Supermodel Cleavage Trumps Good Photography

I was walking through my local shopping center one evening last week when I was stopped in my tracks by this Skullcandy poster in the window of the Tilly's store. What stopped me was not the model (is this a sign I'm getting old?), but the poor photography. It is not a very well done photograph. There are numerous things that I consider wrong with this poster and if I had taken this shot, I would have discarded it during my initial selection process. Here are a few of the things I think are wrong

• Pig Nose - Kate has her head tilted back and the photograph was shot at a slight upward angle, resulting in a very unattractive nose. This alone should have sent this photo to the discard pile.
• Reflections of the studio lights in the balloons. I find these extremely distracting and would have either rejected the photo of cloned them out. 
• Blown out hair on top of her head. Although my cell phone shot here doesn't do it justice, the whole photo was poorly exposed.
• You can hardly see the product! In fact, I did not see the headphones until after I had read all the text then gone back to the photo. Some say that might be OK, because I did read the text, however, I think you should have both.

 Apparently the Art Director was judging the photos by how great Kate's boobs looked and all the other stuff was secondary. Supermodel Cleavage trumps a good photo.

To give the Art Director credit I did find other shots from this shoot that are much nicer photographically. Here is one from Skullcandy's Facebook page. I'm just shocked that this one made the cut.

22 Useful Photography Cheat Sheets

Here is a post on PhotoPoly where they have compiled a list of photography cheat sheets. Some great stuff here. 

http://www.photopoly.net/22-useful-photography-and-photo-editing-cheat-sheets/

Steal Like An Artist - The Book

A year ago I did a blog post about an article on Austin Kleon's web site where talked about 10 ways to unlock your creativity. He has now expanded on this idea and written a book called "Steal Like an Artist". I stumbled across this book while in the bookstore and have thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a relatively quick read but it is packed with ideas on how to be more creative and how to channel your energy in your creative endeavors.

I highly recommend it. 

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Have You Registered Your Photos?

In the past few weeks I've had several photographer friends who have had their photos stolen and in one case one was put on a stock photography site. Neither of these photographers had registered their photos so the only recourse they really have is to request the photo to be taken down, but they will unlikely ever recover any money.

I've been meaning to register my photos with the US Copyright Office for the past year, but I kept putting it off. These incidents made me decide it was time to do it. However I wasn't quite sure how to proceed. I had heard some good things about this book and decided to give it a try.

Photographer's Survival Manual: A Legal Guide for Artists in the Digital Age (Lark Photography Book) by Edward Greenberg and Jack Reznicki

It's an easy and quick read that describes copyright law and why you should register your photos. But the most valuable part of the book was a step-by-step walk through of submitting your photos to the copyright web site. The web site is not the most intutive or user friendly site and without the walk-through I would have been lost at several points during the submission process. It took about 20 minutes the first time through, but now that the initial information has been filled out it should only take a couple of minutes for the next submission. 

The most time consuming part was compiling all my images to upload. I only registered images that had been published, which includes anything put in public view on my web site, Flickr, message boards, etc. That ended up being just over a thousand images going back to 2001. 

My plan going forward is to register my photos every quarter. This should be a good trade-off between protection and finding the time to do it.

I highly recommend the book and recommend you register your photos.

Improving Content Aware Fill

Photoshop CS5 added the feature Content Aware Fill which is an amazing tool which I use quite often. However with certain images it often has difficulties and I end up having to do a lot of manual cleanup after using Content Aware Fill.

I recently came across this video by Dave Cross where he shows a great technique for improving Content Aware Fill. I've tried it a few times now and have been impressed with how easy it is and how it addresses the problems I had been having. Give it a try.

Make Content Aware Fill even Better from Dave Cross on Vimeo.