Photography, history, politics…
It’s arguable, that Photographs – a retrospective (Fotografisk center, 1999) by Marianne Engberg doesn’t belong on this list, since the photographer has lived and worked in New York since 1968. But after all she is Danish by birth and her book is Danish by origin.
Bakken is an amusement park, beautifully situated in the woods north of Copenhagen. It has a history of more than 400 years. In short, I guess you could call it the proletarian cousin of the more famous Tivoli. One of the main attractions are Bakkens Hvile, a music hall that dates back to 1877. Traditionally, … Read more
Building 4 is the former dyeing-hall at BredeTextile Mill. The mill is now part of the National museum, and the building is being renovated for use as an exhibition hall, for the exhibition of the cultural history of industrial society. I have a special feeling of attachment to building 4. Not only is it a beautifulindustrial building in … Read more
Are you a photographer? Are you a bit odd? If so, you might consider staying away from London, UK, for the time being. As seen on the poster, local authorities have launched a campaign to make citizens report any “odd photographers”. Such persons might be terrorists on a surveillance mission… Fotopia.no tells the story (in … Read more
Zoriah is a man with only one name. He is also a photographer. According to himself he used to work for humanitarian organizations, but got tired of too much “red tape”. So he trained himself to be a photographer instead, in order to be able to document the sufferings – human made as well as results … Read more
People in circumstances When the later-to-be-famous German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch published his first major work in 1928, it was called “Die Welt ist schön” (The world is beautiful). Granted, the titled was not invented by the photographer himself, but by the editor. Never the less, it is a bit ironic that Trine Søndergaard received the … Read more
Action? As mentioned in part one, a new generation made itself seen in Danish photojournalism in the late 1990’s. One of them was Joachim Ladefoged. He did several reports from Kosovo and Albania from 1997 onwards – which, among other awards won him a World Press Photo prize in 1998. These photos have been published … Read more
In the posting “Lightroom blues” I whined about LR’s poor JPG-export capabilities. In a comment Carsten Fredsted proposed a solution, which has proved to be very convincing. First of all, you should install Mogrify. This is a program, which will convert from one picture file format to another, with a lot of user settings. However, … Read more
Try taking a look at the two pictures below. They look the same. But click on them to enlarge and see the difference:
The original RAW-file was imported into Lightroom, cropped, converted to monochrome and exposure was adjusted. After that, the ways departed:
The version to the left was exported to JPG directly from Lightroom – without any sharpening applied (both “clarity” and “sharpening” set to zero). JPG quality was 100 – that is: no compression. The picture was downscaled from a width of a little more than 2000 pixels to 500 during export.
The version to the right was exported to Photoshop CS3 as a full size TIFF. In PS it has been downscaled to a width of 500 pixels and a suitable amount of “Smart sharpen” applied. Finally it was converted to JPG with “Save for web” with a quality setting of 70.
The funny thing is, that when you look at the version to the left, there is a distinct halo around the person in the picture.
At last, it started to rain. Passing through the city today, I met this sad beauty. Maybe she didn’t like to be left alone in the rain, maybe she was suffering from a major headache? I really wouldn’t know, since she resisted all my efforts to communicate… By the way: this picture is taken with … Read more