While there are definite similarities in regards to methods and approach when photographing any sort of real estate, there are also important differences to keep in mind, especially when photographing commercial real estate and properties. In the residential real estate realm, they tend to use the images for a few weeks or maybe months until the space is sold, but in commercial real estate, these images are used to sell the business for perhaps years and years, and they might live on a website for just as long, offering the potential client or customer a visual representation of the space.
This is it. This is the one. I’ve found the one! Actually, the one found me! The Samsung NX1. If you’ve been holding out on investing in the mirrorless market because of your trepidations as far as performance as compared to traditional DSLRs, now’s the time to let go. It’s been exactly a year since Samsung invited me into their Imagelogger program, and in that short year, everything changed. I mean everything.
It’s just one of those things. One of those crazy things. While every lens wipe and filter might look the same to the untrained eye, photographers obsess over every detail down to the thousandth of a second. No exaggeration. Literally. Thousandths of a second. So, while the heart might be in the right place, there are certain things that, if you give a photographer as a gift, may do more harm than good. Here are 5 of those things:
In case you’ve been (understandably) hiding under a rock the past 5 days, you’re already aware…it’s that time of year!! The holiday shopping madness has begun. We had Black Friday and Small Business Saturday and ‘Something or another’ Sunday and Cyber Monday and Cyber Monday Tuesday. Well, now that you’re dressing your wounds and nursing your bruises, I bring to you…Wasim Wednesday! Best of all, you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything other than use the very device you’re reading this one. A collection of fine art prints and canvases from the past 12 months shot by yours truly.
The holiday season is upon us, and chances are, somewhere in your family there’s a budding photographer. You’ve been watching as they hone their eye through an iPad lens or the pictures that mysteriously populate your smartphone’s camera roll when your phone goes missing for a few hours (or days). And now, you’re realizing this is a skill and talent they might want to hone further. It’s time to step up their game and begin their gradual and comfortable transition into some more serious hardware. Here are 6 of the best cameras for budding photographers in your family.
Whether we’re ready to admit it or not, the holidays are upon us. I tried as long as I could to ignore the names of the months passing by on the calendar, but, well, once Daylight Savings Time hit, denial turned to grief turned to acceptance turned to ‘ok, fine, let’s do this thing!’ Anyhow, chances are there’s a photographer in your family or group of friends that you’ll have to shop for, and while we're certainly a famously finicky bunch, I guarantee you, there’s still something that photographer “needs.” So here’s a list of things that will help turn that psychosis-inducing task of figuring it out into the easiest checkmark on your shopping list. Here are 10 fail-proof gifts for photographers in your circles.
So if you read my post My First Research Term For The Arcanum: Silence. Why? It's Complicated…, you’d know what this is all about. As Robin Griggs Wood’s apprentice in Trey Ratcliff’s Arcanum, part of each week’s challenge is to research a term that relates to creativity. While the first term I researched was silence, this time, I chose "chromatic aberration.” Whether you know what it is or not, you’ve seen it, you’ve experienced it, and it’s annoyed the living crap out of you, so here’s a basic breakdown of the bugger and what I’ve found.What Exactly Is Chromatic Aberration?
Part of the deal as an apprentice in The Arcanum is each week we are presented with a weekly challenge by our master, and with each weekly challenge, in addition to finding images based on a theme, we are to find a term that relates to creativity in some way (however broad is up to us) and research that term and what we found out about it. So while I was trying to think of what term I wanted to research for my first weekly challenge, I found myself navigating my way through the eternal Facebook stream of doom, looking for a post I saw earlier from a friend that I wanted to comment on, and all I could see are BE SCARED EBOLA OBAMA DEMOCRAPUBLICANS TERRORISM EBOLA LIBERAL HELL WRATH CONSERVATIVE RACIST FIRE DOOM DIE OH YEAH AND EBOLA when all I could think to myself was, ‘shut up already!’ So, that was the birth of the term I wanted to research for my first weekly challenge in The Arcanum: Silence.
So this is where it all got real. The experiences, the Networks, The Challenges. It’s all part of the process here in The Arcanum, but all of it, at first, seems a bit disconnected, another virtual forum, albeit a more positively engaging one sans the trolls and the, but, still,
I am now Wasim The Inspired!!
And with that, things immediately get a bit more serious.
So I was recently challenged by a fellow Samsung Imagelogger, the talented portrait photographer Jess Anderson, to take the Black & White Photography Challenge. Basically, I had to post 5 black and white images in 5 days. Anyone that knows me or my work knows that color plays an enormous role in the images I choose to make, so this was definitely a bit intimidating. In addition to a few of my favorites from those recent 5 days, what follows are 5 things I learned and experienced in my little black & white journey.
So as we already know, Apple has opened up it’s manual camera controls for developers and users in it’s new iOS 8. What this means for pro photographers is that they can finally take charge of their images similar to the way that they’re used to with their professional gear. What this means for amateur photographers and those who use their iPhone to snap their lives’ memories, is that they’re going to be insanely confused at first and wonder what the hell it all means and why can’t they just point and click like they were used to. But then, as they start to play with it all, they’ll realize they’re getting better images, and start to wonder why. So, to minimize that time between ‘wtf’ and ‘oh wow,’ here is a quick breakdown of the Apple iOS 8 manual camera controls that developers will have access to - what it all means and what it all does:
“Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.” -Chinese Proverb
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There it is - This Week's Motivational Kick In The Yahoo!
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Move!
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it, we go nowhere.” -Carl Sagan
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There it is - This Week's Motivational Kick In The Yahoo!
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Dream!
I was recently commissioned to photograph a live/work space in Downtown LA for insanely talented tattoo artist Jun Cha. It was set up as a loft, with the living quarters upstairs, and his tattoo studio in the commercial space downstairs. The space was absolutely beautiful, and I’ve never quite seen a tattoo studio or parlor as elegant as this was - a gorgeously clean monochromatic space adorned with Greek mythological statues and replica busts of everyone from David to the Virgin Mary, classy leather-bound art books, Roman columns. It was stunning.
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it, we go nowhere.” -Carl Sagan
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From me to you, There’s This Week’s Monday Kick In The Yahoo!
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Think it!
If you’ve ever gone on an extended hike or backpacking trip, you know that every single ounce of weight counts. An extra strip of beef jerky may not seem like a lot sitting in your pocket at home, but you WILL notice and feel every single gram of it as the sun-scorched miles move beneath your boots. So when you're packing for such a trip, weight and consideration and bare essentials are a constantly compromised necessity, and, obviously, for photographers, food and clean socks come in a distant second to camera gear. Lucky for us photographers, the new breed of mirrorless systems has changed EVERYTHING. Gone are the days of having to trudge 10-15 pounds of DSLR gear and lenses to get solid professional high-quality images. Now you can make top-shelf images AND pack an entire bag of beef jerky.
"Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right.” -Henry Ford ** From me to you, There’s This Week’s Monday Kick In The Yahoo! ** Move Mountains!
