short flirt with dating headshots

though I was aware of dating sites and people posting pictures on their profiles, I never thought about it in terms of how it related to the photography business. a few years back, somebody contacted me for pictures that he wanted for a dating profile but it was a one-off. fast forward to 2008 when I saw an ad from dating headshots website looking for professional photographers in washington dc to expand their network. it was a process to get approved. once approved you needed to go to their website and fill out a photographer's profile allowing prospects to view your work and schedule a shoot if they chose to work with you. a few months passed. by the time I got to georgetown I got a frantic call from a client that dating headshots referred who was trying to schedule a shoot. we missed each other for a while. it was only after I left georgetown that we finally connected to do the shoot. the shoot is pretty straightforward. 30 mn and you take 100 pictures that you upload to their servers with no touch up.  fairly easy uh! wait until you have to rename all the files to the customer id. at the time, I didn't have a bulk rename software. not even sure any existed at the time. that tedious process alone deserved the money that they paid you. I got the check about 2 weeks later. for someone who was used to get paid on the spot, that was quite a long wait. you can see more dating headshots and personal portraits here.

photo restoration

I finished a shoot for a hair expo project. I shot the project using negative film. after I got the processed film, I needed to scan some images so I could  do some photo editing and optimize some images for print. I placed the negatives on a flatbed scanner but the film slid to the side of the scanner. with the moving part it got partially destroyed, ruining one image that was my favorite. armed with patience and a good supply of tea I sat at the computer and with the help of photoshop set out to restore the image. it took me a while of industrious effort to clean up the scratches, clone some part of the image and using various tools in photoshop reconstitute part of the image that was unrecognizable. the end result is not perfect but it was a good exercise to test the limits of what I could achieve in photoshop.

sharpfocus photo-genesis

how did I come up with the concept of 'sharpfocus'? I had a contax fitted with zeiss lenses.  one particularly a 85mm at f1.4 extremely sharp that I used mainly for what it was designed for: portrait photography. I fell in love with it. even at full aperture, the lens was so sharp that you would see the pores in the forehead. one woman told me she didn't like it. it reveals all your flaws. can't you make it a little softer? she asked. at the time, I was just a photographer. no name. except myself. life's tortuous paths took me to several directions until I even forgot that I was once a photographer. when I was in columbus, I would take pictures once in a while but that was merely to document my fashions. fast forward. dc. I worked in a photolab but didn't really like it because I was confined to production in the lab, loading film, processing, drying and things like that. I've always seen myself as an artist. so the practice of photography devoid of any creativity didn't really appeal to me that much. after a stint in graphic design, I started designing website. autoreverse was born from the ashes of souleye which was an umbrella website for all my endeavors. in 2001, my web designing efforts were not taking me anywhere. I dusted off my aging contax, and thought well, I have experience in fashion, experience in photography. and I like women. so I chose to start as a model photographer. domain name. I thought sharp focus would be cool. sharpfocus (no space) cute? that's how sharpfocus photography was born.

photography gear 3 - the single reflex camera

a single lens camera (slr) is basically a camera that uses a system that captures the light through a mirror and a prism that directs the light to the viewfinder. the mirror is at a 45% angle, allowing it to direct the light vertically toward the prism but when the photographer presses the shutter release, the mirror flips upward to let the light go directly to hit the film. the term 'reflex' comes from the reflection of the mirror system used to redirect the light. it was an ingenuous invention that allowed the photographer to view exactly the image that is passing through the lens and is captured on film.

the pentaprism situated on the roof of the camera sits on the optical path between the mirror and the viewfinder. it reflects the light several times to make up for the initial inversion caused by the lens. if you would look at the image directly through the lens, it would appear upside down.

the path of light in a single lens reflex camera

the single lens reflex is further development form the earlier cameras that used to have two light paths. one for the viewfinder and one that goes straight through the lens to hit the film. since the camera had two lenses they were referred to as twin-lens reflex (tlr). the major drawback of those cameras, in addition to bulk was, that since you have two light paths, they were not sharing the same optical path. though that wasn't too noticeable on medium and long range, at a short distance, parallax used to cause some framing errors, especially in close-up photography.

