Tag Archives: canvas

Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Holiday Lights, Shadows

Leave a comment
Holiday Lights, Shadows - Late afternoon light on holiday lights on a trellis casts shadows on a cloth backdrop.
Late afternoon light on holiday lights on a trellis casts shadows on a cloth backdrop.

Holiday Lights, Shadows. San Jose, California. December 28, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Late afternoon light on holiday lights on a trellis casts shadows on a cloth backdrop.

For some reason, each year around this time it occurs to me to simply walk out my front door and wander around making photographs more or less in my neighborhood. It is an interesting experience that I think every photographer should try. The first time I tried this locally I “saw” things that I had not noticed during decades living in the area. In addition, looking for things to photograph in what might seem like an unlikely location serves to “tune up” my ability to see, and it helps me renew my ability to look past the obvious to find different subjects and different ways to look at them.

At one point on this “photo walk,” I wandered through a parking lot behind some shops. I photographed the back of a building that had an interesting shadow from an exterior staircase and around which interior furniture was arranged… outside. Then as I walked back across the parking lot I happened to see this trellis covered with strings of holiday lights, catching the warm late-afternoon sun and casting shadows on a sheet of canvas hung behind it.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Technique

Reader question: How to add borders to online photographs

1 Comment

From time to time people ask what techniques I use to create the simple frames for versions of my photographs that I post online. A while ago I wrote about this: Creating Frames for Online Photos: My Method. The explanation involves the use of Photoshop CS3, but the technique is essentially the same in the current version of the program.

You can read the details at the link above, but the process is basically fairly straightforward. I use Image –> Canvas size to add a series of borders to the original image: a one-pixel gray border immediately around it, a larger white border beyond that with a bit more width at the bottom, and finally a one-pixel black border at the outer edge. I turn this into an action that I can apply by selecting it and clicking a button to run it.

The approach to creating the text incorporated into the web images is similar, though it requires a bit of tweaking with each photograph. Essentially, I create three text layers: one for the large type at the bottom, one for the small embedded copyright notice, and a slightly larger “watermark” that will go over the image itself. The action I recorded creates the three layers and inserts the boilerplate text, but I always have to do a bit of alignment manually, and I may also have to make some decisions about opacity and so on depending upon the characteristics of the individual image. Still, it takes less than a minute to do the whole thing even in the wost cases.

Why apply a border, “branding” text, and copyright to the photographs?

  • If people like your photograph, it makes sense to make it easy for them to find you – so I include the easily readable text with my name and web site URL. No matter where the unaltered file ends up, viewers will be able to find the source.
  • The use of consistent presentation helps to establish the photographer’s “brand.” This is true even when the image is displayed in ways that are out of your control, including search engine results.
  • Inclusion of the copyright information is a formality to remind viewers that use of my photographs requires advance permission.
  • Although the inclusion of a watermark cannot stop a dedicated image thief, I think it reduces the likelihood of misappropriation – and that is probably about all that one can really hope for on the basis of a watermark. It may tweak the conscience of the typical user, who may perhaps simply not have thought about the issues of legal usage, and it may encourage others to look for a different image that won’t expose their illegal use and/or require them to take the intentional step of trying to remove the text to cover up the source.
I also addressed these issues in a separate post at this blog.
(Occasionally a person interested in purchasing a print or licensing a photograph for some other use wonders if the embedded watermarks, copyright information, and branded borders are part of the original images. No. When you purchase a print there is nothing on the paper but the photograph itself and my signature. Photos licensed for other uses – books, magazines, web site, etc – are normally provided without added text.)
Articles in the “reader questions” series:

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.