should start photographing naked ladies because those guys seem to get all the kudos.

You lie awake thinking about it, turning and turning, much to your cats annoyance. The next morning you poor your self a really big mug of coffee, extra sugar and the works. You place your self behind your laptop and browse around on Flickr with a single thought, “what makes my work different from those other guys”. An hour passes after which you come to a startling conclusion…. Your work isn’t any different from all those guys! Everyone seems to have followed the same class and they’re all top students, details in the shadows, no blown highlights, everything neatly arranged based on the rule of thirds. All the same all…. incredibly….. hopelessly….. B O R I N G G G !!

You nok over your second mug of hot coffee, it spills over the  table and horribly burns your leg. While limping back from the kitchen holding the fabric of your pants like a 19th century ballerina holds her skirt, you review your recent epiphany. You realize that you read published books on the matter. Not long ago you’ve seen an art program on tv explaining by example the golden mean, “The open window, to the milk kan, to the head of the man sitting at the table” all following the golden mean. But now it all seems as far fetched as those Dan Brown books!

After tending your wound you start to look for some more information to gain a bit more perspective. You find out that there’s only a handful of artworks where the golden mean can be applied, and of those only a couple of modern pieces were created with the rule as such in mind. Although invented by the Greeks most artists didn’t even know about it until people again started talking about it around 150 years ago. So this wasn’t the rule the great classic painters were using!

Okay until here my autobiography our story of our fictive photo enthusiast. So what’s going on here? The truth is that when our photo enthusiast was starting out with photography by photographing what, “looked good in the frame he could see through his camera”, was a much better approach. He probably experienced some emotion when looking at the scene and unconsciously that made him decide on the framing. Although there’re exceptions most of the time that’s what photographers do, we find an existing composition and we have to frame it in a way so that it conveys a feeling or message that you want the viewer to experience or read.

There’s no right or wrong place within a frame! If you’re shooting a portrait for a magazine which runs a story of the modern woodworker, it would be perfectly fine to place the woodworker in the middle of his store and frame him in the middle of your picture. He’s the subject, the most important in the frame. You simply do not have a reason to put him anywhere else. If you would frame him left the picture becomes about the woodworkers workshop, for example.

Nothing meaningful can be said about composition if you do not know the intention or story behind the image.

There’re a host of clichés to be found on the web some are even humores, “An image should read from left to right because that’s how we read“, so we have to be able to read first before we can see? What about the people that read from right to left? Are we talking incompatible artwork?

A crude but not inaccurate description of art, “Art is creating an image or object that pleases (the onlooker)”. By that definition our photo enthusiast was well on his way of creating art when he started out.

Imagery can’t be defined by rules, of course there’re guide lines you can keep in the back of your head and which are important to know, but they should always compliment the story not the other way around.

Anyone can go on a forum an criticize your work. You’re the one that decides if a comment is useful, don’t be persuaded into a different style of photographing just because you get a lot of comments saying you’re breaking rules or you’re wrong. Just stick with it. Experiment make images you hate, fail at projects, consider selling all your gear, be desperate and then pick-up your camera again. There will come a day where you realize by looking at a photograph you made that you have found your style. A solid foundation to work on and expand.

Now go out there and switch of that silly grid in your view finder and forget about megapixels, sharp lenses, rules of third and forum bullies, if you have a reason to shoot the frame you chose you’re half way shooting a picture you’re happy with.

You can hire me or browse my portfolio

Guide Number

Let’s start with the most complicated. The Guide Number of your flash unit or build in camera flash denotes it’s power at a given ISO. Lets take a build-in camera flash as an example. Comen D-SLR camera flashes on average have a Guide Number of 12 @iso100. Grab you manual or start Googling to find your Guide Number. <10 minutes pass> “Hey!! I have a D-SLR with a Guide Number of 39!!! I’m soooooooo cool”, ah yes undoubtedly you’re a stud however you have to continue reading the next sentence. Guide Numbers come in two flavors, the lower number is for people that like to use meters to calculate distance and the high number is for people that like to use their feet. Just like the distance scale on your lens…. Which brings me to.

Distance

Because light likes to fall-off or loose power as it travels we need to take the distance between camera and subject into account. A guide could be the distance scale on your lens when you focussed on the subject, but that’s not always the best way to go. My preferred method is guessing! You’d be surprised  what you know you can do when you realize you can do it….. So with your distance guestimated and your guide number looked up, let go to.

