GEECS blog: photography

Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

Digital Photography Course PART 4

Here's the PDF our Digital Photography course Part 4 - Social Photography: Tagging Photos & Digital Graffiti.

If you want to download it click the link below which will take you to scribd.com and download to your computer from there.

Digital Photography Course PART4

Digital Photography Course PART 3

Here's the PDF our Digital Photography course Part 3 - Social Photography, Introducing Flickr, Creating a Flickr account & Flickr Groups.

If you want to download it click the link below which will take you to scribd.com and download to your computer from there.

Digital Photography Course PART3 PPT

Digital Photography Course PART 2

Here's the PDF our Digital Photography course Part 2 - Photo editing, corrections and fun stuff with GIMP

If you want to download it click the link below which will take you to scribd.com and download to your computer from there.

Digital Photography Course PART2

Photoshop Elements 8 Tutorial

Here's the PS Elements tutorial we used for a workshop demonstrating how we can use the concept of storytelling in still images. I made this presentation over on Prizi - a very neat site that allows some free hosting of presentattions that can then be embedded and shared. Very nice tool.

I'll post this tut over on the tools page too.

10 Word Stories with Photoshop Elements 8 on Prezi

Mentro Allan – Outdoor Photography taster day

A great day was had by all last week when GEECS worked with a group from Mentro Allan to provide a digital photography taster session.

Mentro Allan is a collection of projects in Wales that aims increase the physical activity levels of its target group, making best use of the local natural outdoor environment close to where people live.

On behalf of the Communities 2.0 project, we at GEECS have been working with Mentro Allan in Merthyr Tydfil to help bring digital inclusion into the area. As the work with this group is based around outdoor activity, we wanted to provide a session that could incorporate a walk within in the local area.

We chose to apply the ‘Lucky Dip Photography’ workshop. The idea of this workshop is to provide a fast and fun activity that enables the participants to engage with their surroundings and consider the chosen words in a wider context, challenging both creativity and photographic ability.

The session concluded with a computer based workshop where the group were able to bring the images of the day together into a contact sheet. This showed thumbnails of the photos, along with the images of the words, providing a narrative based documentation of the walk.

The participants left with a printed copy of their contact sheet, a DVD of all the images taken, the free photographic editing software GIMP, and the skills to use and develop this in the future. Take a look at some of the results!

(Click on the images to enlarge or see more over on the STORIES page)

Fairytales really do come true....

I want to show a story that came from my love of Lomography. Lomography is a spontaneous approach to photography and pushes the boundaries of what we believe the rules of photography to be.

Fairytales really do come true: A tribute to Lomography from Leanne Taylor on Vimeo.

The images are captured by plastic (and so called) ‘toy’ cameras, which produce magical outcomes from any subject matter. The magic comes from the fact that whatever you may plan for the image you wish to take, the camera will produce its own version of this. In this way, you have a world of possibility from the outcomes, and the dream like images have a way lighting your imagination.

Lomographers have 10 golden rules that they adhere to, but the main point is to not think about your images and just keep shooting. I believe that using this ethos and these cameras will encourage and stimulate imaginations and therefore could play an important role in digital story telling. The images may stem from the everyday, but they seem to provoke nostalgia and may even become something of fantasy and fiction.

There are many different Lomo cameras and they all produce their own unique style of images. The photos in my story are taken on a Holga. As part of the Communites 2.0 project, the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, is planning to incorporate work with Lomo cameras into one of our small workshop sessions. We are also developing ways to apply Lomographic ‘after effects’ to digital photographs in certain photographic editing software. In the GEECS Digital Storytelling Space you can find a free plug-in download (LoMog.atn) to be used as action in Photoshop. Simply download here, install, and apply to your images. There is a choice to run two actions, one will give a ‘hard lomo’ effect and the other will give a ‘soft lomo’ effect. The key is to experiment, each image will be affected in a different way and the effects will be stronger on some images than in others.

We are hoping to develop this into a batch processing tool that will apply different effects randomly to multiple images in one go, therefore echoing the lack of control that happens in film based lomography. We will keep you updated with developments – so watch this space!!