Some years ago a Dutch friend, Jenny van Diggelen, Blauwwerk, gave me a workshop on Cyanotype Printing. I wasn’t sold right away because I was in the middle of emigrating.
Once in order in my new house, I was once again inspired by the blue colour and the possibilities of cyanotype.
It took some getting used to the Spanish sun and sometimes the sun really shines too bright to make nuanced tests. Which makes experimenting all the more interesting.
Inspiration and creativity are must-haves for me. I make drawings, collages or mixed media in some kind of theme.
It helps me keep my creative skills flowing.
An intermezzo is a short piece of music written to be played on its own or as part of a longer piece. For me, it’s a welcome break from my daily activities.
In the video are a couple of examples.
A well-chosen picture explains the content of your article for a blog, magazine, or newsletter at once. A photograph can show something in a single image that otherwise would need a lot of words.
Sometimes it is better to crop a photo to get the focus on the desired part. In this article, I give you 10 tips to crop pictures the right way.
Cropping is considered making changes to a picture. When you use photographs that somebody else made, make sure you have permission for these changes.
One of the ideas in the article 20 Ideas on how to make money after retirement is to sell your digital pictures. Can you start selling pictures online just like that? What are the options you have? And equally important, what are possible problems you can encounter? I’ll elaborate on these in this article.
You don’t have to be a professional photographer nowadays to sell your pictures. Although it helps if you know what you are doing and if you maintain a quality standard in composition, use of colour and format.
Often people assume that the meaning of symbols is easier to comprehend than written text. Most of the time, this assumption is wrong.
In the same way that any foreign language must be learned, the idiom of symbols must also be learned. Some symbols or characters are immediately obvious, others require a table with an explanation.
However, we pick up a lot of knowledge about symbols just by looking around in the town where we walk or using public transport. And when everybody knows the meaning of a certain symbol, it communicates a lot quicker than written language. Especially when many languages are used in one place, for example at an airport.
The quality of the printers is improving fast. Nowadays a lot of colour printers have more than four cartridges, making sure all the tones are printed.
Yet, the extra cartridges are grey or black, never a colour, which means there are still colours you see on the screen that can’t be printed on paper.
Taking pictures and printing them on your colour printer can be disappointing. Sometimes the result is NOT what you expected. I’ll give you the reasons for that disappointing result and if you can improve the colour quality of your precious photographs.
Taking pictures is narrowing your view in a good sense. Looking through the square hole makes you focus on composition, colour and details of what you see. It’s all about making choices.
When I was 12 years old I got a camera from my granddad. It was an Agfa, that I know for sure. But I am not sure anymore whether it was a Click or a Clack.
All these years I was convinced it was a Clack-II, but googling pictures of it made me wonder. The image in my memory resembles more of the Click-II.
During my education at two art academies in the Netherlands, I was trained to look at the composition of paintings and sculptures. That was a big advantage for me when I started making taking pictures.
Painters often had a conception of composition that depended on their time. The Renaissance had a balanced, calm structure of the works. In the Baroque, the dynamic composition was usually applied.
What is composition in photography? The usual rule of thumb is the rule of thirds. It’s a great rule to start with, but in this article, I will explain some other possibilities for composition you can use.
Years ago I discovered the app Hipstamatic for my smartphone. It was love at first sight. I even have to admit I once bought another iPhone to have more pixels and speed.
As an artist, I love abstract art. Taking pictures with abstract results enhances that love and using the Hipstamatic app for those pictures doubles the fun.
In this article on how to create abstract photos, the focus is on the app Hipstamatic. In the meantime, I also explain how you can make your pictures more abstract without the app.