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Issue 35 : August 2014

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Congratulations Steve Harper for your winning image this month. A great portrait of the Tui; I love the contrasting colours here, your selected depth

of field and composition. Congrats also to Jacqueline Viljoen for your entry of Kayla; a great fast capture. And thanks to Jacob William Cavill Saunders for his thought provoking image ‘Stuck in the City’ A great example of an image speaking more than words.

In this month’s Issue Scott Fowler talks about Surreal Photography; shares some of his work with us and a few tips to get started and Allan Cox inspires us to see things a bit differently and take extraordinary images of the not so extraordinary.

Make sure to check out all the competition finalists in this issue and give it a go yourself next month

Good luck!

Hollie WightmanResident JudgeNZ Photographer

Nice work!{

ABOUT Whether you’re an enthusiastic weekend snapper or a

beginner who wants to learn more, NZ Photographer is the fun e-magazine for all Kiwi camera owners – and it’s free!

EDITOR Hollie Wightman, hollie@nzphotographer.co.nz

GROUP EDITOR Jennifer Liew

ART DIRECTOR Jodi Olsson

ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES Phone Richard Liew on 09 522 7257 or

email richardl@espiremedia.com

WEBSITE www.nzphotographer.co.nz

NZ Photographer is an Espire Media publication

Hollie Wightman

PCL’S NEW IPHONE AND IPAD APP FREE WEEKLY TUTORIALS!

New Zealand’s premium photo lab, PCL IMAGING, has made its latest evolution into the palm of your hand. They have launched this month the iphone and ipad app

which allows users to edit, enhance and order photographs directly from their phones.PCL has been a photographic industry leader for over 40 years and once again is enabling photographers with the latest technological development. The app itself is a direct result of another technology PCL has been using for several years called ROES or remote order entry software. This software was made available for MAC or PC and has been used to by thousands of happy customers.

PCL will be holding weekly tutorials for the new app for their customers and if you mention this article you can join them for a free cupcake, espresso photographic print. The relaxed tutorials will take place at PCL every Thursday at 11am.

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Next Month's Competition: Macro

GET SHOOTING AND WIN!Photographers - This is a great opportunity to improve your photography skills and get some feedback from professional photography judges in a safe and friendly environment. Here's what's up for grabs:

• The winning image on the cover of the next issue

• A high quality print of your image and cover to immortalise your achievement for your grandchildren, courtesy of PCL Imaging

• $50 cash

• And of course, bragging rights and the envy of your fellow NZ Photographer fans!

Check out next month’s theme and enter at www.nzphotographer.co.nz!

WIN!

Time to get up close and creative! Next month’s competition is Macro; entries close August 20th

Rules: Images submitted must be no older than 12 months from the date of publication of this issue. Entry to the competition is $5 and you can enter up to five images. Images must be no more than 100 dpi and no more than 1600px wide. Save them as jpgs in the prefered colour space of Adobe RGB (1998). If you don't know what this means, don't worry, but do Google it...●

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Composites, Photomerge, there are a number of different names for this process but regardless of what you call it, it is the process of taking parts of many or a few different images & making one that comes out of the creative hard drive in your head. This is not a genre of photography that can be taught easily, it is about being creative & thinking outside the square.

Surreal Photography

By Scott Fowler www.scoiwi.com

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I create my images from a base image then construct the rest from images that I have harvested in the past. Image harvesting is where you capture image’s,

not too use as a single image but to use part of it in the construction of a totally new image.

All creativity comes from a wellspring within us, and the more frequently and diversely we exercise our creative

muscle, the stronger and clearer our voice becomes. Feeling that you will never do anything well is no reason not to do it. Let that something become your new best friend, because it is from doing that things never before seen are born.

Two surreal image makers I study & admire are Jerry Uelsmann & Dominic Rouse, both with different styles & ways of creating there images, Jerry still uses the traditional

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darkroom to make his work, this is very impressive, have a look. Dominic uses the digital darkroom, his work is another level of digital artistry, well I think so anyway.

So as I said earlier I start with the base image that is usually going to be the background, then I decide what is going to be the middle area, usually people, animals for me, then what is the foreground going to be. So I load my image into Photoshop, then using the lasso tool, I lasso the part of the image I want, then move tool it to the background image. I then use the eraser tool to remove the part of the moved image I don’t want and use the opacity to control the flow from the added image to the background. I transform as

needed to make the new part look right in the image, this is totally your choice. I am sure there are others with other methods but this works for me. Find what works for you and perfect it.

