The Visual Life 1

Iowa Public Television did a segment in 2009 on how a person should approach their photography in relation to the large Iowa State Fair Photography Salon. Here's part 1. The message is always the same, look for moments that evoke an emotional response in the viewer.

How to shoot the Human Cannonball

Here's one from the archive. On the Grand Concourse of the Iowa State Fair, a crowd gathers, a dare devil is loaded into a howitzer and blasted through the air into a net. One photo doesn't do the trick and a series of photos would not tell the story. It happens almost too fast for video. But a still photographer, who knows how to work in layers and blending can make it work. Anyone want to know how?

PowerShots Outtake Theatre

These are some outtakes from an episode of PowerShots, the television program I hosted on Mediacom's Connections channel from 2006 - 2008. This was from a trip to South Dakota. My daughter Emilia is the camera operator.

Image Prep #2 - Save a TIF and working in curves

So now I have a properly sized (10" by 200 Pixels per Inch) and I want to save an uncompressed photo. By compressing in a JPEG format (which is necessary later) we degrade the image by adding compression artifacts. We'll cover this later on. 
So I save the image (with a date on it) in a TIF format, a non-compressing format.

And don't let the program fool you. Do not compress. This is your golden copy of the golden puppy.


Now it's time to do some very simple toning of the image. Toning should be for brightness, contrast and color balance. One tool in Adobe PhotoShop allows me to get the image in the ballpark. This is art more than science. I have a color profile loaded into my machine, but that's for another day. Usually people use some akin to Adobe 1998.


I pull from the top menu IMAGE > ADJUST> CURVES. I simple lighten or darken the image by pushing the line in the middle of the graph. Never move the top point or the bottom very far as they are your black and white points and you don't want to give up too much native information. I'll nudge one point back and forth to punch up the contrast.

I also notice that the puppy is a bit too yellow (photographed under incandescent lights) so I go to the neutral (gray) dropper under the graph and start clicking around that black and white background until some of that color cast is gone and the puppy is close to his native color.

Image Prep #1

For the next few days I'll be giving you good basic information on how to use the basics in preparing a digital image. I'll be using Adobe PhotoShop but all the techniques can be used in any other basic imaging program. Remember you can always click on the image and it will enlarge if you are having trouble reading some of the windows as I use PhotoShop.

First things first, open up the image and make sure you can find the tools. Then I make sure the image is cropped the way I want it. Then I save the image to somewhere other than the disk with the original. We'll name this Gordon with Brush. 2.21.11.jpg

Notice that I always use a date, so I can find the image with ease later on.

Now we're ready to size the image so it can be printed at a standard, 8x10" size, and stored as a JPEG image and accessed for the web, or e-mailing, any format you wish.

 The image is now 10" at its largest dimension and 200 pixels per inch.

Sometimes when the image is resized like this it will blow up too big for viewing on the screen like this:

A simple double-click (in photoshop and adobe elements) on the hand tool and the image will fill the screen perfectly.

Now we're ready to start working the image over. My philosophy on image preparation and processing is to never mess with the veracity of the image, but when you shoot a picture, it is the equivalent of a composer writing the musical score. What you do in PhotoShop (or whatever tool you choose to use) it is your interpretation as you perform the music.

This is going to be fun.

Major Website Overhaul

When you visit our website, www.madhausgallery.com you'll find it easier to find just about anything. It also sports a cleaner, freshier feel. Let us know what you think.

Idiomatic Grass

As a boy, when I would become bored and restless with my life, sooner or later my mother would say, "Well, the grass is always green on the other side of the fence." In the case of this grass, it hasn't been green for months.
I still get restless and bored. When I am not seeing or imagining anything interesting to photograph, I simply change my point of view, maybe lie down in the middle of something and look up. 
From this angle, the grass is certainly taller.

Super Bowl Past

Over ten years ago I took this photo at the Super Bowl, the final play between St. Louis and Tennessee where the Titans came a yard short of the endzone.

A while back I was in Barnes & Noble bookstore and found the photo on the cover of a book. I shot this photo while a staff photographer for The Associated Press, so no royalties.

Stillmunks Painting Class

Master painter John Stillmunks runs an acrylic painting class at Madhaus Gallery, Thursday night, Feb. 17, 2011.

Stillmunks is coming!

