Creative Photography Workshops in New York City

I have scheduled three different creative photographic workshops in New York City for August and September.  The first, Shooting City Night Skyline, will be held on August 15 and September 12.  The second workshop, Night Street Photography – NYC, will be on August 24 and September 14 and finally, Creating Art with your Camera is scheduled for August 11 and September 8.

Each Workshop is limited in size to six (6) participants.  Space will go quickly. So reserve your spot!  For more information and to sign up, go here: http://bradrickerby.photoshelter.com/page1

Thanks

New York City Night Skyline Workshop

Brad Rickerby Workshop #1

For more information, please contact me at brad@bradrickerby.com.

Shooting City Night Skylines – New York City

Images created from shooting under the Brooklyn Bridge

Date:  Thursday August 15, 2013
Time:   From 6:30 to 9:30 ish PM.
Location:  Under the Brooklyn Bridge
Size:  Limited to six (6) participants.
Cost: $125, payable in advance by Paypal (see link below).

For all levels from beginner to advanced.  The workshop will emphasize individual attention and creativity. It will cover the essential basics, such as exposure compensation for low light shooting, composing to create drama and the like.  The workshop will also discuss and demonstrate several advanced techniques that are unique to shooting skylines at night.

The Workshop is limited in size to six participants so there will be ample individual attention.

The best time to shoot starts at around dusk.  Starting at around 6:30 PM, I will give a presentation and take questions. Around 7:15 to 7:30 set up starts and you should be ready to shoot by 8:00, when the lights starts getting to its best.  Shooting will continue for as long as you want (I will leave, however, at 10:00 PM).

You will need to have a working knowledge of your camera and a tripod is strongly recommended.  Apart from that you need need to bring is a desire to create great images.

More images created from under the Brooklyn Bridge

Up Coming Workshops in NYC

I will be holding a number of on location, one day workshops in New York City on Shooting at Night, Creating Art with Your Camera (not Photoshop), and on shooting City Skylines. The workshops will be in August and September 2013, will have a limit of 6 people and will be priced at $125.00

I will post more information shortly. If you want information more quickly, please contact me at brad@bradrickerby.com.

I am an Award Winner!!!!

6th Annual Photography Masters Cup Winner 2013

Looks like I am a winner in the 6th Annual Photography Masters Cup.  For the floral image in my last post actually!

Yellow Glaze – Fine Art Floral Photography

Painters and artists in many media, such as oil, acrylic and watercolor paint, will often add a colorful glaze of paint to their works. This final touch can make dramatic color shifts and realignments in the painting.

I could have, I suppose, used a yellow filter to replicate a glaze effect, but I have always eschewed filters. They look artificial. The same is true for adding color in photoshop. I went the natural route. I spread a layer of vibrant yellow flowers over my composition of hibiscus, iris and dahlia.

The yellow, by the way, is a complimentary color to both the violet in the dahlia and the purple in the iris.

I think we can learn a great deal from our brothers in art, the painters (and vis versa).

The technical specs for this image are as follows, ISO 200, f 7.1 at 1/125 th of a second with an EV of + 1.33. I used the same old 50 mm f 2.5 macro lens.

Pastel Strokes – by Brad Rickerby

More flowers torn apart in the name of art. At dinner with my brother and sister-in-law over the weekend, the title “Flowers Deconstructed” was suggested for this project. I think it works.

In this image I focused more on shapes than on anything else, which is why two of the flower types were not “deconstructed. I thought there shapes were more interesting as whole flower parts. I was ruthless, however, with two spider mums so that I could get the long thin “line” shapes in complementary colors.

The idea for this composition came about in a florists, where I had gone to sell greeting cards, when I saw the mums in complimentary colors, just waiting to be purchased. I saw that they would make an excellent background for a shape study.

This image was created with a 50 mm f 2.5 lens set at f 7.1. The camera was set at 200 ISO, with a 1/200th of a second shutter speed and an EV of +1.67. The EV setting comes from where the spot meter in my camera sees the image.

In this photo, the light reading was taken in a dark area.  Thus I had to increase the EV.  If the spot meter read part of the white background, the EV would be set lower, probably in the negative.  There are a number of different ways to handle the light coming from the light box. This is the way I find easiest.

Fire! A Red Hot Floral Photograph

I consider this photograph just as much art as it is photo. Note that there is only one small spot in the image that is in focus, the center of the tightly spiraled flower in the upper right quadrant.  From there, the rest of the image falls off from being a little soft to an out of focus blob of bright color. The tightly focused part of the image allows us to identify this as a photograph of flowers. By allowing the focus to drift off, we can experience the image more and more as a perception of color and as an emotion. We are not forced to recognize all of the picture as flowers, although we know it is.

This is just one of many ways of making your image more emotional. Strong emotions can, of course, be created through tack sharp focus through out an image. I just prefer to create mine while letting the mind wander. This approach does require more mental activity on the part of the viewer.

The image was created with a 50 mm f 2.5 macro lens. The camera was set at ISO 200, 1/200 th of a second with an EV of +0.6667. The aperture was  f 3.5.

For those of you interested, the flower is a ranunculus.  I consider these a most photogenic flower.

Really Really Close – The Thing About Macro – Fine Art Photography

The thing about using a macro lens in photography is that there are so very many things you can do with it. You can vary the subject, of course, as well as how close you get to that subject. Since people rarely look as closely at an object as does the macro photo of that object, the macro photo generally presents a whole new world to its viewer. So just using a macro lens gets attention for the image you create.

But go one step further. Use the macro lens itself creatively, to create impressions, to create art, rather than just to document reality.

One of the best known characteristics of the macro lens is its shallow depth of field, no matter what the f-stop used. This image of several daffodils shows how you can put this characteristic to use creatively.

By putting just a little part of on stamen of one flower in focus (and this not in the expected part of the image, where dictated by the rule of thirds) I have created the suggestion of daffodils, similar to what an impressionist might have painted. And this with a f-stop of 6.3 (at 200 ISO and at 1/100 th of a second).

Creating Textures – Fine Art Photography

Moving along in the flower series, I realize that the combination of flower petal types has an infinite variety. I can use, not only combinations of petals of the same type flower, but combinations of petals from a number of different flowers as well. With different types of flowers come different transparencies, shapes and colors, but textures as well. All of these can be combined to lead the eye through your creation. The classic forms of painting can be applied to the photograph. Indeed, this image could be taken for textured washes of blue watercolor with opaque white gouache strokes that stop the eyes movement and guides it to the subject of the painting (err, photograph).

There is more, much more, that I want to do with this technique.

I am going to go more traditional tomorrow (or soon) and put Columbine petals against a black background and shoot them with an off camera strobe bounced against an umbrella.  I would not want to stop trying different things!

Photo of the Day

I admit to having been so busy working on my new floral series that I have neglected my blog postings. So here is one of the images from that series. I am sure you will be seeing more soon.