Archive for the 'Art' category

It is always more pleasant to work with a nice wall paper on your PC (or Mac) desktop. Here are two interesting source sof beautiful wallpapers based on photographic quality images:

• dozens of nature-oriented images (including some cartoons) on UsingMac.com;
• ligthning and storms (15 images).

Downright spectacular.

I collected a long list of tutorials (mostly in English) on my other photo website: Tutorials for Photoshop and The GIMP.

This is easy to reduce a color photo to a B&W image (any photo software or any B&W photocopier can do it). But the reverse operation seems difficult at best, impossible in most cases. However, a team of French scientists from the French INRIA (Guillaume Charpiat, Matthias Hofmann et Bernhard Schölkopf) presented recently an algorithm that succeeds to rebuild the color information from a B&W photo. And with some success.

On the image on the left, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been converted to black and white (A), using color data and textures from a similar image (B), the algorithm built a color image again (C) not too far from the original (D).

Analyzing this work, I’d say that part of the differences between the result (C) and the original (D) come from the quality of the conversion to Black & White which led to an image quite hard (a bit more contrast than needed).

Impressive result on photos, you can expect to see it applied to moving images (and movies).

Source: Futura-Science.

Some of my best images are available are posters, cards, prints, laminated prints, etc. on RedBubble.com. I like the quality of their service, their prices and the broad support (including good discussion forums about photo).

What you’ll like even more is that they reduced the shipping costs to NOTHING for a week. They are celebrating their shipment of 100,000 photo/art masterpieces around the world. At this moment, they decided to offer one week of free shipping. You just have to use the following coupon code when checking out: ‘100000masterpieces’

PS: The promotion will expire at 2359 on 30 October (GMT). Just in time to prepare your gifts for Christmas or for your 2009 new year’s cards.

Buy my photos at RedBubble

• Cards,
• Matted Prints,
• Laminated Prints (between shiny plastic sheets),
• Prints mounted on hard support,
• Canvas Prints,
• Framed Prints

Presented by  Dutch architects NL in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

I found a few funny, interesting, or surprising glasses or vases that I wanted to share with you.

The first ones are coming with a request to drink responsibly:

A Cognac glass (Rikke Hagen)

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Awesomely superb, “The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala” is an illustrated book (download in PDF) by James Bateman that you can find in Botanicus.org wbe site of the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

I created on RedBubble a calendar (for 2009) that I think should be interesting for people in love with all kinds of artistic alterations.

Images taken from the Paris metropolitan railway (le Métro) in a station under heavy repair. It brought images from the past (probably 20 years ago or more) through the remains of previous decors and acts of cultural vandalism that easily make me think of the slogans of the “Mai 68″ near-revolution in the streets of Paris.

Even shooting the photos seemed out-this-world: Silently and slowly walking the station with another photographer (we did not even exchange a word), while the people around us were waiting for their train trying not to notice the flash lights. It could not have been a more troubling experience, going from an unstuck paper to a poor paint job or a hasty writing between dirty white tiles.

John Ross web site.

OK! I don’t really know what it will be but one of the web sites I regularly check (Photoshop Insider) announced a bizarre event: WorldWide PhotoWalk. The idea is just to have photographers going to a place to walk together in a town they know in order to shoot a few pictures and… share.

This afternoon, I decided to go to the Photowalk in Paris tomorrow morning (if I wake up early enough to be there by 10am).

I known this is a last-minute decision, but if you’re in Paris, why not join? It’s free.

What I do (or should be doing, since -like everybody else- I can’t stick to my good resolutions) in order to obtain beautifully detailled photographs. It’s even more important if you want to make them ready for printing in large size (on your brand new A3 inkjet printer or poster-size at a print shop).

A quality lens

The first advice I should give it to choose a high-end lens. Even if the trans-standard zoom lens of the kit for most digital SLR cameras provide very good results in an exceptionnally compact form factor, that we all love to use. But these are also the result of so many compromises where image quality cannot be always the only factor.

Professionnal zoom lenses (the most expensive) are often capable of really impressive achievements, but prime lenses (with a fixed focal lenght) can reach quality levels that no zoom lens can reach. Some say that this is their unique (and only) selling point: Quality.

Thus, in the Minolta-Sony lens catalog, I rushed onto the white tele-lenses from the APO G pro family that, even today, produce exceptionnally good images (for a price no less astonishing if you don’t purchase them second-hand). But each serious camera/lens manufacturer has a few very nice lenses in its catalog.

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Photos from Nilgun Kara, Turkish photographer. Need I say that I loved her work? I’m simply dazed and I adore her photos…

Her portfolio on Art Limited, and on DeviantArt.

You want to download free short movies. Here comes BritFilms – Short Films. A neat web site with a very pro look and content.

Filled with short movies, some news about independent cinema and quite a few other things to discover.

Source: Shooher.

hanks to FreeGeekery, here are 101 Awesome Downloadable Fonts for Designers. I am sure that you will appreciate teh variety, the diversity and the quality of this archive.

Source: Photo.net.

A photographer must love his models to make the best possible portraits and to serve completely the models. This is all the more obvious when it comes to photographing celebrities and famous people.

Platon does a great job for this.

Source : Platon.
All photos are Copyright (c) Platon – All rights reserved.