23 Great Examples of the ‘Middle Line’ in Art, Photography and Film

The ‘middle line’ can be a powerful tool in composition. Here are 23 great examples in art, photography and film.

Via Twisted Sifter

How to create a contact sheet

Proof multiple images on a single page. Simply select a folder that contains the images from your latest creative project.

Put all of the images you want on the contact sheet in one folder on your computer.

In Photoshop, go to File > Automate > Contact Sheet II.

In the Source Images section of the Contact Sheet II dialogue box, choose the folder that contains your images.

Under Document, set the Units, Width/Height, Resolution, and Mode (colour mode) for the contact sheet.

If desired, select the Flatten All Layers option.

Under Thumbnails, decide how you want your images arranged on the page.

Select the Use Filename as Caption option to label each image based on its file name.

Click OK and Photoshop will create your contact sheet. You can save or print it from the File menu.

October 6, 2014

Contributor: Erica Larson

Watch: 100 Filmmaking Tips, Tricks, and Hacks in Under 10 Minutes

Hold on to your hats! Here are 100 tips, tricks, and hacks that you can use on 
your next project.

In filmmaking, we all need a little help along the way, and sometimes, we need that help to come in tiny bite-size portions that pair well with our short attention spans and ability to get the gist of just about anything within seconds. Well in their latest video, The Film Look unfurls 100 tips, tricks, and hacks for filmmakers like little fortune cookies, giving you a ton of short but oh so sweet advice on how to do a myriad of things from labeling batteries to properly handing off expensive equipment. Gorge yourself below:



Now, that's a lot of fortune cookies! There are tons of great pieces of advice in the video, especially for those who are just starting out. I mean, let's get real; when you're a newbie, you want and need to learn everything about the craft. The Film Look covers all phases of production in their video compendium, from screenwriting to editing, so you're definitely going to learn a little bit of everything.

And for all of you more experienced folk, maybe most of this stuff was a review for you, but hopefully, you found at least a handful of things in the video that will help you on your next project. 
What about you? What are your top five filmmaking tips, tricks, and hacks that you've learned over the years? Let us know down in the comments below! 

Reblogged via No Film School

Amateur Vs. Pro: How Differently The Same ‘Ugly’ Location Looks When Pro Photographer Shoots It

First published on Bored Panda by​ Stella 

Award-winning art photographer Vijce is back with fresh inspiration, though it’s not exactly the colourful work you may be used to from him. This time, the German camera pro used a gloomy train station staircase as his main subject, but the beauty he brought to the’ugly’ location is something we can all learn from.

“To be honest, I’ve captured my favourite street photos in the ugliest of all places,” Vijce wrote in his recent PetaPixel feature. “Sure, it’s a bit more challenging to find the extraordinary in the ordinary… but isn’t that what street photography is all about?” Indeed, he somehow manages to capture the industrial grit of the station in a softer, more ‘human’ light, an effect he insists can be achieved in any place a photographer has available to them.

If you simply observe any length of scenery for a while, no matter how depressing it may seem at first, you’ll notice things that other passing by don’t see. You’ll notice people that you would otherwise ignore. Vijce writes that this is the key to finding unique shots in any situation, as well as experimenting with perspective by laying down, walking around, and looking up.

Check out the surprisingly powerful photos below, as well as a special video at the end.

(h/t: PetaPixel)

 

To the average photographer, this train station staircase would probably look gloomy or ‘ugly’

 

Image credits: Vijce

Image credits: Vicje

 

Award-winning photographer Vijce, however, saw a world of possibilities in the unusual location

 

Image credits: Vicje

Image credits: Vijce

Image credits: Vijce

 

All a photographer must do is spend time observing the location, then play with perspective

 

Image credits: Vijce

Image credits: Vijce

Image credits: Vijce

Image credits: Vijce

 

What was once a depressing industrial atmosphere now appears more ‘human’ and ‘alive’

 

Image credits: Vijce

Image credits: Vijce

Learn more about the compelling process below:

A Massive 30-Part Guide to Retouching Photos in Photoshop

Originally posted on PetaPixel by Jayphen Simpson

Visit the original site with links to the tutorials here:

Want a crash course in retouching photos in Photoshop? Here’s a 4-part video series that clocks in at 4.5 hours in total, making it a very comprehensive guide. There’s something here for everyone — even the most experienced photographers are sure to learn something from the series.

Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid goes over a total of 30 techniques from healing skin blemishes to creating skin texture, replacing skies, puppet warping, and even swapping out faces.
Photoshop is a very powerful piece of software, and it seems that no matter how long you’ve been using it for there’s always something new to learn. It’s always important to understand the tools that you’re working with, so this free series is an excellent way to boost your skill set.