long before digital, we used to shoot film. pictured here is the pentax k1000, a middle range camera from the now defunct asahi pentax who was a major player in the photography industry

how I came to photography - part 1

I was born and raised in Dakar Senegal, West Africa. I came to photography almost by accident. I wanted to be a moviemaker. Cinema helped shape my vision of the world at a very young age. Growing up in a small country town, the movie was really a window to a world that was larger than life. A little town in Senegal would not even be the size of a village in America. We didn’t have many distractions. Apart from football, called here soccer, there was the movie. It was an open air movie theater that was sitting across the street from our house. So at night, when we were idling, it wasn’t rare that we would go to the cinema and just hang around. I was very artistic. Good at drawing and later took to painting. Formative years I guess. When I graduated from high school I missed a chance to attend film school in France simply because the people who could’ve helped me didn’t believe that there was a career in cinema. By the time I was in university, I had been reading every book that I could lay my hands on about movie making until I saw on tv someone who lived in my neighborhood showing on TV some ‘artistic’ pictures that he took of Goree Island. That was the ‘click’ – watershed event. It really dawned on me that you could express your creativity through photography without having to worry about all of the resources to pull a film together. Gradually a shift was going on in my mind and I started looking into photography more seriously. 

PhotoCamel

photography gear 2 - different types of cameras

in the days of film, we used to have different types of cameras targeting different types of photographers and suitable for different budget. if we define a photographer as someone who uses a camera. from the occasional photography buff who would load a film roll to save memories of the last family vacation, to the seasoned pro who makes a living from taking pictures. in the early days of photography of course, there didn’t use to be such distinction when Kodak first introduced the brownie camera in 1900. it was a point-and-shoot camera designed for mass appeal and was according to kodak’s advertisement "so simple they can easily [be] operated by any school boy or girl".

point-and-shoot
a point-and-shoot camera is a camera that is simple and inexpensive designed for the occasional photographer who’s only interested in taking pictures and not worry about anything else. it takes its name from that simplicity because To take a "snapshot," all one had to do was hold the camera waist height, aim, and press a button. their extreme simplicity comes with a lot of limitations which makes them unsuitable for a more advanced level in photography.

it’s hard to talk about image capture without getting deep into camera technology. the photographic camera got its name from Leonardo davinci’s early experiments in capturing images in a dark room with a pinhole that would project a reverse image on the flat surface of a parallel wall. hence the name camera obscura which translates from the Italian ‘dark room’. see picture

sources: 

http://www.brownie-camera.com/

http://www.sharpfocusphoto.com

photography gear 1 - the camera

if you wanna get started in photography, what equipment do you need? to answer that question, you must first know what type of photography you want to get into. different types of equipment are suitable for different types of photography. the camera that you will need, the lens or lens assortment that will make your job easy, whether you’re gonna need on-camera flash, a studio flash outfit or whether you’re gonna rely solely on natural light, all that depends on what you wanna do. there are other accessories that may be handy depending on the types of pictures that you wanna take. but most certainly, you’re gonna need a camera. so let’s start with that basic gear.

the camera

the camera is an electro-mechanical box that is designed to capture light. how a picture is created depends on the type of camera. a film camera records a latent image on a film which needs to be processed for the picture to show. a digital camera on the other hand has a sensor that captures light and records it as pixels that are stored on memory chip. unlike film, the picture recorded on a memory chip is readily usable without further need for processing. another aspect of digital photography is that memory is volatile, which means that the recorded image can be erased without leaving any traces. the sensor alone would be useless as it need a storage medium for the virtual image to be accessed. film has limits in the number of microscopic grains that record the image. a sensor also has a maximum amount of virtual grains that it can capture. the amount of virtual grains - pixels - that a sensor can records is referred to as the resolution of the camera. camera resolution is usually expressed in megapixels - one megapixel is one million pixels. by today’s standards, a decent camera will hold about 10 to 12 megapixels.