Tag Archives: projects

Jan 18

Have fun experimenting with white balance tweaks

Did you know that white balance is the quickest way to turn your camera into an InstaLomoCrosstography machine?

This tutorial is a fun, simple way to play with colour a la Instagram or Lomography without any apps or chemicals!

All you need to do is take the correct white balance and set it to the “wrong” white balance to get sweet shifts in tones and colours.

We put together a guide on exactly what kind of colour shifts you’ll get with each setting. No Android-based technology here. You can do it all with the settings your camera already has!

Create Sweet White Balance Experiments

Why it’s cool:

ingred-smDid you know that your brain has magic colour changing abilities? Well, sort of.

Your brain can’t change it’s own colour (bummer!), but it does an awesome job at making sure the colour white always looks that way. In other words, our brains are stuck in Auto White Balance.

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Apr 24

She can leap tall buildings – can you?

Today I’m sharing with you the creatively clever work of Heidi Lender, leaper of tall buildings!

Of this series, Heidi says:

I humbly nod to all the superwomen of the world, especially my mother, who amazingly do it all.

I think Heidi’s imaginatively quirky compositions make for fun viewing and I imagine she had a lot of fun making them too… I hope you enjoy these as much as I did!

The LoverThe Lover

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Mar 15

Discover the wonders of pinhole photography

Wishing Trees pinhole image

The Wishing Trees
image ⓒ SWS

I love pinhole photography – it’s easy and such fun!

In fact, the above photograph’s one of my first attempts with a pinhole camera… but what exactly is a pinhole camera, you may ask?

A pinhole camera is a camera without a conventional glass lens. Instead, an extremely small hole in a thin material is used to focus light rays from an object onto light-sensitive paper or film.

The shutter of a pinhole camera usually consists of a manually-operated flap that covers the pinhole. There’s no viewfinder, and the ideal exposure is a bit of an experiemental guessing game – just part of what makes pinhole photography such fun!

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Feb 1

Picture this: Australia’s green desert

The saturating rains of La Nina have had an extraordinary impact on the Australian landscape, the firey reds and earthy browns for which this sunburnt country’s interior is so renowned replaced by expanses of green which hum with life.

With a longstanding interest in environmental photojournalism, photographer Peter Elfes has spent the past three years documenting the amazing transformation in a series called Green Desert.

This photographic essay reflects the significant value of photography in highlighting the critical importance of preserving our natural heritage.

Of his work, Peter explains:

To me photography is an art in observation. I see the abstract forms of nature, like nature’s poetry and the more time I spend in nature, the more I understand her poetry.

Here are some sample images from Peter’s gorgeous series:

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Jan 21

The largest & most sophisticated camera in the world!

Vanishing Cultures – An American Portrait is an amazing year-long project which will use the largest and most sophisticated camera in the world.

The project will produce a series of documentaries capturing individual portraits, unique languages and accents, regional music and landscapes of vulnerable cultures – Eskimos, Native Americans, cowboys, Cajuns and more.

It will use a camera like no other…

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Jan 13

Take a photograph, pass it on: The Disposable Memory Project

The Disposable Memory Project

The Disposable Memory Project is a fascinating global photography experiment founded and curated by Matthew Knight.

Disposable cameras are left in public locations around the world, each accompanied by an invitation to its finder to shoot some images and then pass the camera on to someone else. At the end of its journey, the camera is returned to Knight and his team, who upload the captured photos to share with project followers.

So far, since April 2008, the team’s visited over 70 countries, released over 350 cameras, and travelled over 700,000 kilometres – that’s almost to the moon and back!

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Dec 5

Personal style or self-repetition?

When does personal style morph into self-repetition?

My query paraphrases one posed by Varga in his book Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers, but it’s obviously equally relevant for us as photographers.

In pondering the dilemma, I was reminded of an overseas photographer whose work I followed with interest for quite some time. The photographer lived in a struggling rural settlement, home to marginalised people with few worldly goods. Their faces were furrowed with the hardships of their lived experience, and they made wonderful subjects for the photographer’s lens.

The resulting head-and-shoulder portraits were powerfully emotive, the solemn demeanour and direct unsmiling gaze of the subjects thrown into sharp relief against incongruously bright-coloured backgrounds. Technically the images were very good, and the photographer’s engagement with the subjects was clear.

The photographer’s personal style of portraiture was instantly recognisable, even from small thumbnails in mixed online galleries. So recognisable in fact, that I felt somewhat guilty when I realised I’d become bored with the work, despite its obvious merit, and I soon stopped following their portfolio. It seemed to me the photographer’s personal style had morphed into self-repetition.

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