Strategy on picking photos

For a photographer, the ability to pick his "right" photos is a very important one, be it when satisfying a customer need, presenting a portfolio, entering a contest and such. Having good photos but making poor picks or having not so good photos but clever picks, this can make a difference.

We often face face this dilemma: which photos to pick? I want to share the inner of my mind on how my personal selection worked when submitting photos for the Dragobete photo contest and exhibition. Any such process is open for improvement, so it worth thinkering.

The rule was simple: submit up to 3 pictures fitting the theme, "Dragobete kisses the girls", so kisses, nice gestures, love, relationships and such. I have quite a few of those, so in a first step I made a rough selection of over 20 photos vaguely fitting made in the past year (that's not a contest rule, is may own, submit fresh stuff). Then in a second step I narrowed the selection to 5, which I felt are better. Just for fun, I added one more to this selection, to have 6, two full sets in the case I decide I have split personality and participate twice. Of course I am not split, so had to proceed to final 3 images selection.

I went with images very different in style, theme and technique. One of them is a sunrise, quite cheesy, but such images have usually a big impact with the general audience got decent scores on various photography websites. Another one was street photography in black and white, I knew a majority of the jury are street photographers, they may appreciate that or, by contrary, be more careful when judging it. And the other one was a "rural" one, selected knowing the exhibition take place at the Village Museum and Dragobete is a traditional holiday.

Net result: the "rural" photo in the exhibition. Was my strategy successful? Well, I didn't expect any prize, is highly unlikely one would win something two years in a row. Also, is highly unlikely one would have more than one picture accepted, considering the large number of participants (no one had this year). So, in a word: average.

On a positive note, I could note the placement. Whoever put the pictures on the walls, it happened for my photo to be front and center, at the entrance. Very hard not to be spotted, no matter what happens around. Also, the museum used it in a poster to advertise the exhibition on Facebook. Again, not a hard guess, since the photo was made inside the same museum.

For me, I was somewhat puzzled, I expected the sunrise to have a better score, it scored better in all the places I submitted it, and somewhat disappointed, since it required some advanced editing for which I could write an editing tutorial.

The real disappointment is I have for quite time a few good (I think) photographic ideas in my head for this theme but didn't got yet to shoot them. Maybe next year. Or the year after. Or who knows...

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Black and white

Is the fourth time I participate in the Bucureștiul in alb și negru(Bucharest in black and white) photo exhibition and this time I managed even to get a prize, the 1st place. This is quite a surprise, considering not even 10% of my pictures are published in BW.

However, this is a story behind this photo, all photos should have one, but this one is more complex. Back in January there was a big snow, but caught with some things at home I couldn't get out for photos and was jaded seeing the powerful pictures made by others. Then, a few days later, there was another snowstorm, more powerful and more beautiful. This time I went right out with camera in hand, an opportunity not to miss again.
After half an hour of shooting in the streets of the old city, my camera stopped with a dreaded message "Camera internal temperature is getting too high, can’t take pictures." I had to take it under the coat and warm it for about another half an hour, shoot again half an hour, get the error again, warm it again, shoot some more and then go home.
Another highlight from this adventure: right after clicking this picture, I know I will sent it to the black an white exhibition.

Note: the exhibition is open until the end of this month at Café Verona / Cărturești in Bucharest, where all the photos can be seen.

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Bucharest Art Photographer Salon 2014

Today, 11 January, in Romania is officially celebrated the photography day, this is established in the memory of Carol Popp de Szathmary, the first Romanian photographers and one of the photography pioneers of the world. There is a week ahead full of photography related events and it started today with the fourth edition of the Bucharest Art Photographer Salon.
After last year participation, I submitted photos again this year and three of them were accepted. On top of that, one was rewarded with a honorable mention, that's is, one of the 6 prizes awarded in the salon. Not bad.

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Mother Uța

I meet her a couple of years ago during a trip to old cave monasteries, but I heard stories about Mother Uța even before that. She had her house next to the Corbii de Piatra monastery, a less known but quite famous in some circles touristic place and a few attractions, including a stone raven (Corbii de Piatra means Stone Ravens) is practically in her backyard. So almost everybody visiting the monastery was visiting her too and she was very friendly, talking with the visitors, posing for the photographers and so on.
Today I learned (from the monastery's Facebook page, no less) she is no more. This made me dig from the old pictures from March 2012, find an unpublished one with mother Uța, who at the time was 80, edit and post it. Remembering thing and people is one of the things photography is good for.