Thankfully, Dodson has provided a full breakdown of the topics covered in the videos. We’ve included the videos below, along with timestamps matching the corresponding moment in each video.

Part One

1. 01:28: Editing ANY Photo in the Camera RAW Editor
2. 07:51: 8-bit vs. 16-bit Images
3. 14:59: Lens Correction and the Transform Tool
4. 19:02: White Balance and Chromatic Aberration Corrections
5. 22:59: Slimming a Figure with Liquify
6. 30:59: Healing Skin Blemishes
7. 35:46: Get Rid of Flyaway Hairs
8. 38:35: Making Simple and Complex Selections with Select Mask
9. 47:17: The Power of Adjustment Layers
   
   Part Two

1. 01:24: All About Levels
2. 07:59: All About Curves
3. 15:18: Blend Modes
4. 19:56: Masking!
5. 25:56: Retouching Eyes
6. 29:49: Whitening Teeth
7. 32:03: Changing Hair Color
8. 37:14: Frequency Separation for Better Skin
9. 44:37: Creating Skin Texture to Add Detail

Part Three

1. 01:00: Reduce and remove wrinkles
2. 02:41: Getting started with the healing brush
3. 06:32: Dodging and Burning
4. 07:58: How to do the burning
5. 13:00: How to do the dodging
6. 14:22: Double dodge and burn trick
7. 15:48: Quick dodge/burn effect
8. 18:47: How to Add a Tattoo Realistically
9. 23:33: Masking the tattoo in place
10. 27:06: Using adjustments to blend the tattoo
11. 30:04: Blurring the tattoo to match
12. 35:43: Select and Replace a Sky with Luminosity/Channel Masks
13. 38:38: Using levels to get the perfect selection
14. 42:44: Replacing the sky and watching the magic happen
15. 45:02: Color Correction Techniques
16. 45:28: Curves for quick corrections
17. 49:58: Targeting and Changing Individual Colors
18. 52:56: Correcting sunburn by targeting the reds
19. 54:32: Four Ways to Create a Black and White Photo
20. 01:00:03: Creating a Basic Composite Image and Blending Colors
21. 01:14:26: Puppet Warp to Change a Person’s Figureo
22. 01:00:03: Creating a Basic Composite Image and Blending Colors
23. 01:14:26: Puppet Warp to Change a Person’s Figure

Part Four

1. 01:00: Content-Aware Everything!
2. 12:42: Smart Filters
3. 18:04: Replacing/Swapping a Face
4. 25:34: Smooth Wrinkles from Clothing
5. 29:41: Color Grading
6. 34:03: Colorize a Black and White Photo
7. 44:34: Extreme Lens Correction
8. 51:55: Lens Flares and Light Leaks
9. 58:32: Global and Selective Sharpening
10. 01:05:49: Cropping, Resizing and Saving Photos

Phew! Finish all of those and you’re well on your way to Photoshop mastery. If you manage that and are still hungry for more knowledge, check out the tutvid YouTube channel — it’s worth a subscribe.
(via tutvid via Fstoppers)

5-Minute Tutorial Reveals How To Make Boring Photos Look Awesome

Original posted on Bored Panda by Andrius

There are a tonne of bad photos online and it’s mostly because people simply can’t be bothered with editing. But as this tutorial shows, you don’t need to sink a tonne of time into a single image, all it takes is just 5 minutes!

The guy behind this tutorial is the landscape and fine art photographer YuriFineart, who proves that only 5 minutes spent with a raw photo can make all the difference.

Yuri explains how to utilise split toning, saturation, as well as graduated and radial filters.

And he even gives insights on the ways in which more experienced photographers edit their work, so not only the beginners could get something out of it.

Harvard University's Digital Photography Course Online

Image: iStock

Harvard University just made its photography course free to access online. This is a great resource for improving your photography skills. Available on Alison, the course has 12 modules covering the fundamentals of photography – from exposure, optics, colour and histograms to artefacts and software tools. Complete the assessment at the end and receive a certificate. You will need to get a mark of 80 percent or higher to pass.

Course Information

Welcome to Digital Media E-10: Exposing Digital Photography, offered Fall 2015 at Harvard University's Extension School.

