Category: photographyPage 1 of 3

Preparing Photos for Print

Everyone understands that screens are not paper. So when our photo prints come back looking flat and muddy compared the vibrant image on our monitor, we are disappointed but not exactly shocked. Can this be prevented?

My Micro Four Thirds Photography, 2022

The Micro Four Thirds camera format still offers many attractions. In this post I look at five M43 lenses

On Aspect Ratios

Exploring aspect ratios in photography, fine art, and publishing.

Nine Views of Point Pinole

All taken 14 April 2020 with a Samyang / Rokinon 12mm f2 (wide-angle) lens.

Catchlight

I don’t do much portrait photography. Most of my people shots are casual and unposed. The majority are of family, and it seems we are often wearing sunglasses….

Weathered Walls

To The Lighthouse: Nubble Light House, Cape Neddick Light Station, York, Maine (and a few other lighthouses)

Recently I visited Sohier Park in Cape Neddick, York, Maine (near Ogunquit). About 100 yards offshore on a small rocky island perches one of the prettiest lighthouses I have…

New York Public Library provides hi-res images for free use

It’s encouraging to see libraries and museums beginning to make public domain images freely available, increasingly providing high-resolution scans or photos for downloading. Historically, they have guarded images of objects in their collections as a private source of income. Count the New York Public Library among the honorable elite who have made their pd images available to be shared.

Fun with panoramas

Stitching together photos can be great fun in the proper context. I think the Piazza del Duomo in Milan counts as one of these. This photo was taken…

Canon Powershot A630 vs. Olympus PEN E-PL2

Pixels or sensor size? Consumers have been trained to judge cameras by their pixel counts, But there are other factors that may be more important to image quality,…

Olympus E-Pl2

This photo of a jade plant in front of the fireplace was taken with my new camera, an Olympus E-PL2. This is a mirrorless camera in the micro…

Paris under water

This photo is one of a series of dark, atmospheric photos by Arnaud Labgraph showing the Seine at high water. Photography is one of the diverse interests of this mainly…

Author photo

thomas christensen author photo

My author questionnaire and author photo for 1616: The World in Motion are due this week to Counterpoint Press. My daughter Ellen, who is a brilliant photographer, among other things, took this photo from the roof of her apartment overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland. It was raining lightly at the time, and later that day ice would fall from the sky.

In Tom’s Glossary of Book Publishing Terms the author photo is defined as “Pictorial fiction. Authors always choose photos that emphasize that quality in which they feel most deficient.” So what does this say about me? I dunno — but I will say, as a guy who has been cutting his own hair for years, that I don’t think the hair looks too bad.

Travel photo: Castel Vecchio Museum courtyard, Verona, Italy

While we’re in Verona, here’s a picture from the courtyard of the Castel Vecchio, which is a handsome museum indeed. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect…

Travel photo: Venetian gondolier

This photo amuses me because the gondolier reminds me of the Eric Blore role in the Astaire/Rogers film Top Hat.

Travel photo: a street in Verona

Please bear with me while I post a few photos from my recent trip to the Veneto and Upper Adige. I travel with a little (maybe 12-inch) tripod,…

100 meters of humanity

For the 100-meter-long photo of which the detail above is a part Simon Hoegsberg shot one-hundred seventy-eight people, “in the course of twenty days from the same spot…

Early 20th-century scenes of Paris

Eugène Atget made a number of interesting sets of photos of aspects of Parisian life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France…

Photography’s rule of thirds

There’s nothing new about the rule of thirds — it’s almost a photographic cliche. Still, as a, well, rule of thumb there’s a good deal of sense in it. Let’s have a look.

One of the worst instincts of amateur photographers is to aim the camera directly at the main subject, as if it were game to be bagged. You can see this in society pages, like one in the back of a magazine I’m responsible for (I try to keep the section’s space to a minimum). The photographer’s strategy in these situations is just about always to line the swells up in a grinning row facing the camera. You can see what I mean in the above image (I’ve replaced the people’s faces with smilies so as not to embarrass anyone).

The rule of thirds says that you’re better off arranging your composition with a main element a third of the way from one of the edges. In effect you imagine your image as composed of nine equal rectangles. Consider this image from the Sentiero degli Dei in the Lattari Mountains above Amalfi.

Driving from Furore on the Amalfi Coast to Agerola in the Lattari Mountains

While driving the Via Amalfitano has its motoring excitements as well as its famously spectacular views,

The Path of the Gods

Okay, I guess I’m still a little jetlagged — or maybe just worn out from coming back to an office in crisis mode. Anyway, too tired to do…

Gathering storm clouds over Amalfi

This photo was taken from the spectacular trail in the Lattari Mountains overlooking the Amalfi Coast called the Sentiero degli Dei — the path of the gods. A…

Cà d’Zan Mansion, Sarasota, Florida

Just a photo today. This view of the patio of the Ringling mansion in Sarasota — the building is rather ostentatiously called the Cà d’Zan — was taken…

What’s going on here?

Maybe by the time this post runs the photo will have been widely printed. If not, you can still try your luck at guessing what this picture —…