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Unexpected encounter

A couple of years ago at the traditional Flowers Day fair I had the chance to meed a nice old lady, she impressed me at the time by telling about her, how she is at the sunset of her live and sad she will not be able to create more. Two years later, today, I saw her again at a Flowers Day fair, she is well and as active as ever. Good thing!

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Event photography portfolio website

It wasn't planned, just happened to be ready now, but is a cute coincidence to launch my event photography portfolio website on the Valentine's Day. Maybe is a sign :) But the important thing is, if you need event photography (be it a wedding, an anniversary, corporate event, spectacle or something else), I am open for commission. For the 2013 wedding season start now, is no much time left until the summer!

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On copyright

The news broke a few days ago: the European Court of Human Rights has declared that the copyright monopoly stands in direct conflict with fundamental Human Rights, as defined in the European Union and elsewhere (read more). At a first look, it sounds like good news for users. A law is a law because people agreed it serves the public interest, and that's the case for copyright too (at least in theory and before corporations and their lobby and money got into play)

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Two for Dragobete

Two of the three pictures I sent made the final selection for the photo exhibition for Dragobete (it's all about love and couples, like a Romanian Valentine's Day). The organizers jumped the gun and announced "the top images to be exposed" but we, the participants, are still supposed and think if we participated and, if one has multiple images, which one (the price is proportional with the number of images). So those are my two pics and I have to make a choice: two, one or none? I will surely participate and kind of like the second better.

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Kill the pig! We are not a colony!

Something struck me when photographing a traditional pig butchering, a guy told me with pride "Europe should not tell us how to kill the pig!" (background: European Union tries to impose rules for sacrifices of animals raised in rural households, Romanian peasants refuse due to convenience and price increase).
That is the key to read many recent [in/e]volutions in our society: populist politicians protesting "we are not a colony" when EU tries to push us into civilization, modernization, morals or anti-corruption: we keep the old ways, killing the animals with our hands (and eating their blood), we elect known corrupt politicians and delinquent to rule the country.
And then we drink and wait for an elusive deity to save us all. Welcome to Romania!

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Photo editing tutorials

Lately I wrote on my general blog a couple of photo editing tutorials, both of them are targeted at GIMP, since this is what I use on my day to day work. Of course, the principles are general and can be applied to other similar tools.

The first one is about watermark removal on photos submitted to Wikipedia, this is something perfectly legal, since those pictures are submitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

The second tutorials refers to creating customs grids to be used on photo editing but also in graphic and layout design.

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Purple haze tutorial

I rarely cross-post things from one of my blogs to another, but now my sarcastic howto edit photos for an iPhone 5 look is somewhat on-topic here, so if you want to make a bit of fun about the defective iPhone camera while learning a tiny bit of GIMP editing, go read it.

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Halfway

The first half of the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 is done: photo submission ended, not is the time for the second half, jury enters the action to select the winners.

So far it exceeded the expectations, in Romania we collected over 8750 images from about 270 participants, a significant increase from around 5800 images in the previous year. The international contest is also well, the grand total is over 360000 images and still counting (some imports are undergoing), more than double compared with the previous year.

Some serious ass kicking happened!

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On religion and my photos

If there is one thing I try hard to avoid is being a hypocrite, this is why I question myself often. Now is one of those times :)

I deeply and sincerely believe religion is evil but I do photography, contributing to things like Wiki Loves Monuments I take and publish a lot of pictures of churches, monasteries and various other religious things and I also take photos at events like weddings and baptisms, where religion is a very important side. I know churches and monasteries are the bulk of historical monuments here (in medieval times very little culture happened in Romania outside the religion) and I know the society make the religious part that important in life events, but still feel a bit uneasy.

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The Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition

In only a few days the Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition is starting: from 1 to 30 September everyone is invited to submit too Wikimedia Commons pictures of the historical monuments in the country, they will be used to enrich Wikipedia with facts about our country.
The top 10 pictures from Romania will be awarded prizes and will go for the international contest, with its own round of prizes.

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On Ars

I learned today about one of my CC licensed pictures being used on Ard Technica on an article about software patents. Of course the usage is properly made, with credits and linking back, that's how it is supposed to be (still not perfect, they didn't say CC-BY-SA about the picture, but that is said on the link they provide).

