Impression of Hokkaido

Impression of Hokkaido I, 1500mm x 500mm, Limited Print Edition 1/5

The theme of my exhibit work is Impression of Hokkaido, which is showcasing the montages work of Hokkaido. The inspiration came from the Chinese painting where the scene is the result of artist’s impression with personal interpret of feeling. It allowed me to show how I see the place. I always wanted to work on body of work that move beyond the border of camera frame, it has to be presented to viewer with the vision. This give me a great opportunity to explore the alternative way of how we could see the photography work (whether or not you accept it as one). To push it further, the body of work is printed on Hahnemühle Fine Art Rice Paper to enhanced its characteristic.

I must thank the gallery for accepting the controversial work (in fact it’s Gwen of the gallery that encourage me to have this done). The concept has been well received during the exhibition.

Sakura Triptych

Sakura Triptych I / II / III, 350mm x 700mm, Limited Print Edition 1/5

If you are interested on the print work, click here.

And living truly is showing the respect.
不需喧哗，坦诚活着就是。

I always wanted to improve the very raw version of 0.1 but not until recently. So now I give you the ALPreset ver 1.0. The version fine-tuned to make better natural color, especially better control of the highlight and shadow clipping. If you happens to own a copy of ver 0.1, do consider “upgrade” to this version (replace).

I also added a new B&W preset that carry warm tone which I used it most of the time. I hope you will enjoy this version and helps you of the post-processing.

Original photo:

With ALPreset:

BW #1	Cross Processing: Argentina
Cross Processing: Ocean	Cross Processing: Papaya
Soft: Dreamy	Soft: Romance

Download ALPreset 1.0

TIPS: You should compensate the exposure and brightness value according to the condition of the photo

There’s a trick that I’ve learned sometime back on the internet (can’t recall the website) show how the Color Match in Photoshop can be useful to tweak your photo to match with famous art work. I have trial and find it really useful. It really change the photo characteristic and sometime it spike my creativity and bring the photo back to life or give it another level of altitude.

What it does is to bring the color theme from the art painting and match with your photo, that change the mood of the photo dramatically. For example:

The original photo:

Color match with painting of Eugène Delacroix – La liberté guidant le peuple

Color match with painting of Leonardo da Vinci – Mona Lisa

Color match with painting of Hokusai – The Great Wave off Kanagawa

As you can see, the photo has show it’s potential at a different level, I could of course using the photoshop to achieve this result via many steps, but the main idea is to take on what the artist has been working hard in their life time on the colour study, and perhaps, from this practice we could learned more from the artist view point of color.

To do this, you first collect a set of art work from various artist that you like, and here is the Photoshop steps:

1. Open the both photos (yours and the art work) in photoshop
2. On your photos, select Image > Adjustments > Match Color
3. In the dialogue box, select the art work from the pull down menu under Source (near the bottom area), and tweak the 3 option in the Image Option, my choice is always start from Luminance: 200%, Color Intensity: 200%, Fade: 25%. You may have your own preferences, which ever that work for you.
4. Click “OK” once you are happy with the result

That all. Simple and yet effective. Of course not every painting sample works fine for every photos, it’s really try and error and open mind for the possibility.

New ALPreset is avaiblable here.

While I’m struggling looking for my next photo assignment, I took a break tonight and spent some great time consolidate my customise Lightroom preset.

Orginal Photo

Soft: Romance

Version 0.1

This version of preset are design to be use on portrait and in very basic form of mood, I’m working on other contemporary and classy theme.

It should work fine for other subject as well. They set the basic mood that allow me to tweak the detail to archive what I like later on, depends on the photo subject.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is my ‘current’ favourite digital darkroom, the making of photograph become a fun process and free up my image.

Orginal Photo	Cross Processing: Argentina
Cross Processing: Ocean	Cross Processing: Papaya
Soft: Dreamy	Soft: Romance

You can download the 5 presets from here for free download.

TIPS: You should compensate the exposure and brightness value according to the condition of the photo.

I hope you will like them. Leave me a comment if you ever use any of them :)

The confusion laid with traditional misconception of the DPI requirement. More often the printing house will require a 300DPI image resolution, it’s true for colour separation printing process but unnecessary for inkjet printing.

Those who shoot in digital, should know that the camera always give you the same image resolution (X pixel x Y pixel) under the same model, for example a 10 megapixel camera will always deliver you an image of 2592 x 3872 = 10,036,224 (10 million pixel, there’s where the 10 megapixel came from) with marginal different, depending on brand and camera model.