The Division

We’re ready to calculate our flash exposure! What we need is the f-stop. Shutter speed is only for continues lighting like the sun etc. Flash is to short te leave any lasting impression so we calculate the amount of light hitting the film or sensor surface. We do that by a simple devision, lets take the Guide Number 12 as an example and speculate that we’re 5 meters from our subject:

GN12 / 5 Meters = F2.4

For feet:

GN36 / 16 Feet = F2.2

Not to difficult I would say, setting your camera on F2.8 should be fine.

A Bit More

“What if i like to use a portable flash like my sb-800 and bounce it of the ceiling?” No problem just add that distance. So if the ceiling is 1.5 meters from you flash-head and the subject a similar amount from the ceiling you end op with a distance of 3 meters.

“If shutter speed doesn’t matter why is my camera manual talking about flash sync speed?” Okay there’s that issue. The flash sync speed of your camera is the maximum shutter speed with which your camera can keep the shutter in sync with the flash. Just don’t set you shutter any faster then that (often around 200/s) or you will start to see exposure differences between the top of your photo and the bottom. The dark part is the shutter going down in the middle of your flash pop. You can play a little with your shutter for creative effect, the longer you leave the shutter open the more available light wil come in, this way you can combine your flash exposure with available light. Just play you’ll see what I mean.

“My Guide Number is calculated at ISO 100 but I want to shoot at ISO 800, now what?” That’s going to add another calculation on your Guide Number. From ISO 100 to ISO 800 is in total 3 stops more light sensitivity. This means that your flash unit becomes 3 times more effective. So the only thing you need to do is multiply you Guide Number by the amount of stops your increase your ISO. In this case GN12 x 3 stops = GN36. Be careful with this though as there’s also a minimem to the light a flash unit can put out.

“I really want to use my flash manually but I can’t calculate fast enough, now what?” If you use a digital camera the answer is simple, set your camera to manual and play with the power devision scale (1/1, 1/2, 1/4 power) on the flash. Shoot and review. Pretty soon you’ll develop a sense for it and you’ll get it right on the first or second try. If you’re like me and love to shoot film the previous is not an option. When shooting black and white film you can really do a rough calculation just pick easy round number. I know the world parties about the ability to shoot raw and fiddle with the exposure in a raw editor, but I made 5 stop exposure errors on Kodak Tri-x 400 film and got away with it.

“Do you know of an iPhone or Android app that can calculate for me?” No I don’t. You can search for it but most of camera flash units come with one build in, you probably just never knew it was there. I sometimes use my Nikon SB-800 with my Rolleicord or one of my Range Finders. I switch the flash unit to manual and set the film ISO in the advanced menu. When regulate the power level there’s a small distance scale in the top right corner which show distance in, you guessed it, meters and feet. How is that for easy! Just guess the distance and set it, done.

Closing words

It’s actually a pretty long explanation for a very simple calculation. And if you look at the text without reading it you might think it a wast of time as your modern camera can TTL it all for you. But even if you do use your camera on full auto it’s still valuable to know why it behaves like it does, and how to make it do a bit more what you want even in auto mode. I hear often people complaining about their entry level D-SLR, saying it takes bad quality photographs and that they want to replace it, even asking me which one they should buy instead. The fact is the quality of D-SLRs these days it wonderful even if you get a really cheap one. But if you let the camera decide everything you get what it meters for, an average picture.

This also goes for TTL flash exposure. You’re walking around on a average sunny day and see a pretty flower you want to take a picture of. Being already one step-up the cool lader you shoot in A mode to get that nice depth of field. You realize you have some light coming in from the background, “fill flash!”, you think and you’d be right. You pop-up the flash and let the TTL do its magic. You see some blinking in the view finder but you don’t know what it means so you quickly fully press the shutter. The result is a white background with a washed out flower in the foreground. A feeling of disappointment and failure fils your being. You try to take the shot again, maybe the camera made a mistake, same result. In complete desperation you decide to gamble on taking the shot without the fill flash, quickly deciding that flashes are ugly anyway. The result is horrible, still parts of the background are blown-out and the flower now looks under exposed and lost all its vibrance. Being beaten by your camera you decide to take the photo home and “correct” it in your wonderful raw editor. You pump up the “fill light” and play with the magic “recovery” slider to save some of the highlights, then you increase the blacks to get some contrast. Because you picked-up that book from Scott Kelby you decide to start up Photoshop and play with adjustment layers. Finally giving up  you’re left with a feeling of disappointment, you blame your self for buying the wrong camera. You decide to go read your mail, maybe someone faved a photograph you uploaded on Flickr yesterday….

