Photo_21

This forum may be the place for posting the following thread. It pertains to several issues and methods that I am calling “Photo_21” and which will be demonstrated and described below.

I’ve posted a few ideas over on the introduction forum but I now have pictures on Flickr which better show the methods.

This Photo_21 style is a combination of unusual geometric shaped pictures printed on canvas and also non-traditional lighting methods when making the picture. The indoors pictures are made in a dark studio with various light sources and the Chess image below is one of those. Please bear in mind that taking a picture of a picture which is hanging on the wall results in a poor digital image. The best image is the digital one but that is not the finished product; the canvas picture hanging on the wall is and it can only be critiqued by looking at it in its real place in real time. Key Point: Picture printed on canvas is viewed using reflected light ; digital image on computer is viewed via emitted light from a monitor. These can’t be compared as anything nearly the same.

The Chess picture is not “geometrically cropped” but is used to show lighting methods. F/14, ISO 160 for 53 seconds at 41mm focal length. I now usually use f18 or 20 for indoor work to get more specular reflections from applied light. The scene here is set on a glass table covered with black felt which has a hole cut in it. Under the table top is set a UV blacklight (24 inch long from Walmart at about $20).

This exposure is done with the camera on a tripod in a dark studio and the blacklight was lit first for a good 20 seconds then turned off and the rest of the scene was lit with an LED flashlight being careful not to apply any of it on the chess set as that would erase the effect of the blacklight and make the glass pieces look as they do under fluorescent lights. The candle was lit in the last second of exposure by stepping in front of the camera between it and the scene and applying a lighter to the wick. The camera can’t see and record a person in front of it if there is no light shining in the room.

No flash used. No Photoshopping other than cropping and slight straightening. That’s about all I have to say about the picture and camerawork on it; this was just a means to an end. The end being artwork on canvas on the gallery wall that might sell.

The pictures of the pentagon evening scene show another longer exposure that was edited pretty heavily to get the cloud color and these pictures show how the image looks cropped (using a GIMP add-on) and then printed on canvas and stretched to a custom-built pentagon wood frame.

Again, it will be in a gallery for sale. Any geometric shape could have been chosen. Note the white triangular tab on the corner. This fault was covered over by painting the canvas corner with acrylic artist’s paint to blend in with the scene colors. A more advanced solution to cover the fault is to select and copy the image pattern at its edges and paste that onto the white corners before printing.

There are links posted here that help explain more of what I’m doing and how it is done: http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16127

This includes the mention of geometric framing as a way for wall art to compliment architectural elements of a room in which it is displayed.

Frank Schmidt said:

Method will be explained when I am allowed to post attachments.

Click to expand...

find the URL of the image ending with .jpg

paste between these two sets of instructions

that's it.

The link they give for sharing is http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncle_sparkles/7831063038/ and that does not terminate with the required .jpg

You just need know how to get the URL from Flickr with the needed suffix .jpg.

Asher

Allow me to share the picture for you:



Normally, by clicking "share" and "grab the html/bbcode" from the picture, you can choose a "bbcode". Just copy that code in your message, it will work (and make the image clickable, what I did not do here).

If that does not work a paying flickr account may be required (I don't know). There is a workaround.

Jerome,

Good job, but it's not obvious how you found the right URL form!

"You can't share this picture on Twitter because owner has disabled sharing" is what one gets and corresponding notices on all other links. How did you find the URL ending in .jpg? When I look, it does not have that form, just a link to the same Flickr page!

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

find the URL of the image ending with .jpg

paste between these two sets of instructions

that's it.

The link they give for sharing is http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncle_sparkles/7831063038/ and that does not terminate with the required .jpg

You just need know how to get the URL from Flickr with the needed suffix .jpg.

Asher

Click to expand...

Asher, for the link above that does not end in a .jpg, if you are on firefox and right-click the page (not the image) choose VIEW PAGE INFO then click on the media tab and you can scroll through any media that is available on the page, the image .jpgs including the image thumbnails. If you do it on this (OPF) page or any other page for that matter, you will see all images including graphics are available to you.

Thanks for posting this overview of how you work - I'm very intrigued in the final product here.

How do you go about choosing subject matter? (Or maybe another way: how does your end product influence what you choose to shoot?)

Your non-rectangular final result reminds me of another photographer I've seen who frequently shows circular photographs: Stephen Gillette. Maybe it's representative of me, but I certainly can't wrap my brain around non-rectangular composition.

Thanks for the note, Sam. To the question of how do I choose subject matter for my images, I would break that down in two parts. Outdoors vs. indoor work. Out of doors is usually a nature scene like the pentagon or a snapshot of a river or waterfall. Water scenes I usually convert to black and white and print rectangular on canvas but have done one as an octagon. Whatever happens to look interesting in nature; but most of my work is indoor composed still life.

