Special Effect or Photography…. hmmm, tough…

Ok, photography or special effect? there has not been a day that I wonder what my life is going to be like if I go down the photographer path or special effect-er path, since I am going to graduate with a master degree in a year.

While it is true that special effect looks so cool and awesome, it also takes so much time and and effort to make them well, the process reminds me a lot about game development. Where you have to work with a small group of people, in the closed air conditioned space, eating probably the most unhealthy food, while working at the most unhealthy hours imaginable, day in a day out for a period of months, probably seeing more of your teammate than you will ever see your family. Which is great for so called “team building”, everybody will be tight like brothers/sisters after the project. But that is if you have the technical skills needed in order to succeed and stay with the company. After I’ve turned in my midterm project for my special effect class, I know there is a lot more technicality to it than I thought.

When was the last time you went back to watch a movie just because of the special effect that’s in there? well, if it’s really a big budget movie, or one of those cult classic, you probably will watch it over and over, but I highly doubt it will be because of the special effects that was put in the movie, it’s most likely because of the story in the movie or the way the story was told in the movie (Memento anyone?). On the other hand, when was the last time you went back to look at the photograph and wish you were still there, or reminded you of how much fun you had on your trip to Hawaii? you see, the point I am trying to make is that photography and special effects are fundamentally different, special effect is a collaborative project, and there’s a lot of parts to it, if anyone of those parts did not execute well, if could ruin the experience for the audiences; where as in photography, it might be as simple as somebody’s action or reaction at that particular moment of time. For example, how many times have we seen the Iwo Jima images http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/51/Flags_of_our_fathers.jpg yet isn’t it still as powerful as the day it was shown? to me, photography is a more timeless form of art than special effect is. It’s something that I can just look at for hours on end.

The road to become a photographer does not look like it would be any easier, but I am more than willing to go down that path, not just because it’s more memorable, more personal, have longer effect (on our children, grand-children, grand-children’s children), but the path to get there is much more interesting and unpredictable for me, once I know how the basics of how to take photograph, the rest is for me to explore and play with. Who know, if someday the photography doesn’t work out for me, I can always fall back to special effects field.

testing blogmailr

testing from blogmailer

Cropping to get a better picture

Have you always heard people talk about how if you crop your picture, you will get a better image? Well, it is true, but first you will need to know a thing or two about photography.

1. Assess what you’ve taken

How many times have you come back from your photo shoot to look at the images, only to find out that the images are either too busy (crowded with informations. ie. tree branches in the background) or the way main subject was shot is not all that interesting?

What to do about it:

• Pay attention to the background, do you want the tree to grow out of your friend’s head?

• Take more pictures! With the price for the SD/CF/XD/MMC cards dropping, you could easily pick up a 1 Gb card for about $10( I wouldn’t recommend anything less than 1 GB), it would be one of the best investment for the digital camera.

Some might argue that the quality of the card you acquired with $10 might not last you long, hence it would not be a good investment. But for the sake of the argument, all I am trying to say is just get a bigger memory card so more pictures can be taken before the card gets filled up. From my experience, I’ve found that it’s best to take several images from the one angle before you try out another angle, that way when you open the images up on computer, you will have more than 1 images for that angle, just in case the image turns out to be out of focus, or the face was not lit well.

2. Know what you want to crop to

Depends on how involved you are with the photography, you must at least know a thing or two or at least heard about the compositions

• Rules of third,
• Horizontal,
• Diagonal,
• Circular,
• And close up off center just to name a few.

Out of those, the Rules of third has to be one of the easiest and a lot of time could be the most powerful one. What is rules of third you might ask? well, the quick and dirty version would be: Look at your image, and divide it into a 3×3 grid, where the lines crosses are what we call the interest (action) point. And you’ve guessed it, we try to put the action/interest at those points.

So to summarize:

1. Get a bigger memory card so you can take more pictures from more angles, which gives your more pictures to edit from when you open them up on the computer.

2. Know that you can crop your computer later after you get home, rules of third is the easiest one to learn and often time the most effective one. Try to place the main subject in one of the interest (action) points and see what you get!

Flickr Post #02

Flickr Post #01

Powerline tower

Today we are learning about the rule of third in the world of photography

Ever wonder why most beginners place their subject in the center of the picture?? it’s partly related to how human eyes are built. Our eyes tends to center everything that is in a circle, which is the most boring and un-interesting way to capture your subject. As my professor says

if you LOVE sombody, please, please don’t butcher them with the ugly dead center image!

One of the easiest way to make the picture interesting is to move it off/out of the center, hence the creation of rule of thrid.

Here is my take on it

try your profanity thang….

The idea of this site seems simple enough, just click on new game, and you have 1 mins to let out all your anger (curse words that you’ve been wanting to say, yes, let it out….) and you will achieve points base on how profane the word is??

Interesting enough, I’ve only scored 6 points out of 100….. does that mean I am a nice guy?? or I should learn more “vocabulary” before I attempt it again? what’s your score?
http://imagine-it.org/google/profanegame.htm

Product Review – Wolverine FlashPac 7-in-1 reader

I saw a deal on the Wolverine Flashpac 7-in-1 reader

Want to take your digital camera on the road? Then be ready to buy either a lot more Memory Cards or just get the flashPac. NOW you can take thousands of photos with a single Memory Card. A single press of a button and all your photos and digital data are effortlessly copied from the built in 7-in-1 Card Reader into a portable, self powered gigabytes of mass storage unit. With the contents of you memory card now safely stored, your card is now ready to be reused – and you never had to go near a computer. Because the Wolverine flashPac is battery operated you can literally save your data anywhere in the world. It’s perfect for photographers, trips, sharing data during meetings, any situation involving a memory card.

I will post the review on the item later, stay tuned

Hello world

Hello everybody, welcome to Photo LZ, I don’t know exactly what I will be covering here yet, but I know they will be photography related…. stay tune