Thursday, November 18, 2010

PHOTOGRAPHY: applying it to your author photos, etc.






Libby has become quite interested in photography as of late. She's gotten herself a new gig (go Libby!) writing and photo taking and asked for some pointers on how to take good shots. As some of you may know, I love photography. In school at RISD I toyed with the idea of making that my major. In fact, during photo classes, I was urged to switch majors. I didn't, however, but sometimes I wonder what if.

Gone are the days of the dark room and with it are some major losses. Especially when it comes to B&W photography. But the coolest things are cropping up for ipod and iphones in the form of applications. I just found a few new ones. One is called SwankoLab, where you can "mix" your own chemicals and come up with different combinations and looks for your photos. I think this is great for B&W stuff! Unfortunetely, this app will not let you keep high res photos and it changes them to 72 dpi, which is kind of useless. It's a start, though.

I was stuck at the doctor's office for over a hour yesterday getting an IV treatment so I had lots of time to play with this new app. Here are some of my creations:

The first batch is from my movie photos called "crazy women in the movies," which is a spin off from my painting series.







These are from my "enchanted forrest" series:





These are from my coney island series:











This is from my brooklyn building series



And here we have another application I have found. This is great for fun author photos! It mimics old photo booths! It's called IncrediBooth. And yes, the first strip was taken in the doctor's office. It's a darn good thing he didn't catch me doing it or it could have been embarrassing!







This last shot was mixed with the SwankoLab. It makes nice B&W shots, with or without the aged look.

2 comments:

Libby Koponen said...

I LOVE this picture of you (the last one). It's one of the best pictures of you I've seen.....and all the others here, too.

Thank you again for all the photography tips you gave me--really helpful! Maybe I'll post some of them?

Anyhow, thanks!

M J Muir said...

Thanks for the interesting post. Your photos are really fun to see. Isn't technology wonderful and magical at times?