Congratulations to Florian for becoming the August 2012 winner in the DSLR Training competition. This makes him one of the twelve finalists in line to win the NEW Canon 5D MkIII and EF 24 – 105 f4L IS USM lens kit. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed that Florian takes honours and wins this fantastic prize.
GIMP Is Now Available as a Native App for Mac OS X
OS X: GIMP is a fantastic free alternative to Photoshop for all desktop operating systems, but on Mac it was a bit of a pain to set it up, because you needed to install X11. Gimp now, however, comes with a standard DMG installer.
Is Film Truly Superior to Digital?
Rachael Towne writes
Since the dawn of widely available commercial cameras in 1999, long heated discussion has arisen over whether or not digital image quality is equal to what is produced by film. So, is film truly superior to film? The answer is yes… and no.
Image credit: Film by lisbokt, on Flickr
ImageMagick: a simple, scriptable tool to convert, edit and compose Images
There lots of software for customizing image files, but most of them are not simple and user-friendly. So if you’re looking for a simple and free customizing tool for images, check this one out. ImageMagick is a tool that can convert, edit, and even help you create image files, and supports tons of image formats including jpeg, gif, png, tiff, and many more.
I have been using ImageMagick for a number of years for various tasks, both by running the tools directly from the command line, and via scripts that I use to automate image processing tasks. I have been considering writing a script that you can use to automate resizing your images for submission to the club. Please comment and let me know if you would find this useful.
Wiki Loves Monuments launch event in Cape Town this Saturday
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) is a public competition where you can photograph the monuments that symbolise our cultural heritage (buildings, statues, shipwrecks, etc.) and share the photos with the world by uploading them to Wikimedia Commons: a database of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute and which anyone can use. In 2012, the very first South African WLM competition will take place, organised by Wikimedia ZA.
Wedding Crashers
A recent club outing to the Wijnland Auto Museum coincided with a wedding shoot and several of our members managed to find their way into the wedding photographer’s shot.
Faststone Image Viewer
Those of you that attended the Black & White meeting last night will have seen this application in action.
Faststone Image Viewer is a free Windows application that is not only a viewer but provides fairly extensive editing features too. It’s perfect for playing around and experimenting with different processing ideas. While the old favourite IrfanView provides similar functionality its user interface has a dated feel. Faststone Image Viewer on the other hand has a modern user interface with innovative features like hot edges in the full screen view. Moving the mouse pointer to the screen edges triggers pop up interface panels that let you interact with the application when you need to but otherwise stay out of the way, leaving the entire screen for viewing your images.
Go ahead and download the application and start discovering all its great features.
2012 July Competition Winners: Projected Images
Here are the projected image winners from the July competition for which the set subject was On Golden Pond.
Set Subject
- Underwater Mirage
Kevin Broadley - Tree Pool
Roger Lee - My Own Golden Pond
JJ van Heerden
Open
- Art Connoisseur
Giorgio Guasco - A Day’s Work
Noleen Kutash - Tapestry
Paddy Howes
The full list of projected image scores can be found in this PDF document.
Monochrome Through Color
The Seven by Five blog article titled Monochrome Through Color begins;
Color… most of us see this everyday and everywhere we look. It’s a very important thing for some us and others just take it for granted. Obviously I deal with color a lot in my photography but I also love my monochrome as anyone who follows me will know very well. One thing I am asked by many people is how do I decide what photo will be color and which will be monochrome. That answer is a bit more simple than some might think.
How to See in Black and White [and how HDR can be a Powerful Tool for the Monochrome Photographer]
Joseph Eckert says on the Digital Photography School blog;
The very first photographs were shot in black and white. Decades later, even after the advent of color, many photographers—especially those concerned with creating works of art—continued to shoot in black and white. The format remains popular even today: nearly every consumer-level digital camera has a black and white mode available (for outputting JPEGs directly from the camera in monochrome), and all digital darkroom editing suites have at least one (and usually multiple) means of changing a color photograph to black and white. Indeed, there are expensive plugins available for Photoshop that are entirely devoted to the process of converting a color shot into black and white, and there dozens of groups on Flickr and Picassa and 500px that are exclusive to black and white photography.
Why do black and white photographs continue to exercise this hold over the fancy of so many photographers (dabbling, amateur, and pro) when we have cameras and techniques at our disposal that can capture every color under the sun? We can produce photographs of spectacular color range, with arresting reds and blues and greens and yellows, and yet the simple power of an effective black and white shot can (arguably, of course) leave even the most brilliantly realized color shot in the artistic dust.
Helderberg Photographic Society 