What went wrong here?! The first step was the correct one, fill flash would have done the trick. But the cameras default setting to sync at 1/60th of a second when doing flash exposures was not right for this particular case! By blinking the exposure calculation in the view finder the cameras light meter even tried to warn you that it would horribly over expose the available light at 1/60th. But this wasn’t a high-noon scene and at 1/250th of a second the background would have been perfect. Sadly you had no idea, flash was still scary magic. You could have changed the default sync speed in the advanced menu, probably not the best idea. Or you could have switched your camera to manual and decide about the shutter speed your self. You would have done that because you know what makes a flash exposure and a ambient exposure and how those two relate to each other.

Hire me or browse my portfolio

However it has been an absolute pain to get any of the search engines to index my new website under the new domain www.deportretfotograaf.com. So that forced me to read up on SEO, get the titles right, descriptions and even registered at the Open Directory Project (I know Google uses that some times to get descriptions etc).

I also setup Google Webmaster Tools and created a sitemap file which i submitted. Where ever I could I changed my portfolio url to www.deportretfotograaf.com, although most of those sites add a “nofollow” to the link tag.

I monitor the progress using a combination of Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and the Chrome SEO plugin. That last one is basically a plugin that does a “site:www.xxx.com” query for the site you have open in the active tab, saves a lot of typing.

I put the site through a couple of SEO analysers and they all seem  happy with title relevance, length of titles and descriptions, also the keyword analyser shows the right relavant keywords for my site. It’s been a month ago when i submitted I have seen bots crawling my site but not indexing any urls.

Hmmmmm what am I missing?!

http://www.feelingnegative.com/darkroom/an-overview-of-film-developing-chemicals

I would still like to add another developer to their Rodinal advise, Kodak HC-110. Like Rodinal it’s a very efficient developer with a very long shelf life when kept in its concentrated sirup form.

The standard dilution for HC-110 is dilution B which is 1+31. 1 part developer on 32 parts of water, which we can easy calculate. Lets say you have a Paterson Universal tank and you want to develop you 35mm film. I use 300ml for doing that (the Paterson Univeral tank says 290ml on the bottom but its a pain to calculate with that number). So all we need to do is dived 300ml in to 32 parts (literally 31+1) which is 9,3ml. Which leads me to my next suggestion, buy a syringe!

To close a link to even more details on HC-110

http://www.mironchuk.com/hc-110.html

The last couple of months I’ve complete emerged my self into film photography. After wanting to do it for years but always dismissing it as being to cumbersome. What I actually ment was too daunting. Deep inside I knew I had to do it as it is an important step in the learning processes.

No wonder I waited so long with giving it a try, I made it sound like a school assignment! Not one of those fun ones but one of those really boring icky ones!

If you’re making excuses or telling your self that film is dead. Or the always funny, “I can do that with Photoshop”. With Photoshop you can emulate film, not replicate. Let it be said once again; there is a BIG difference between noise and film grain. But lets not get into that discussion. Digital is great and so is film . Anyway stop making excuses you’ re depriving your self of a whole lot of fun and creative growth.

I’m actually writing this post to tell you that film is fun! The process of development is great! The smells and the experiments! Even if you completely fumble up the process you can still get creative results, how ever unexpected they may be. Also, it’s really not that hard. And no you really don’t need a special room completely blacked out. I really needed to put that last sentence in to bold as loads of people think this and a lot of articles written out there make it sound like it’s the only way (including the one I’m linking to below). A simple changing bag and you don’t need the blacked out room. Note that I refer to it as a “blacked out room” as a darkroom is where you develop your prints and has the red safety light. Although that room has to be really dark as wel it’s not as sensitive as photographic paper is not as light sensitive as film. Anyway we’re only talking about film here.

So this morning as I was going trough the latests post on feelingnegative they linked to an excellent film development tuturial on PhotoTuts+. The tutorial talks about Kodak TMax film but the process is pretty much the same for any black and white film. I have a couple of short notes/tips on the tutorial, but go read it first.

