Art and Photography Blog

Submit Your Photos to Shots Magazine and Onexposure

If you have great photos here are two sites for you. If you like to look at great photos also check them out. Here are two sites that you can submit photos for publication. I heard about Shots Magazine, an “independent, edgy and fascinating publication” from Akos Szilvasi, a great portrait photographer who is leading a portrait photography discussion group I hope to get a chance to attend.

Ed Friedman introduced the group to Onexposure. As he write, “One submits photos and is either accepted for publication on the site or not. The screening is process interesting. There is a panel of screeners who look at all submissions. They can accept or reject a photo. If they are on the fence, they throw it out to their members to vote for or against publication. If you get rejected (as I mostly do!)you do get some feedback as to why. If you disagree with a decision of the screeners you can appeal. Also, if rejected one can post the image to a forum to see what other viewers think of the image. I have done that several times and gotten good feedback from other members. It is free to join.” Ed also has a great photo site himself.

Great Transformed Fall Leaves Photo

Here is a wonderful transformed photo by Jeff Clow. Thanks to Mick Mather for proving the link. The artist used a "posterize filter embedded within Photoshop Elements 5.0 to remove some of the detail and to focus on the primary colors within the medley.”

Daily Dozen Photos from National Geogaphic

Here is a nice source of photos. It is photo editor Susan Welchman's daily selections, the Daily Dozen. From
the Daily Dozen, two photos will be published monthly in National Geographic magazine.

Akos Szilvasi - Photos of People

Recently, I went to an event of the Cambridge Art Association and saw the photographs of Akos Szilvasi. They have a very direct quality. Akos said he often crops off the top of heads to focus more on the eyes and mouth were there is much more information. You see this in the four portraits on his opening page. He talked mostly about black and white and explained the digital process for black and white photography.  With digital you have to start with color but then you can take the color out.

Akos puts his subjects in front of a white background to focus only on them. He takes the picture vertically to make the most of the pixels but then adds white on either side to create a horizontal format. Akos said he does this as we see the world horizontally.

Akos also has a blog, Invitation to discussion: Portraits: How Do We Photograph People?  It is nice to see the complementary web site and blog with the blog providing more of the back story.  He needs more entries in the blog as Akos has a lot of interesting things to say.

Great Photo Blog and More - Louisiana Flava

Here is a blog on one of my favorite topics, Louisiana food and culture. I learned about it from a cooment on this blog. New Orleans is my home town and I frequently return. There are many photos of the city on this blog. Louisiana Flava with the tag line, “At the end of the day in Cajun country still fulfilling a passion,” covers the area south and west of the city. I often went fishing there with my father in the 1950s. Roxie Broussand provides a beautiful blog with great photos.

I loved the post and pictures of figs. We used to have a large fig tree in our backyard. I would pick them and my mother ma fig preserves that I sold at a street stand in front of our house. I sold out in one day. Rexie provides some recipes along with several photos of the figs.

There is also a wonderful post and pictures on oysters and Dupuis Oyster Bar in Abbeville. It also includes photos of shrimp boats. We used to go down to the docks in NOLA and get fresh shrimp form the boats. I assume that you can still do this if the docks in NOLA survived Katrina. I know that much of the west end was blown away.

Photography as Narrative: Ashes and Snow

Here is a beautiful and interesting web site. Ashes and snow is an art project that looks at the relationship of animals and people. It combines photography, art installations, and a novel. Gregory Colbert is the photographer who has worked around the world on this project. It aims to integrate people with the other animals. Highly recommended. They also sell art work on their site. A nomadic museum has been built to house the project as it travels to places such as Venice, New York, and Santa Monica, California. It will be in Tokoyo from March to June 2007.

New Web 2.0 Ways to Share Your Travel Photos

I have a lot of travel photos on this blog. Here are some other ways to use features of the new web to share your photos and learn from others who have already been to where you might want to go. The New York Times recently had an interesting article, Practical Traveler: Sharing Photographs Online, in which you covered some of the ways the new web allows you to share your photos more effectively and use those of others to enhance your travel plans. As they wrote, “photo-sharing sites like Yahoo’s Flickr.com and SmugMug.com have begun to let users add another dimension to their travel photos. Through a technology called geotagging, users can add G.P.S. data to their pictures, which can then be plotted on a digital map. This not only allows users to see exactly where a photo was taken, but, when uploaded to an Internet map, users can also quickly browse a trove of photos that were taken nearby, providing a kind of scattershot collage of a place.”

It is still a bit geeky to use these features but I am sure they will get easier. More your can go to these sites and search for photos of your travel destinations to see what they are really like. It can get very specific, “Plotting photos on maps also allows trip planners to “see” the terrain before booking a trip. On Everytrail.com — which lets users upload geocoded photos from their favorite hiking trails, biking routes and sailing trips — visitors can check out sights along a specific driving route in Namibia, or examine trail conditions on a hilly bike route near Palo Alto, Calif.”

This could easily be another area of accelerated business activity for Web 2.0. As the NYT wrote, “ Last month, Google announced plans to acquire Panoramio.com, a photo-sharing site with more than two million images that allows users to integrate photos into Google Earth. And as photo-sharing continues to evolve, travel Web sites are recognizing how valuable images can be when users essentially act as free contributors and submit their own pictures.”

These features can certainly increase the stickiness for web site. “Zoomandgo.com, a travel review site, recently redesigned its site around photos and videos submitted by travelers. A team of four people spent months “geocoding” thousands of hotels and attractions so that user-photos can be displayed on digital maps. A new social-networking feature also allows users to create their own travel profiles, connect with like-minded travelers, and swap tips through photos. “Facebook meets Frommers” is how Jonathan Haldane, the founder of Zoomandgo.com, described it. Before the social-networking feature went up, he said, users spent about eight minutes on the site, mostly reading or posting hotel reviews. Now, he said, users spend an average of 18 to 19 minutes, sending messages to each other and browsing through photos and videos.”

That is a great concept for any site that wants to keep people there. It is like getting lost in YouTube.

Michael Schmitt Photography Site

My cousin, Michael Schmitt, is a professional photographer living in Portland Oregon. I was impressed with his site, especially the travel photos, and wanted to pass on this link to Michael Schmitt Photography. I enjoyed seeing all the interesting places he has been. I also like his photo style and the simplicity of his site.

Provence Photos - Howard Dinnin

Howard Dinnin writes the blog, Per Diem. He posted some good photos hear his place in Provence, Late Fall in Fox-Amphoux 2006. Take a look

Flickr Photography Methods

Flickr is a great source to share your photos. Look at this nice use of graphics. As the What Can We Do With Flickr? post says, “This cluttered desk represents just a small set of powerful ways you can use Flickr. This image has been annotated with "notes", so as you move a mouse over hotspot areas, pop-up messages will appear, some of them with links that can take you elsewhere.” Here is another excellent post on Top Ten Hacks on Flickr by Thomas Hawks. I also love the graphic here collecting multiple photos. He males an important point, “Flickr is that because of their open API a whole host of developers have built more and more interesting things to do with the site. It's interesting to me today that so many of the ways that I use Flickr are not even through the site as designed by Yahoo, but instead through the work of outside developers who are constantly creating new and interesting ways to experience the site.” This is one of the key success factors for Google, Google Maps, and Amazon. The Flickr people paid attention. Here are some further readings the What Can We Do With Flickr? Post recommended. How to Flickr Intro by Ben Bishop Tips for Flickr Beginners (Lifehacker) Flickr Tutorial Series (Indezine) Flickr Advanced User Guide (Lifehacker