Candid photography
As I’ve been looking into HDR photography, I’ve also discovered ‘candid photography’. This is where you photograph people on the street doing ordinary things in ordinary ways, but capturing those moments is an extraordinary thing.
As I’ve looked into it, I’ve also looked into the law for doing this, because it’s become apparent that a lot of people think candid photography is illegal. They believe people have a right to privacy, and therefore photographing them in public is an invasion of privacy and subsequently illegal.
This is absolutely not the case.
The law states that you cannot take photos of people in locations that they would expect reasonable privacy. However, out on the street, in a park, or on a beach are not locations where one can expect reasonable privacy. They are public places, and public places have no privacy, no expectation of privacy, and no laws forbidding photographs.
Photos and websites
It seems like such a long time ago now, but back in 1998 I started my online presence with www.thespirit-online.com. It was my home for quite a few years, where I detailed my life and adventures. It also was the online storage location for all my photos.
Back then everything was manual. There wasn’t the free online photo storage locations that we have today, so I had to upload photos to the server, and use Microsoft Frontpage to edit the photo web page so that the photos would be visible. It was quite a hassle, but I loved it nevertheless.
By 2005, we had Flickr (bought by Yahoo!) and Picasa (bought by Google). I used both of them, not really sure which way I should go.
HDR Photography
I’ve just learnt about High Dynamic Range photography today, which is a style of photography that accentuates colours and contrasts in vivid detail. Here’s an example:
Isn’t that just awesome? Here’s another example:
These are the kinds of things that I’ve wanted to do for years now, to get some extraordinary colours and contrasts out of my photos. I’ve learnt how I can now do that, so I’m going to start this weekend.
In the meantime, I found a website that transforms ordinary jpg’s into HDR-type images. Here’s an example of what I’ve done to a couple images of my own:
In the second photo, the colours are clearer, and there’s less shadow…
Let’s try one more…
Can you see the difference? I certainly can – and I love it!
A new camera
I bought myself a new camera on the weekend, a Canon PowerShot SX10 IS. I figured it’s time to upgrade, since I had my previous camera for over 3 years. It doesn’t seem like it, but it’s true. I bought it in November 2005.
This new one has 10 Megapixels, whereas the old one had 5. It has 20x optical zoom, where the old one had 12x. It has built-in image stabilization, so even at maximum zoom it stabilizes the image and prevents excessive blurring.
Since a lot of my photos are of scenery and I like to zoom in a lot, this is exactly the kind of thing I was happy to upgrade to. The old one gave me so many blurry shots like you wouldn’t believe.
Photo Album
I’ve added a new page called ‘photo albums’, which you can click on in the menu at the top of the page. The photo albums are via Picasa Web Albums, which is where I’m posting all my photos, and the page will always show the entire series of public albums I have. Clicking on any of the pictures will open the album in a new browser window or tab.
Please enjoy.