1. You don’t need a completely blacked out room, get your self a Changing Bag. Paterson makes these and it’s the one I use.
2. Buy a Paterson Universal development tank and buy a new one. Second hand tanks can leak or can be incomplete without you knowing until you have developer all over your hands and ruined negatives.
3. Start out with plastique reels they’re easier for beginners. The Paterson Universal is a plastique reel system and can handle 135 and 120 film without a problem.
4. The Massive Dev Chart is your friend! It’s a database with film and developer combination and tells you the times and temperature need to develop (and a lot more)
5. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch install the Massive Dev Chart app! Aside from telling you how to develop your film with a specific developer it also provides you with a timmer that guides you through the process of developing, stop and fix. It even tells you when to agitate. It’s a breeze with this little helper. They also provide the app for other mobile platforms but the iPhone version is by far the best.
6. Your stop chemicals can be replaced with water with a little vinegar!
7. You can skip the HypoClear I never user it. But wash properly!
8. Never buy photo flow, it’s really bad for the environment!! You can replace it by using a little dish washer fluid. Also just using a squeegee also solves the issue. There you go saved you 3 bottles of chemicals with the last 3 points.
9. To close some general info on shooting black and white film. The wonderful thing about most black and white film is that it’s really hard to screw up! Black and white film has a very high dynamic range. Just meeter light in the shadows and you’ll be fine.

This is pretty much it! At first glance it might look like a lot but it’s really not such an unforgiving process as it migh seem. I’ve made loads of mistakes including developing in an incomplete, liquid and light leaking tank and guess what, I still got good exposures out of it. I even once forgot the stop bath all together and still the negatives were fine.

Don’t be afraid of screw-ups! And just have fun! And I can guarantee that you end up making better photographs also when using your digital camera. I would love to hear about questions, suggestions and experience in the comments below.

The thing I never really liked is the fact that disabling the flash disrupts my workflow. I prefer much more to just press and hold a button and take the shot and release the button to take me back to flash, AE-L hold style. It so happens that you can! Yesterday I was browsing the menu of my D300 (I’m sure you can at least do this with a D90 D200 and D700 as well) and found that you can reprogram the (for me useless) aperture preview button to do it for you. This has made me so happy I felt the need to share it and make those users that are as anal as I am just as happy. So here’s how to do it:

Press MENU –> Go to the Custom Settings Menu (the small pencil) –> Choose “f Controls” –> Choose “f5 Assign Preview Button” –> Go to the “Preview Button Press” option –> Select Flash off  –> And, very important, press the OK button.

And that’s it! Try it out, you don’t even have to take your camera of you face to do a quick ambient exposure!

In general there are two different categories of blogs/sites which I visit, the ones where I go for learning and the ones where I go just to look and get inspired. I’ll start of with the inspiration section.

I think looking at art is a key part of enhancing your artistic eye. Browsing those sites often takes me longer then reading through a couple of blog posts. Bookmarking a photo to comeback to it later is one of the tactics I use to dissect composition and lights being used (Read-It later is great for this). I have a big weak spot for portrait photography so the combination of those two elements are what I usually focus on. Now I  can hear you thinking that those two elements are important in every form of photography. That’s true of course, but to take nature photography as an example, you wouldn’t be talking about lights used but rather the light that was available (and how that was utilized). Of course there’s still a whole bag of corner cases. Anyway on to the list! Here they are in no particular order:

• ReduxPictures, on location photojournalist style photography
• ONEXPOSURE, really good source of inspiration only your best pictures are allowed here. And yes, they have judges.
• ArtPhotoBlog, a blog of photos from different photographers all over the world. I really enjoy this website and can’t wait for new editions to it. The work is great but updates infrequent, so be patient and enjoy.
• Flickr last 7 days, probably no big surprise here. This is one I visit every now and then.
• The Big Picture, picture stream from The Boston Globe

Is that it!? Yeah pretty much! The truth is that OneXposure and the ArtPhotoBlog pretty much fulfill my needs. OneExposure offers great work and updates are really frequent, this morning I had 17 new photos. The last time I looked was last evening. ArtPhotoBlog I often visit even though  there are no new editions.

