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John Watson is the original founder of Photodoto. If you're interested in what John has been up to, you can browse his personal blog.

Dealing with the inevitable

By John Watson
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If you put your photos where they can be viewed publicly, inevitably someone will do something with them that you probably don’t approve of. The internet makes this easier than ever. You could hunt down and sue every infringer but frankly I think it’s probably better to pick your battles. Case in point: I was alerted this morning to the use of one of my photographs in a contest at a site called, ironically, PhotoshopTalent.com. Here’s the contest entry:

Contest entry

And here is my original photograph:

Road to heaven
Road to Heaven
(Click to enlarge)

I’d critique the artistic direction the contester took my photo in but I think it speaks volumes for itself. The sad individual who used my photo for this contest will gain nothing from it but a bad reputation. Honestly, rather than be upset, I’m actually embarrassed for PhotoshopTalent.com and the person who created this contest entry. (And a little perplexed that PhotoshopTalent.com would open themselves up to such a potentially large liability.)

One of the most interesting comments on the contest entry was from the artist himself responding to criticism from another member of the site about the source of the background photo.

… Continue reading Dealing with the inevitable

Quick tip: did you know you have a photo studio in your house?

By John Watson
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The BoyOne of my favorite photo locations right now is our upstairs bathroom. The tub and toilet are separated from the rest of the bathroom by a door which can be opened or closed to let in varying amounts of sunlight from the window in the outer room. Combine that with a small flash and you get perfect portraits every time:

  • Just drape a cloth over the shower bar (or buy a nice looking shower curtain)
  • Turn off the lights
  • Point your flash at the wall behind you and to the left
  • Fire away!

If you’ve got a window, a little investigating may reveal that you get perfect light in your bathroom (or some other small room in your home) at certain times of the day just from that. Sure, it’s a little cramped but you can’t beat the price and you can’t argue with the results.

… Continue reading Quick tip: did you know you have a photo studio in your house?

Google adds facial recognition to image search

By John Watson
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Ars Technica is reporting that Google has quietly added basic facial recognition features to their image search. There is no user-interface for it yet and it can currently only be accessed by appending &imgType=face to an image search. Here’s an example (I’m on page 2): John Watson

Still in the experimental stages, this would obviously be a killer feature to add to Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, Google’s photo management application. It would be huge to be able to identify people in just a few photos in your collection and then be able to search for all photos with those same people. Riya.com has had something like this for a while with its “People” tab.

Google’s addition of this feature is a shot across the bow of every other photo sharing service out there. I can only speculate that Flickr, Smug Mug, and other photo sharing services are working on similar features. They’d better be because this is the sort of thing that will make sorting through thousands of photos of people much easier than it has ever been before. I for one would love to be able to sort out pictures of just my kids,

… Continue reading Google adds facial recognition to image search

Protect My Photos?

By John Watson
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A while back I wrote a review of Protect My Photos, an online photo backup service. In the past few months I’ve received a few emails and some comments on the original post indicating that some people have had a few problems. Protect My Photos worked fine in my testing and there are inevitably people who have problems with any product. However, in my experience, for every person who complains there are 100 others who just cancel their service without saying anything.

If you’re interested in online photo backup there are a ton of options out there.

… Continue reading Protect My Photos?

Super quick (and easy!) tip for more flattering portraits

By John Watson
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One of my goals when I take portraits is to make sure the resulting photograph is flattering to the subject. There are a ton of techniques one can use to improve a portrait from lighting to digital alteration but one of the very best and quickest ways also happens to be one of the easiest. Here are three photos of the same subject taken from three different perspectives (uh, please forgive the model). In the first, the camera was slightly below the subject shooting up, then at eye-level in the second, and finally a few inches above the subject:

BelowEye-levelAbove

It’s clear to me that the last photo is the most flattering. Not only does this perspective make me look thinner, notice that it also opens up the eyes and hides wrinkle-revealing shadows. A few inches of elevation above the subject’s eye-level is all you need.

… Continue reading Super quick (and easy!) tip for more flattering portraits

Sorting the wheat from the chaff

By John Watson
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When I return triumphantly from a shoot I always run excitedly up to the office and begin downloading the photos. The first step in my process is to download everything and then sort them into bins depending on what I plan to do with them. Here’s my system:

Bins

Unfortunately, here are the usual contents of the “Perfect” folder:

Perfect

Sigh. There’s always tomorrow, I suppose.

… Continue reading Sorting the wheat from the chaff

Exposure Blending Tutorial

By John Watson
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After posting Getting the Exposure Right, I received a quite a few questions about how I achieved the HDR (High Dynamic Range) version of the mailbox photo (last photo in that article). This tutorial will walk you through the basics of creating the same look by hand. All you need is camera and photo editing software that supports layer masking (you can follow these steps in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and The GIMP, among others).

… Continue reading Exposure Blending Tutorial

Getting the exposure right

By John Watson
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One of the most common problems people have when taking photos is that part of the photo (usually the part that they want to see) is too dark or too bright. For example, when taking a photograph of a friend in front of the sunset, the sunset will show perfectly but the friend is a dark, unrecognizable blob. The problem is that the range of brightness in the scene is too much for your camera to record. So it has to “decide” which parts of the photo it wants to keep (the sunset, in this case) and which parts aren’t as important. And it often gets it wrong.

… Continue reading Getting the exposure right

Does the camera change the way we behave?

By John Watson
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Clip from This American Life (Showtime)

The clip above relates the story of a group of school children who pretend to film a schoolmate being beaten up rather than help him. Sure, young kids will do that sort of thing. But it reminded me of the story of Chinese pothole photographer Liu Tao, tabloid photography in general, and exploitive photo journalism.

Sadly, I think a lot of people today are more likely to take pictures first and help second. Now that cameras are ubiquitous the problem is worse than ever. Is it the camera changing the way people behave or is bad human behavior just finding a new outlet? Probably a little of both.

… Continue reading Does the camera change the way we behave?

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