 Master painter John Stillmunks is holding a class at our Gallery in Winterset tonight. Last week he helped the beginning painters explore their canvas and to find what it wanted them to paint. He has a very interesting process. Whimsy is never far away from his acrylic paintings.
He operates the Independent Thought Gallery, now located in Valley Junction on 402 Maple St..
Above his a tray of colors he uses as his palette. My daughter looked at it once and said, "It's looks like clown vomit." John took it in good humor.

You Can Also Find Me Here

For the very first time, my work is available to purchase online. The shop is open.  www.etsy.com, under sellers search for MadhausGallery.

Warming the sky at the right time of day

Once again, during the winter, if you want to make a pleasing picture in nature, warming the sky with a strobe just off to the side will do the trick. Right at dusk is the right time.

Storming Last Summer

The warm weather reminds me of a storm last summer. Took these photos, first chasing what looked like a funnel cloud, and then a lightning strike, from the car heading east of Winterset right around dusk. It scares my wife when I take pictures of storms while driving. What can you do? Photography is an affliction you don't get over.

Painting with light #2

Happy Valentine's Day. Here's my Valentine Robin during Christmas a few years ago. Once again, flash off the camera to the side, totally dark room and some spinning Christmas lights. It's easy!

Painting With Light #1

Here is one of my favorite fun ways to have fun with a flashlight, an off camera strobe and a boring photo set-up. This was during a class for the Iowa Newspaper Association a few years back. For the next couple of days I'll throw a few of these out there. It's nothing new, Life Magazine had a photo of Picasso painting with light.

Here's a link: http://rockphotographers.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/light-painting-picasso.jpg

Here's a simple way you can punch up a standard event. It's not very journalistic, but can be fun in classroom situations. You must be able to make the room very dark and have the camera on a tripod. More later...

Sitting in the Car with Gordon and iPhone

Sitting in the car with Gordon. He is one year old and my best friend and companion on four legs. We were waiting for my wife Robin to come out of the dentist's office so here's a result of our playing. A nice self portrait, made possible by the flip screen mode on my iPhone 4. Oh wow is this a nice camera, still and video. I'm not a huge gadget guy, but the phone is as good as many cheaper SLR's in a pinch.

While waiting I tried the camera up close, almost macro and here is the result of a Zippo lighter in my car. That's about 2" and the clarity is terrific. I love macro photography and we'll get into the water droplets you can find on my website  www.madhausgallery.com. What I'd like to see from someone else is fun thing's they've done with their phones.

Art & Craft Shows Tomorrow

Tomorrow I'll be teaching a class in how to join the festival Arts & Crafts Shows community. I'll tell the students about how to show and sell their work with a warning about the weather sometimes encountered in outdoor shows. Above you see hail in Edina, Minnesota in 2009.

The two pictures above are about the damage done by 90 mph staight line winds, that same year, in Omaha, Nebraska. I'll be sure to sing the praises of sand bags for tent weights.

The Emilia Wants A Cool Senior Photo solution.

I'll do a video of this if someone needs it. A gray, cloudy day is an opportunity to punch things up if you simply have the ability to get your flash off of the camera. Either a flash cord that plugs into your hot shoe or, better yet, an infrared remote trigger. (See graphic). The remote talks to the strobe, telling it what the camera is set for and the triggers and measures the flash for a perfect exposure.

But I didn't want an exposure that worked with the light. I wanted to overpower the light. So... I metered the ambient light on Emilia (at 200 ISO, 1/60th @ f8. Then I set me camera on manual and jumped my shutter speed to 1/250th, which made for a two stop underexposure. But since I had my camera on manual, the trigger told the strobe to give me f8. The sky went darker and Emilia jumped out of the background. Also, but holding the flash at a 60-degree angle, off to the side, I got some nice separation and a bold image.

In one of our Photo Safari classes at Madhaus Gallery I try this technique on a cloudy day. Here's an example from a recent class.

I have started this string with hopes that you'll add to the conversation with examples. Later on I'll talke about the importance of spelling... just kidding. I'll talk about the importance of slowing the shutter in a punch flash situation to help give some life to wedding receptions, etc..

Let's Get Started

Hi Mom!

I've set up this blog site for all my friends (past, current and future), students (former and future), colleagues and visitors who share the same visual affliction for photography and other visual arts. We'll share, discuss and experiment with different visual approaches, mostly based on digital photography, but my control of the subject matter and direction of the conversation most certainly won't last very long.

To kick things off, Theme 1: What can I do when it's gray and cloudy and Emilia needs "Something completely different for my senior photo."
My solution is upcoming.