Okay, so now for my blog list, comments will follow after:

• Strobist, great place to learn from a speedlight carrying guru. Treasures of knowledge can be dug op here.
• Squeeze The Lime, learn from these to Belgium photographers through podcasts and screencast.
• Kelby Training, a site filled with hundreds of screencast about photography, photoshop, lightroom and much more. It’s payed subscription but well worth the money, go check it out every class has a couple of free videos.
• Photocritic, nice read with good resources.
• Lightroom Killer Tips, I’m a lightroom user and this site has loads of good tips and resource. The author of the site, Matt Kloskowski, also has screencasts on Kelby Training.
• Joe McNally, ever  wonder what a forest of speedlights looks like? Want to learn the left handed mind like water camera body grip? McNally also has video’s on Kelby Training but actually has a reputation far exceeding that of the Kelby website. This guy has done a lot and understands light.
• 1001 Noisy Cameras, the tech and gadget side of photography. Go here to find rumors, big stories and links to reviews. I much prefer using this website above DPreview only. This website also links to DPreview reviews and previews but also to loads of other.

I’m sure I’m still missing a couple of blogs but I think this list consist of the ones I most actively read. I want to mention the Strobist blog and the guys from Squeeze The Lime extra as I think they are really doing a wonderful job in sharing their knowledge. I’ve learned a lot on these websites which would have taken months even years of searching and trying to find that stuff out for my self. Be sure to visit those and go through their archives. If you’re interested in of camera strobes and in general learning to see the light I would recommend diving into the Lighting 101 course on the strobist site and go from there.

Okay last but not least if want to share 4 book titles (you know hard-copy). I actually have loads of books on photography, but I wanted to mention these three as they are great to get your self started on composition and feeling good about the work you produce. Art is in the eye of the maker.

• Photographic Composition, by Tom Grill & Mark Scanlon
• Learning To See Creatively, by Bryan Peterson
• Art & Fear, by David Bayles & Ted Orland
• Light, Science & Magic, by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver and Paul Fuqua

I’ve learned a lot from these books when I started out (I’m still starting out, been starting out for the past 8 years). I would suggest you read Photographic Composition first, it provides very good basics and a bit more theory then Learning To See Creatively, this way you can read Learning To See Creatively book after Photographic Composition and you can skip some of the theory and focus a bit more on the photographs and their comments.

Art & Fear discusses the questions artist often have about there own work. By addressing those it attempts to explain some of those questions, but also to provide you with a clearer view and a better feeling in creating your own work.

Okay that’s it for my list! I hope you found it interesting and discovered a couple of new sources of inspiration and information.

It would be great to see a couple of comments with your favorite reads and tips!

One small note to people living outside of the US when ordering at Adorama. When I tried to pay for my Sunbounce Payall wouldn’t okay the payment (I always use Paypall if I can as I don’t want to type in my credit card info on websites). I made an exception this time and decided to enter my creditcard information anyway. A couple of things happened, first of all my Bank contacted me the next day to verify, in there eyes suspicious transaction from a company called Adorama, if I could verify that I ordered something there for the given amount, I could so everything was fine. The second thing that happened is that I had to pay a whole load of money to UPS, on top of the delivery costs I already payed Adorama. Puzzled as to what might have happened I set out to research if I payed double or if something else went wrong. I finally find out that you’re warned by Adorama that there might be extra costs involved when it comes to importing, how ever the bad thing here is that they only warn you after your transaction is complete and you payed them. See the comment entry from Adorama below. Great that they reply in this way.

Anyway on to the important stuff, the Sunbounce Micro. In short? Well you have reflectors, and there is the Sunbounce, no they’re not paying me to write this, but the Sunbounce is worth every penny. It’s light as a feather and really strong. It’s also much easier to work with then the foldables, it’s really a breeze to get them in position.

At first I was a bit worried if you would actually ever take it apart, I got this really nice bag with it so that I can always take it even if I’m not sure if I’ll use it. The thing is it really took some effort to assemble. It came to a point that I started doubting if what I was doing was actually correct, I was afraid that I would rip the fabric. I decided to sit back for a moment and double check what the Sunbounce looks like assembled on the Sunbounce website. I discovered that it takes some force to get together and that the fabric might look thin but it’s in fact very strong. So if you get one of these don’t be afraid to apply some force.

And although it was hard to assemble, it’s actually reasonable easy to get it in the bag and out ready for use. You just pull out the aluminum tube at the back, roll it up and slide it in the bag. When you need it it’s really not that hard to get the tube back in position.

The Sunbounce might set you back a couple of bucks but considering its build quality I consider it well worth the money. The only disappointment for me is the big price tag on the flash attachment. Considering the amount of money it costed me to get the Sunbounce shipped, it will not be likely that I will pay for the expensive flash attachment and again layout down the fat cash to get it over.