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Iconoclash online

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A first version of Teresa and my photography portfolio is online at www.iconoclash.org . It contains a selection of what we think are our best photos. Check it out!

Some comments on photography

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For someone interested in movies and directing in particular I have taken up on photography rather late. Nonetheless I enjoy it a lot now and you can see some of my photos in my photo gallery.

I will use this page to dump some tips I picked up or some random remarks. Some of them are sometimes refered to as rules - of course none of these should be followed blindly, but I have used them with success so they might be of some use for others.

  • When photographing animals, always get down at eye-level with them (or up if you happen to live somewhere where there are taller animals than dogs ;) ). It's amazing how much more empathy a picture carries when shot at eye-level.
  • If you have an SLR camera: buy a fixed focal length lens. My 50 mm lens (which on my digital camera is approx. comparable to a 80 mm lens on a normal 35 mm film camera) is by far my favorite lens. The footwork you have to do because you can't simply zoom in or out is one of the best examples of how constraints act in your favor in art. The second good thing is that they are usually several f-stops faster than their zoom equivalents - this means that you can shoot with available light where you would need a flash with a zoom lens.
  • Go back and forth between shooting every picture you see and constraining yourself to only a very low number of shots. Both methods can teach you a lot - owning a digital camera I was more at home with the first category, but during my big journey last year I ran out of pictures - I was forced to think about the value of every picture because I knew it could be my last.  It was one of the most instructive experiences I have ever had. I heard the opposite from people who started with film, so I can only suggest you try the opposite of what you're used to.

Photos online

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I uploaded a bunch of photos, namely of Lajas wedding, the round the world trip last year with teresa, and teresas birthday brunch in february.

The workflow is pretty annoying, the more I do this the more I see what is wrong in todays photo editing/publishing workflows. I'm gonna write about this in more detail sometime soon, but just to mention some things i deem pretty essential to the sanity of computer users as data quantities keep rising:

  • Metadata that is stored in a generic way (not exif here, xmp there, iptc somewhere else and ipv3 in yet another place)
  • Metadata that is stored independant of the data (there is a reason this is called metadata, you know)
  • Metadata that is indexed centrally by the filesystem
  • Support for walking down whichever transformation road you want (IPTC<->EXIF<->XMP<->something usefull)
  • OS independant libraries to read/process this, with high-level wrappers for a broad range of scripting languages

and so on, but these are the essentials that I see atm. Feel free to comment on this, or suggest possible solutions.

Use the Adobe filebrowser in Photoshop

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Why is it that you always find out about these things after you spent an hour writing a script to work around it? Use the adobe filebrowser in Photoshop - it looks a bit strange if you are used to Windows, but it remembers the last file format, doesn't add " copy" to filenames and it allows drag-n-drop favorites. Neat.

Save as in Photoshop without the stupid copy in the filename

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Photoshop annoyed the heck out of me again today - every time you save an image as a filetype that does not support layers etc it adds " copy" at the end of the filename. Here is a script that saves the currently active document as a png at the same location where the psd file is stored. If you want to save as some other filetype you will have to change the script. Feel free to contact me if it you need help with it!

How to use:

  1. Download and copy it into your Photoshop/Presets/Scripts/ directory
  2. Restart Photoshop
  3. Choose File->Scripts->SaveAsPNG

Developed & tested on Windows XP, Photoshop CS2

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