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    Saturday
    20Mar2010

    Back in the wet darkroom

    Yes, after about 10 years of not touching any chemicals, I'm developing my own film again. It's been so long that I decided to enroll in a course at the Australian Centre for Photography and start with the basics again. I've already developed 2 rolls and did a couple of contact sheets. And it's been a lot of fun.

    I've been shooting with my very old Konica C35 rangefinder. It's a great little camera with a beautiful 38mm f2.8 lens. The only thing I wish it could do is use film faster that ISO400 but that's the limit of the meter. Anyway, I'll post some of my film photographs soon.

    The above shot was taken with my iPhone and edited in an app called Lo-Mob that's becoming one of my favourites.

    Saturday
    13Mar2010

    All photographs from my Project 365 are now CC


    Out for a stroll, originally uploaded by gabrielponzanelli.

    I just updated the license for all my photographs in the Project 365 set in Flickr to an Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd) Creative Commons license. That means, anyone is free to use them for any non-commercial activity as long as they don't change them in any way and they link back.

    Let's see what happens.

    Bigger versions are in project365.gabrielponzanelli.com, a Posterous blog I created just for this project.

    Saturday
    06Mar2010

    Landscape panorama in Black & White

    A few months ago I wrote a bit of a rant on my thoughts about sharing everything you do versus only showing either your absolute very best photographs, or only what's in line with what you want to shoot in the future.

    In that post, I wrote the following:

    I've been struggling with this for a while. As I said at the beginning, I love photography and have a bunch of stuff on a number of genres, all very different. Should I share it all? Should I hide most and only show what I want to be known for?
    I still don't know.

    Well, I'm not sure today either, but what the hell. I've got a bunch of stuff that I just don't want to fade away in a box or in some forgotten folder in my computer, so I'll be sharing different styles that I enjoy shooting. Here's the first.

    For a long time I've been doing a series of landscapes in black & white. This one was shot in New Zealand in 2005 using a 5 megapixel Canon G5. It's a panorama stitched out of 6 photographs if I remember correctly. Click on the photograph for a larger image. More to come soon.


    Sunday
    28Feb2010

    3 Free Black & White Adjustment Presets for Apple Aperture 3

    If you follow my blog you probably know that I love black and white photography. I previously posted a video on how to convert colour photographs into black and white using Aperture 2. While it worked, you had to use the Dodge & Burn plugin, which made it a destructive process and a bit of a pain in terms of workflow. Now, Aperture 3 offers many ways to do it non-destructively with a lot more control over the final result. I've been playing with this quite a bit since Aperture 3 was released and I have to say the possibilities are amazing.

    One thing that I'm thoroughly enjoying is the ability to save some of my settings as an adjustment preset that I can then apply to other photographs in one pass. I'm currently working on a series that emulates the effect of the black and white settings that my Panasonic GF1 bakes into the JPEG's. I'll share those when I'm happy with them, but for now I want to share 3 that I think are pretty cool.

    The following photographs illustrate the effect:

    1. Original

    Original photograph (no adjustments)

    2. Preset: B&W Light Shadows

    Aperture 3 preset: Black & White Light Shadows3. Preset: B&W Preserve Shadows

    Aperture 3 preset: Black & White Preserve Shadows4. Preset: B&W High Contrast

    Aperture 3 preset: Black & White High ContrastThe presets are provided for free. If you download them I'd appreciate your comments, good or bad!

    Download Aperture 3 Black & White presets by clicking here.  Related Posts with Thumbnails

    Wednesday
    24Feb2010

    Apple releases Aperture 3.0.1 update

    Aperture 3.0.1 Release Notes

    This update improves overall stability and addresses a number of issues in Aperture 3, including:

    • Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
    • Importing libraries from iPhoto
    • Importing photos directly from a camera
    • Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
    • Face recognition processing
    • Adding undetected faces using the Add Missing Face button
    • Printing pages containing multiple images
    • Printing photos and contact sheets with borders and metadata
    • Editing photos using an external editor
    • Display of images with Definition and Straighten adjustments applied
    • Zooming photos in the Viewer and in the Loupe using keyboard shortcuts
    • Accessing Aperture libraries on a network volume
    • Selecting and moving pins on the Places map
    • Adding and editing custom locations using the Manage My Places window
    • Switching between masters when working with RAW+JPEG pairs

    Full information: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2518 

    Sunday
    21Feb2010

    Oivind from Norway, shot for People of the Globe


    Oivind. From Norway., originally uploaded by gabrielponzanelli.

    This is just a quick post to test posting directly from my Flickr account. I've neglected Flickr lately and I want to get all my online stuff (Website, Blog, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Model Mayhem, Posterous, etc.) to start working together. Probably the main reason why I haven't done it is because I haven't found a good way to manage everything without spending a ton of time. I have a bunch of images everywhere and I don't really know where I've posted what, so I'm trying posting everything I intend to be in Flickr into Flickr first and then blog and embed from there.

    I'm also playing with the new Labels in Aperture 3 to help me organise this mess. Right now I'm thinking I'll assign labels depending on what I've done with the photograph. For example, if posted to Flickr I'll give it a grey label. Not too sure if that's going to work, but we'll see.

    Speaking of Aperture 3 and Flickr, I just posted a bunch of photos directly from Aperture and I have to say I'm not too impressed with the in-built Aperture to Flickr export. It's the first time I've used it, so I may be wrong, but it seems it doesn't read what's already there on Flickr so you can't post photographs into an existing Flickr set. The old plugin seems much better, but I'll reserve my final judgement until I've played with it thoroughly.

    Sunday
    14Feb2010

    Jess shot with my new Panasonic GF1

    A couple of weeks ago I received my new Panasonic GF1 with the beautiful 20mm f1.7 pancake lens. I've been playing around with the camera trying to figure out all the controls and settings, but I hadn't really done any proper shooting with it until a few days ago when had the opportunity to photograph Jess.

    The light was pretty low so I decided to give the GF1 a try. I left it wide open at f1.7, set the ISO to 400 and got a decent exposure at 1/160th of a second.

    I have to say, I love this camera. I sold my LX3 in order to get this one and I don't regret it one bit (yes, it's 3x more expensive, but totally worth it). I wasn't too sure about the micro 4/3 format at the beginning, but I have to admit this is an amazing little camera and the 20mm lens is beautiful.

    More images to come soon.