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Referendum

The political situation in Romania turned as bad as expected, with the democratically elected president suspended by a rogue government and we are heading for a referendum this Sunday. Fortunately, the European Commission acted and made the government to respect the law (the government tried to put a government order in place of the law and eliminate the presence threshold for the referendum), so in the light of this, the most effective way to act against it, Romanians who want to preserve the democracy have as the best option to boycott the referendum, this way it will be invalidated in the case of a small voter turnover. Hopefully, the fraud won't change the numbers from a projected 30% presence to the 50%+1 they need.
In support of the democratic action, I made a few images based on my old photos encouraging people to avoid a communist future for the country by boycotting the referendum.
Personally, I won't vote and on top of that I will be out of the city for the next few days, I am going to the sea side (expect pictures).

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Activism

Until this week I believe I never did politics on this blog, so is natural for the reader to wonder why I become active in this area so suddenly, do I plan a new career or received some incentives? That's not the case.
I believe in freedom and freedom of speech, I want to live in a modern and democratic society. And for those to happen, there is the need for a free press, which is lacking in my country:

• the public television is controlled by the government coalition, USL, they recently changed the management and filled the directory council only with their people (before it used to represent the political spectrum proportionally;
• the largest media group is owned by Dan Voiculescu a leader of the government coalition who is also known as a member of the secret police in the former communist dictatorship and is tried for corruption (the trial was nearing a verdict which was delayed by maneuvers of his government);
• Another media group supporting the government is owned by Sorin Ovidiu Vantu, who is currently imprisoned for blackmailing a former business partner;
• other media groups are controlled by politicians and businessmen close to the governing coalition, like Dinu Patriciu.

In such conditions, if one want the truth to be heard, it has to bypass the traditional media and put the reality directly on the internet, where those powers can't reach it and alter the truth. Traditional media is bought and full of lies, always hired to follow someone's agenda. We are free.

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Basescu

Later today the communist coalition controlling the government and the parliament will move to impeach the democratically elected president, Traian Basescu. He will be suspended from his function until a national referendum.
I think this particular impeachment is a bad thing for a number of reasons, I think he was the best post-revolutionary president, but this does not means much, since the others were absolutely awful, he did a lot of mistakes and bad things, but at least under his mandate also happened positive things like the country had at least an independence of powers in the state (legislative, executive, justice), the press was free (unlike the previous regime) and we had, for the first time in history a formal condemnation of the former communist dictatorship (while that is not much, is infinitely more than the previous regimes).
So I am not a fan of the president, but I think for the moment he is the best alternative. This slogan from yesterday's meeting at Piața Revoluției are very close to my own position "I don't cry for Basescu, I cry for the rule of law and constitutional order".

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My photos in Cancan (no license, no credit, no nothing)

Cancan is one of the most known local tabloids focusing on celebrities and such stuff (to judge its level, the article I am talking about here is about a Facebook fight between a dancer and the nephew of a rich guy) and I just discovered back this January they used a couple of my photos for an article, here's a screen capture from their website:

Obviously, they had no legal right to post them, neither from the photographer (me), nor the model (Alicia), it looks like they just lifted the images from a Facebook album of mine (stupid them, they could have obtained better quality from the g+ equivalent album) (the model has also a copy, but she put on her profile only one of the two images used by the tabloid).

On the legal side, the photos on Facebook are just put there, so they are full protected by copyright, according with the Romanian law. On Picasaweb/Google Plus, where there is such an option, I have put them under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike, which still require an user (Cancan in this case) to credit the author and keep the license. Is true I did a mistake: forgot to add a watermark, which I do with images like this which are likely to be misuses, but the presence of a watermark was no influence on the law and copyright (copyright is applied by default) and the tabloid modified the crop anyway. They act like everything is online is free to use, which is false but used by other media outlets from the entire world.

So what I am doing next? Nothing, I won't sue the tabloid (probably they expect that much, people to be busy with other things to sue them), but I will post the pictures here, for reference and for people to be able to see the original, compared with the tabloid editing. I do like to share content and I do it all the time, but under the rules I want, which means most of the time a Free license.

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Retro

I genuinely hate the way people damage their phone-taken photos with crappy effects made with Instagram, so last weekend when I took part in a photo hunt in the Cișmigiu Park under the "Retro" theme, I was really unhappy with the requirements: put your camera to shoot on sepia and gives the photos like that. Why I consciously damage my photos by permanently erasing the color information? But those were the rules...

We had 7 points we had to cover, all with pompous names, and in the end my team selected my pictures in 4 cases, they were as such: easy reading

The tree from the water

Crețulescu Alley panorama

and Sun under the bridge

The pictures weren't that good, the team didn't win anything, however in the end my team mate Laura won the special prize for the best picture (sorry, her picture for in the shadow of the lost time is not online at the time of this writing).

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