My still lifes usually have high contrast dark to light. They are set on a table or granite slab or wood shelf. Often they have a “moody” feel with several elements in the scene not too visible and others well lit often by an oil lamp or candle flame. Some of the themes are kitchen or cooking related; fresh food, real fruit and wine in a glass are recurring topics and I like the vitality of fresh cut flowers or growing plants. A clock with a twirling pendulum or something else showing movement or a scene just vacated by a person, like a diary with tea in a cup and ink pen just left there adds reality to the image; not frozen set-in-stone. I don’t do dead animals on the table or blood or insects on flowers.

A lot of what I’m doing would be looked at as commercial stuff. For a winery, café, specialty grocer and the like. Taking out the company’s wine bottle from the scene turns it into a generic art piece, not commercial. So this can be set up and shot both ways and keep the one art picture without reference to a business (winery) and offered for sale in a gallery; or just turn the wine bottle so the label can’t be read; same effect, art picture for private sale.

Sometimes what I do is a ‘project’ on a theme like the music piece below which is at the printer’s now and I hope to frame up as an 8 sided work as a gift to the Taos, New Mexico performing arts association who put on concerts called “Music from Angel Fire” near the resort town of Angel Fire. This is brighter than my usual work but hope it will be displayed in an office or auditorium. A light area or candle flame seems to attract attention to the piece so I try to get that in somewhere in the setting. In this one I used incandescent light on the darker and gold/wood pieces for warmth and LED light on the blue tickets (mine for the Sept 1st performance) and flower blossoms. This keeps the warms warm and blues and whites correct and highlights the flowers. No overall flash possible. Dark room, individual and sequential lighting. I had to move the yellow flag to the background as it was too brilliant up front. The difficulty then was keeping light off the music paper as it was way too white for the scene if well lit; you can see that the octagon cropping got rid of too light colored fabric on lower right.

I hope all the hot air above explains somewhat how I choose my subjects. For a long while I’ve been on a Dutch Masters Art kick setting up still lifes like the old guys who did art in the 17th century. That’s how the 12 sided piece with the blue ginger jar in an earlier link came about . http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1003&message=42260696

There is a whole complex system of setting these up and figuring out what props to include.

I saw the link to S. Gillette that you included. Thanks for that , I’m looking for anyone who does odd cropping so I can learn from their work. His circles look to be on a faint blue square background so I supposed if you printed them they would be a circle in a square; not a circular wall art picture. If hung as a gallery wrap (no decorative outer frame) I don’t know how a stretcher frame could be built or how it could be stapled on without folded edges all ‘round.

By the way, I’ve not seen art paintings on hexagon or octagon canvas but I do see the blank canvas for sale in that format so someone must be doing oils or watercolors in such a style.

Some examples of this new style of cropping and printing on canvas. Photo_21:

Frank Schmidt said:

...

Sometimes what I do is a ‘project’ on a theme like the music piece below which is at the printer’s now and I hope to frame up as an 8 sided work as a gift to the Taos, New Mexico performing arts association who put on concerts called “Music from Angel Fire” near the resort town of Angel Fire. This is brighter than my usual work but hope it will be displayed in an office or auditorium. A light area or candle flame seems to attract attention to the piece so I try to get that in somewhere in the setting. In this one I used incandescent light on the darker and gold/wood pieces for warmth and LED light on the blue tickets (mine for the Sept 1st performance) and flower blossoms. This keeps the warms warm and blues and whites correct and highlights the flowers. No overall flash possible. Dark room, individual and sequential lighting. I had to move the yellow flag to the background as it was too brilliant up front. The difficulty then was keeping light off the music paper as it was way too white for the scene if well lit; you can see that the octagon cropping got rid of too light colored fabric on lower right.

I hope all the hot air above explains somewhat how I choose my subjects. For a long while I’ve been on a Dutch Masters Art kick setting up still lifes like the old guys who did art in the 17th century. That’s how the 12 sided piece with the blue ginger jar in an earlier link came about . http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1003&message=42260696

There is a whole complex system of setting these up and figuring out what props to include.

I saw the link to S. Gillette that you included. Thanks for that , I’m looking for anyone who does odd cropping so I can learn from their work. His circles look to be on a faint blue square background so I supposed if you printed them they would be a circle in a square; not a circular wall art picture. If hung as a gallery wrap (no decorative outer frame) I don’t know how a stretcher frame could be built or how it could be stapled on without folded edges all ‘round.

By the way, I’ve not seen art paintings on hexagon or octagon canvas but I do see the blank canvas for sale in that format so someone must be doing oils or watercolors in such a style.

Click to expand...

No hot air at all, thanks for taking the time to elaborate. Personally I don't lean much towards studio or any kind of "arranged" (I'm not sure that's the right word) photography, so it's very useful to hear your thoughts and perspectives as a counterpoint to what feels right for my own work.

I suppose the whole issue of display always comes about with non-rectangular formats - Especially online you get stuck with effectively a circular matt to make it rectangular. For the circular canvas your comment jogged a memory - there is an australian company that seems to have it figured out (Genius Printing)- I wonder if they actually sell many that way?

Finished octagon of Music from Angel Fire.