I saw some photographs by Sandro Miller of his friend John Malkovich on the web. In the photos John Malkovich impersonates various people in famous portrait photographs. I don't know if they were supposed to be tongue in cheek but I thought they were very funny. I've pasted images below of the 'original' photograph next to the copies as a kind of compare and contrast. See if you can tell which ones are of John Malkovich (no prizes for this as it isn't very hard). Looking at the photographs side by side I noticed that the things that make an image memorable are quite subtle and not easy to imitate and if you don't get it right it looks odd. For example in the image below of Marilyn Monroe her photograph is 'sexy' but with a certain vulnerable/fragile quality whereas the John Malkovich image just looks 'weird'. You can see more of the images at this link - http://edelmangallery.com/exhibitions-and-projects/exhibition-pages/2014/sandro-miller-malkovich,-malkovich,-malkovich-homage-to-photographic-masters.html You may have seen the story about a Dutch woman called Zilla van den Born, her parents dropped her at the airport on 23 April, believing she was off to see Thailand, Cambodia and Laos over a month-long holiday. Instead, she secretly returned to her flat, and lived undercover while posting fake images and status updates on Facebook of her adventures on holiday. She also sent postcards to people although no one noticed they had Dutch postmarks and wore disguises when she went outside her flat so that no one would recognise her. It was a funny story and she went to quite a lot of trouble to produce the fakes including going to her local swimming pool to take the photo of herself underwater (see pic on left) and posing in various positions to make it look like she was really in the picture (see bottom picture). She's a graphic designer so is experienced with using Photoshop and she did eventually tell people that the photos were faked. She explained why she did it - “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media, thereby we create an online ideal world which reality can no longer meet. My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality.” Of course the manipulation of photographs has been going on since the invention of photography, but with social media and Photoshop it's easier to create an imaginary reality. This story may also have been a publicity stunt as the internet loves these kind of stories and they quickly go viral. She has an interesting site showing some of her graphic design work which you might like to check out. Link here - http://www.zillavandenborn.nl/ I thought you might enjoy some photos from the Lapworth Scarecrow festival which was last weekend. I live in Lapworth and the festival is the cultural highlight of the year. The theme was 'Around the world in 80 days', at least I think it was as it's hard to tell with some of the scarecrows. There's a prize of 1 million pounds if you can guess correctly what they are all are supposed to be. Slide show below - Did you know that photography can help to improve your social life? Well, it can! By using a stylish Facebook profile photograph you can attract new friends, impress people, appear to be a cool/happening person and generally improve your web presence. I don't understand Facebook as I'm too old and not very 'with-it' but I understand it's popular with young people and the 'in' thing to do. I came across a site that had a feature called '101 Self-portrait ideas to spice up your Facebook profile' which basically featured 101 photos by various people and I've done you a favour by picking some of the ones I thought were most creative. A lot of the photographs were what you might call 'glamorous' or 'beauty shots', that is sexy looking women and hunky, rugged looking men but I was more interested in the quirky or unusual ones. It's interesting seeing how peoples different personalities come through in the photographs. I've put a slide show below of the 'best' ones. The link to the feature is here - http://photodoto.com/101-extraordinary-self-portrait/ if you want to look at all 101 of the photos. Some of them make clever use of Photoshop and they may give you some ideas for self portraits, it could be a good mini project as well as updating your Facebook profile picture. Do you enjoy it when your friends or relatives say "would you like to see my holiday photos?" and then you spend an hour looking at over 500 pictures while they explain how great it was in Bali and point out all the great places they visited and what fun they had climbing Mount Everest and how they met an interesting family who were also from Warwick etc.. If you do you're in for a treat because I'm going to do a series of posts featuring some of my holiday photographs, however I have been selective so there won't be too many and there is an educational purpose as well as I'll write about some of the approaches I take to photography. Sunny Weymouth and the Jazz photography technique To set the scene, I went to Weymouth which is a smallish seaside town in Dorset on the south coast. Weymouth has a long beach and a large harbour and the town was full of pensioners, families and groups of foreign teenagers who were probably there for the sailing as Portland (which is next door to Weymouth) is a mecca for sailors. The main feature of Weymouth is the beach so I took a number of photos of people on the beach, as you do. One of my favourite photographs from the holiday is shown below. I took it using what I call the 'jazz photography' technique. Jazz photography is like an improvisation in jazz where the soloist plays a melody over the backing music - it's spontaneous, free-form, made up on the spot, in the zone, going with the flow etc. you dig daddy-o? Cool dude! I noticed some women with push chairs were going to walk in front of the camera and quick as a flash took a photo as they passed and got lucky, it wasn't planned it was almost instinctive. Part of why I like the picture is because it's 'busy', the composition 'feels' right too. The womens faces stand out nicely and there are some interesting details like the arm nearest the camera, the bags hanging from the pushchairs, the half eaten popsicle, the Union Jack in the background and there's a view of the beach and sea beyond which gives the picture depth. The picture is a kind of snapshot of the British seaside experience. Shoot now crop later Another technique I use is 'shoot now crop later', I use this technique when photographing crowds of people. It's hard to follow what is going on on a busy beach as people are constantly moving, so I take quick snapshots and hope I've captured something interesting, I then crop the image to focus on the parts of the picture I like. I've pasted two photographs below to show this, the first photograph is the image I took, the second image is the cropped and tweaked image. I particulary liked the figure of the woman in the red striped bikini who looks like shes afraid of the water, with her amusing upturned hand gestures. Cropping the image focusses your attention more on her as well as removing unnecessary details. Of course with cropping you can crop the photograph in hundreds of different ways, changing it's format (the shape of the rectangle) or it's orientation (from portrait to landscape) etc.. It's a matter of personal taste but is useful if you don't have time to carefully compose the image or are shooting from the hip, so to speak. Another beach scene below of children playing on the sand, this image is cropped and is an example of the 'shoot now crop later' approach. Below is a wide angle panoramic photo of Weymouth beach, I particularly like the figure of the girl at the bottom of the picture who is 'frozen' running into the picture Below is a photo I took in the morning of some people who were making a fire on the beach, the original photo had some lens flare - because I was pointing the camera into the sun - which caused a purple blob to discolour part of the beach, I got around this by converting the picture to black and white which works quite nicely, it emphasises the differing textures of the stony beach, the sea and the sky. The figures are on the rule of thirds sweet spot although this wasn't planned.
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