DGMD E-10: Exposing Digital Photography

Fall 2015

Instructor: Dan Armendariz
Teaching Fellows: Shelley Westover, Rob McCarthy, Jordan Hayashi, Henry Vega Ortiz
Producer: Jordan Hayashi
Harvard Extension School

Description

This course explores the artistic aspects, scientific foundations, and techniques of digital photography with the goals of enabling students to expand their knowledge of photography as an art form, to develop a deeper and broader understanding of the scientific basis of photography, to improve their photographic technique, and to effectively use photographic software tools. Although the primary focus is on digital photography, many concepts apply to other photographic disciplines including film and video. Topics include quality of light, exposure control, depth of field, aesthetics, composition and patterns, perspective, color science, the human visual system, spatial and color perception, exposure, metering, digital sensors, optics, analogies to biological systems, color filter arrays, file formats, sensor linearity, color spaces and profiles, optical and computational image artifacts, and software tools and techniques for modification and enhancement. Through lectures, hands-on assignments, and critiques, students expand their understanding of digital photography while exploring their creativity to broaden the possibilities and improve the quality of their photographs. Upon successful completion of the course, students can expect to take photographs with an intuition of the camera's behaviour, and its limitations, and an ability to think critically about light and the resulting appearance of a photograph.

Students should have access to a camera with a manual mode and an option for RAW for the duration of the course.

Take the course here

Why The Golden Ratio Is Better Than The Rule Of Thirds

Oct 24, 2016 by Jon Sparkman via PetaPixel

A long time ago I was a young art student, being told about the “Rule Of Thirds.” I was told it’s one of the most important fundamentals of art and photography, as it helps you get the right composition in your images.

Overlay a tic-tac-toe/noughts and crosses grid over your image and crop or move your picture around so that the “points of interest” lie on the lines or line intersections. Sounds simple enough. It has been the basis of countless millions of images throughout the centuries. But is it perfect? No! Is there a better, more badass brother to the grid? Yes! Enter the Golden Ratio.

Just to slow things down a bit, here’s what the Rule Of Thirds (I’ll call it the ROT grid from now on) looks like on a plain black background. Chances are you’re familiar with it, you’ve seen it pop up on the viewfinder of your camera or as an overlay in Photoshop or Lightroom. The grid is great for making sure your horizons are straight, for making sure there are subjects spaced out evenly throughout the frame and generally giving a bit of calm and order to the scene.

 

Here’s its superior, wiser, and elusive brother: the Golden Ratio, also sometimes called the Fibonacci Spiral. It is the result of when you do some complex maths on a rectangle to the tune of: a/b = (a+b)/a = 1.61803398875. There's no need to memorize this, you can find the overlays everywhere on the Internet to download and paste over your images, as well as being built in (but very well hidden) in Lightroom.

To access this spiral, press R to get your cropping function open, then cycle through the available overlays with O until you find the spiral. Turning it around is done by pressing Shift + O. There are eight variations to it.

Looks kind of fun, a tight coil ending up off centre and providing a great host of lines to align your picture up to.

If I put the two overlays on top of each other, you can see how similarly they intersect. The tight spiral of the blue ratio almost marries up with the lower right intersection of the red overlay. There is a reason why the golden ratio gets oft pushed away because it’s murder to have all its eight variations displayed on a screen at once.

The lower right intersection of the red lines is pretty close to the tight curl of the spiral.

So if the golden ratio is more hassle than the ROT grid, why should I care about it? It all comes down to the long sweeping arc of the spiral. Putting your subjects along a curved line rather than straight grid lines draws the viewers eyes around the picture, forcing it to go closer to the tight coil of the spiral where you’ve placed your point of interest. It’s like a giant subliminal road sign pointing the eyes towards where you want them to go.

Here’s the reason they don’t put the spiral as an overlay on your camera. The spiral in just four of its eight possible orientations.

I hope I haven’t lost you yet. Here are a few real-world examples of the Golden Ratio in practice on a few of my images, one without an overlay and one with. Hopefully, you can see how many times the images follow the sweeping curves and conclude with the focal point of the image in the tight coil.

The line follows the body shape of the man on the bed and finishes at the woman’s stare.

This image focuses on the child, dominating the image in the foreground, larger than the adult mother.

This time the spiral passes through background objects like the chair and tripod, around the lighting and on to the crook of the leg of the photographer on the floor.

The focus is pulled towards the car’s open door, making the viewer ask the question “why?”

There are a whole host of different ways you can use the Golden Ratio—from portraits to landscapes… even sports and street photography. Start looking out for the Golden Section when editing your pictures in your favourite cropping post-production program and see how it can take your pictures from “yeah” to “oh yeah!”

I have to admit, once I discovered my love for the Ratio, I started flicking back through the past few years of shoots to re-crop images in the Ratio. In my opinion, these newly-cropped pictures feel much more dynamic and interesting, and forcibly lead the eye around the pictures.

As always, it’s entirely up to you to take my advice, but I just want to be able to show that there’s more to the world of art than a criss-cross of lines. Let's just call the Golden Ratio “The Rule Of Thirds, Plus Some More” (TROTPSM for short).

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About the author: Jon Sparkman is a Cheltenham, UK-based fine art photographer. He centres his work on conveying a message through his photography. You can find his work at www.sparkman.photography and follow him on Instagram and Twitter. This post was also published here.