The Beauty of Urban Decay

The Beauty Of Urban Decay | Inspiration | Smashing Magazine

The city is a fantastic source of beauty and inspiration, with all the glitz and glamour glistening beneath the city lights. But there is another side of the city altogether, one rife with its own kind of allure. Across the tracks, away from the dazzle of downtown, lies a darker imagination, this one looking to grunge-ridden, dilapidated architecture for inspiration. There is a beauty that pervades this kind of urban decay and captured wonderfully through a photographer’s well-trained eye. These industrial city scenes are wonderfully dark and offer a glimpse of the weathered face beneath the city facade.

In this inspirational installment, we take a tour and show the charm of a more neglected and worn side of the city. We showcase the beauty of urban decay, a series of photos of this eroded elegance that photographers have captured brilliantly. These gorgeously grungy images have a haunting appeal, a stirring quality that radiates from within and that earned them a spot on this list.

Black and White for the Digital Era

You might think that creating black and white images in the digital age is as easy as loading your digital image in Photoshop and converting to greyscale. While that will get you a monochrome image it will be a pale imitation of the same photo shot with black and white film. But don’t despair, great black and white imagery is easy to obtain from digital images; you just need to know the best ways to process them. In this article Harold Davis goes into some of the processing methods you should be aware of.

Black and White for the Digital Era – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog

Outfit Your Camera Like a Pro

Dealzmodo Hack: Outfit Your Camera Like a Pro (Hobo)

Whether your camera is brand new or an aging holdover, you want to accessorize it, but you don’t want to pay. By now, you know the Dealzmodo Hack drill: Paying is for suckers.

For decades, photographers have engineered little tricks to get the most out of their cameras, and most of them have carried just fine over the digital divide. Here are a few, with some newer additions collected by our friends at Lifehacker.

Thanks from “Lady Nicole”

You should know by now that Nicole Palmer was conferred honorary member status at the meeting in December.  She sent these words of thanks and asked that they be published here.

The year is not even 2 days old and HPS has already managed to impress me again with our new Web and Blog sites that I immediately want to take this opportunity to thank you, not only for this, but also for the great honor bestowed on me at the last meeting.

It was indeed a total surprise to receive the title of "Honorary" member, I was very touched by this.

The "Knighting" ceremony was great fun and marked the occasion with the usual touch of care, creativity and humor that this wonderful Club of ours always surrounds its members with.

I became a "serious" photographer in 1991 and have been involved with the Helderberg Club ever since, so you can guess that it is an integral part of my life and although I find our programme interesting and stimulating, the best part for me is the support and camaraderie we never fail to find at our meetings.

I would like to tell my companions that in turn their encouragement and friendship has helped me tremendously to grow in my photographic career and I am deeply thankful for everyone’s contribution and assistance along my road of creativity.

Once again I thank you all for this recognition and will do my best to live up to it.

Wishing you all a very good 2009 and may your images be perfectly composed and skillfully photoshopped.

With love from the new desk and new swivel chair of

LADY Nicole!

2009 January – Competition Winners

Here are the winners of the January competition for which the set subject was Silhouette.

Please note that only digital images are available for display.

Prints

Set Subject

  1. Silhouette in the Storm
    Bernard Seymour-Hall
  2. Come On, Hurry Up
    JJ van Heerden
  3. Sunset at Signal Hill
    Neels Beyers

Open

  1. Slow Currents
    Paul Hayes-Gregson
  2. Overberg Waterfall
    Nettie Warncke
  3. Sunset at Signal Hill
    Neels Beyers

Projected Images

Set Subject

  1. Bubble Silhouette
    Michele Moss
  2. Snow Silhouette
    Bernard Seymour-Hall
  3. Richtersveld
    JJ van Heerden

1. Bubble Silhouette2. Snow Silhouette3. Richtersveld

Open

  1. Eaten Away By Wind
    Neels Beyers
  2. Ascent
    Irmel Dunaiski
  3. Reflections on Foil
    Kerry Jones

1. Eaten Away By Wind2. Ascent

Genius Of Photography Series

Genius Of Photography Series | PixSylated

This month’s “Best Web Video” is actually an entire series — the Genius Of Photography produced by the BBC (site here). If you are trying to figure out how to be a photographer today, I think it’s essential to expose yourself (pun intended) to a bit of the 170 years of our collective history. Consider this 6-part series to be a must watch.

Outside the UK, the Genius Of Photography appears periodically on Ovation (USA), ABC (Australia), Knowledge Network (Canada) and elsewhere. Fortunately for the impatient and impulsive, the entire series has been posted on YouTube in 10 minute installments. To make things easy, I’ve collected all 37 links below.

Enjoy. Learn. Pass it on.

Partial Solar Eclipse

There will be a partial solar eclipse on the morning of 26 January 2009 lasting from around 07:00 to around 09:30.

From Solar Eclipse on 26 January: Astronomy 2009

Eclipse Viewing in Cape Town

On the morning, from 7 a.m., the Iziko Planetarium Cape Town will be setting up in the Museum Amphitheatre (in front of the South African Museum in the Company’s Gardens) to view the eclipse.

Telescope(s) will be set up, a number of free viewers and handouts explaining the phenomena will be available for the public.

As demand warrants, short planetarium shows will be run to illustrate what exactly is taking place and the difference between full, partial and annular eclipses.

More information, including the map below, can be found on the Johannesburg Planetarium’s site.

Partial solar eclipse 26 January 2009

Report January Meeting 14.01.09

A great crowd of over 50 members arrived at the meeting last night – quite a few new faces, as well as some we hadn’t seen for some time.  We welcomed several guests, as well as Francine, a lecturer at the Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography, who was our judge for the evening.

Of course, one of the most important ‘notices’ was to say Thank You to Steve for setting up our brilliant website –  the round of applause from the audience was well deserved.

Eric Palmer has offered to organise an outing involving some of his off-road mountain biking friends, at a venue where members can photograph them doing all manner of tricks – speeding, jumping, flying (and no doubt, falling down …).  Members will be advised via this website as to when exactly this outing is going to happen.  Paddy is busy organising the February outing – watch this space.

The Competition ‘Silhouette’ and the Open Sections in both Prints and Projected Images were both well-subscribed … there were several ‘first timers’ included, which is heartening – perhaps our ‘Get your Feet Wet’ project is paying off.  Francine got through the judging very efficiently – thanks also to Ilse and Steve for their administrative flair. Steve will soon be placing the competition results on the website.

The break for tea allowed for some busy social interaction, after which Chris Joubert presented ‘The People of Lubumbashi’ – a photographic project which he hopes to self-publish and get printed, in order to enlighten the general public of the dire circumstances in which the poorer people of Lubumbshi live.  His portrait work was excellent, and his street photography highlighted the difficult circumstances that many of the people live in.  We wish him well in his venture, and thank him for his presentation.

My thanks to the many members who helped out with the tea and kitchen duties, as well as the committee members for the ‘setting up’ and ‘taking down’ before and after the meeting.

Next month’s meeting is going to be an Evaluation one, together with Hermanus, who will be our guests.  Watch the website for more details!

Nettie