So, how big can you print if you have an 10 megapixel image (without cropping)? Here is where the DPI information step in, DPI determine the scale of print output by how many pixel are compress into 1 inch print out (Dots-Per-Inch). In traditional colour separation process (like magazine, books, brochure, etc.) the minimum requirement of 300 DPI is to ensure there’s no printing dot to be seen with naked eye.

Here’s the way in Photoshop you can easily find out your print size with your image files. Under Menu > Image > Image Size, with the dialogue box, uncheck the Resample Image, enter a value in DPI and it give you the dimension (you can choose either inch, cm, mm or other information you required under the drop down menu). Alternatively, you can also enter the value in the dimension box and the DPI information change accordingly, they are linked respectively. The reason for you to uncheck the Resample Image is to ensure your image is not being manipulated, but only extra information is embedded and given to the printer while printing an image.

For example, if I would required an 300 DPI output for my print requirement, 10 megapixel image files will allow me to print up to 8″ x 12″, or if I must print for 16″ x 24″, then my DPI resolution is only up to 162 DPI.

So now, what is the minimun requirement for the inkjet printing?

While you can say that the more dots get together into an inch space, the clearer your image will be, but it should be depend on how the photo being presented. With large print, your audience are feet(s) away from your photo, the requirement of the DPI can be lower compared to book or magazine where audience are inches away while reading or looking at them. Further more, inkjet printing using different technology compare to colour separation processing, thus the requirement shall be different.

From the experience, inkjet printing are safe to print with 162-165 180 DPI and can’t be notice by naked eye while hanging on the wall during exhibition. Of course if your image are larger, you may have more flexibility to get a higher DPI, but for an exhibition, 162 180 DPI is sufficient good enough (but not the best of course).

Now you have better understanding on the printing requirement. So it comes with the next question, what if, you want to print something beyond your files can handle? In this case, we can’t escape from image manipulation. There’s many software allowed you to do that, some claims to be better than the other and I don’t want to make review on any of the software (there’s even some brand of the printer claims to do a better job while using the printer build-in manipulation mechanism). For sure, quality will be suffered from the image manipulation, something we need to face it realistically.

I just want to share with you about Lightroom and why we should always shoot RAW. Beside colour tweaking, change of temperature colour and retained highest quality, there’s one most important factor that least discussed was enlarging manipulation (not that you want to do this but it’s when you need it). Because of the information amount retained in RAW format, you will be benefit from it if you need to do enlarging work, you will never know when you need this, for this reason, it’s wise to always shoot in RAW format.

As for Lightroom, it allowed you to decide how big you want to export the files, anything larger than original, Lightroom will use adobe’s algorithm to enlarge it. I found it very simple, easy to use and the result is finest. Here are the sample of images compared direct output from Lightroom and enlarged image size in Photoshop, both are double the size of orginal which is the 3rd image, they are all 100% crop.

Hope this information helps you and don’t just store your image in the hard drive, print it big and admire yourself with your wonderful photo :)

Direct output from Lightroom

Manually enlarge using Image Size in Photoshop

Original Size

It’s always a fun discussion about gear we used to do photography, even for some who denied and claims stand still for the film in the digital age, or others that into the alternative photography, the truth is that they’re still using a more then decent photography equipment, perhaps it’s just not the latest technology.

The real artist has shown us what they can produced using whatever tools on hand. Today I came across the site Just What I See that give it the best explanation. Greg Schmigel has show us the wonder of his soft skill by using only the iPhone for all the photograph in this site.

What Greg has proved is not only show that I’m far away from being a great photographer, it also showed to the world that the gear isn’t really matter. The line that I’ve heard a thousand time and perhaps I’ve said it myself too. Only then thru the eye of Greg we have prove it right, from the real work, and put a shame to those who has said “camera is not important” yet still equipped with tons of gear.

Here is some of the sample and do visit this wonderful site and gets inspired. Greg Schmigel, you the man!

There’s time I am too routine on my processing, you may call it style but I name it dead. I guess it’s time to be more experimental, to open up mind and looking for possibility. One shall not scared for doing wrong thing, get lost in control and enjoy what that surprise outcome.

However, I’m happy with the 2 image below which remain in Black & White version.

Hue is an ancient city where there’s a lot of history took place, and Hoi An is just too charming town not to like. The people are wonderful over in Vietnam, we may heard a lot of their friendliness but until I meet them in person, they are a really nice people, not all but a lot.

Food is another highlight, it change my point of view towards Vietnamese food.

Vietnam provided a lot of photography opportunities, the limitation is simply photographer himself. In summary, I like the place, a lot.

To view my complete collection, visit my vietnam set on Flickr.