Edward Weston said, I would say to any artist “don’t be repressed in your work, dare to experiment, consider any urge, if in a direction all the better”

So my advice to you is try, & if you fail try again & again & again, it is about practice let the child take over & tie up the editor/adult up, they just get in the way. Don’t put yourself under pressure to make images, this is the best way to fail, let the creative juices you have within you take over, the more you do it the

easier it gets & you start to harvest at any opportunity, ideas start to form in your head for later development. GOOD LUCK HAVE FUN. ●

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The Art Of Photographing Waves Allan Cox

I’ve heard it said that New Zealand has a longer coastline than the U.S. Looking at a map I could well believe it. With so much coastline, going to the beach

is just part of our culture. And going to the beach, we see waves. If you’re like me, you’ve seen a gazillion waves rolling in over your lifetime. Yet still they hold a very special attraction: powerful and at the same time so beautiful. To photograph them comes naturally, but how to do so in a way that is more than an ordinary shot.

Often with photos of waves it is about finding the right shutter speed. While panning a wave for example, is it ¼ of a sec, 1/6 of a sec or 1/8 of a sec that looks best?

It might not seem like there is much of a difference between these speeds, but the difference is enough to give a slightly different feel to the photo and this can end up making all the difference. The only way to find out is to experiment with different shutter speeds. This is one of the few times when I will use shutter priority: S on Nikon and other cameras, Tv on Canon (time variant).

There are different ways of getting the very slow shutter speeds: the shutter speeds measured in seconds, not fractions of seconds. Sometimes, the easiest ways are the best. One of the easiest ways of getting a long shutter speed is to take the photograph when the light is low.

“The art of photography, lies not in taking ordinary photos of the extra ordinary, but in taking extraordinary photos of the ordinary.”

www.nzphotoworkshops.com

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Go to the beach after the sun has gone down. As it starts to get dark your shutter speeds will get longer (auto ISO needs to be turned off. Set it low e.g. 100) you’ll need to be shooting from a tripod, or some other support.

At this time of the day, the sky will often be a range of beautiful colours, and these colours will reflect in the water.

Sometimes in low light, the camera will struggle to focus. The camera needs contrast to focus, so putting your cameras focus point on a line between dark and light can help. Once the camera has focused, turn the camera to manual focus, effectively turning your auto focus off. Otherwise if your camera can’t focus, it won’t let you take the photo. (You can set your camera up so that it will allow you to, but the default setting is to not allow. Going to manual focus is easier and better).

Here are a few photos of waves to inspire you. So go forth and create your own masterpieces. ●

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Tui by Steve Harper

There’s a lovely spot on the side of one of the craters at Cornwall Park where the Tui gather. Settings: Nikon D300 at 600mm, 1/200 at f5.6

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Kayla by Jacqueline Viljoen

Waikanae River Walk - Nothing like a morning walk and play at the river! Settings: Nikon D5100

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Eagle Eye by Jerry C Gonzales

This eagle’s photo was taken in a resort when I went to the Philippines. The vibrant colours of its eye were simply amazing. Settings: Canon 550d, f/5.6, 1/50 sec and 200 ISO.

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Stuck in the city by Jacob William Cavill Saunders

This is one of my favourite wildlife photos and I think it speaks a lot. It shows a chimp at the zoo and the background is the city scape, I’m trying to show how out of place this chimp is. He does not belong in the city and this makes the shot have a strange vibe about it which is really what I was going for. Settings: Nikon D200, f/5, 1/160 sec, ISO 200.

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Pied Shags by Allen Hogan

Pied Shags nesting at Zealandia park Wellington Settings: Canon EOS 7D f7.1 1/200

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Red Panda by Peter Spence

Red Panda wondering what keeper is up to. Hamilton Zoo Settings: Sony SLT- A37, f/l 200, f5.6, ISO 400, 1/320s

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Heifer in waiting by Mandie Sparg

I wanted to get a close up of a cow with rest of herd just visible in background. Settings: Canon 600D, F2.8, ISO 100, 1/60

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Green Gecko at Auckland Museum by Edward Swift

Really liked the vibrant green and the blurred leaves in the foreground Settings: Canon 100D, f/4.5, 1/60 sec, ISO-500

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Hungry Quartet by Steve Harper

Settings: Nikon D300 at 345mm, 1/160 at f5.6

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“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

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- Elliott Erwitt