Black Diamond Productions

Version 2.20, 14th July 2009

• Border widths can now be a percentage of the longest/shortest side.
• Problems related to the saving of presets containing multiple borders have now been solved (I hope!).

Author’s Site: http://timothyarmes.com/lr2mogrify.php

Update is available from your Lightroom Plugins page

Check it out on there site at: CLICK HERE – and thanks again to Scott for giving me a chance to post on photofocus.com

Glamour Photography, It’s all about Tone and Rapport….

2009 July 16

tags: glamour

Guest Post & Photos by Brent Burzycki Follow Brent on Twitter

I began my career in the glamour photo marketplace about four years ago and since then I have learned much, dispelled many more rumors than truths and also learned that in the end there is only one really happy person if you do your job correctly.

Let us start with the only person that will ever truly be happy with your work, that is your model. One of my rules when I shoot glamour is that if I cannot make the model happy with the images we shoot then I have failed as a photographer. My job as a glamour photography is to make an image that shows that model in their best most sensual or sexy light possible. You can accomplish this in many ways and those ways are based on how you implement and plan your shoot, what your subject matter is or simply what the client you are shooting for actually requires.

With those criteria in place it comes down to using your skills as a photographer and as a human being. Let’s be frank about it – you as a glamour photographer are asking your model to be incredibly intimate with the camera, and to play into a mood and feeling that they might not be fully comfortable doing with their significant other let alone a complete stranger as you could easily be in most shoot scenarios. This is where your rapport with the model becomes so very important, and without it you will never get the results you are looking for in your shoot.

Rapport is a very interesting topic I can talk for hours about so I will try to just summarize my thoughts and feel free to contact me if you have points you would like to add. My attitude when shooting any living human subject is that I treat them as I would want to be treated. That said it is very important to note that there are very important guidelines to not cross, one of them being touching. The rule for most photographers is that there is no touching of the model allowed without explicit consent of the model. I have this rule for a simple reason, for most people touch is equal to trust and trust needs to be earned and you cannot earn trust when you have only known a person for less than a short interview at the beginning of a shoot. The flip side of this is making the mistake of breaking a models trust; this could easily ruin your career as a glamour photographer. You will find it is truly amazing how the internet can ruin you forever when your model leaves the shoot, hops onto Facebook and Twitter and tells all her model friends that you are a creepy untrustworthy photographer. Thank you for playing, your career is done.

Lighting is important, proper technical photo skills are important, but in the end when it comes to glamour the mood of the image is most important. Photos tell stories, mood evokes emotion and emotion will equal the viewer looking at your photo longer. Mood is created by achieving trust between the model and the photographer, having proper rapport with the model to achieve that mood that is desired and simply to be open and honest with the model about the shoot and the content of the shoot. If you follow those simple rules you will find your photography grow and your reputation in the industry to grow along with it.

** Thanks again to Scott for giving me a chance to post over at photofocus.com – Hopefully more posts to come.

Blogs of the Day – wordpress.com

July 17, 2009: Top Posts – Ranked 65th out of all blog posts!

The Fractalius plugin creates unusual, eccentric artworks in a single step. The effects are based on extraction of so-called hidden fractal texture of an image. You can also simulate various types of exotic lightings and high realistic pencil sketches.

This is definitely one of the more fun plugins for photoshop – and I even paid for it because the results can be so cool and fun to play with… Sometimes a plugin should just really mess with pixels and this one does just that.

No details of what has changed yet – but there seems to have been a few fixes lately:

Version 2.12, July 2009

• No Changes listed yet

Version 2.11, 4th July 2009

• The export was being disabled unnecessarily when the watermark height field was empty, even though watermark resizing option was not turned on.

Version 2.00, 2th July 2009

• New JPEG compression option will compress JPEGs to the highest quality that’ll be smaller than the requested file size.
• Text annotations can now include accented characters and other such things.
• Unnecessary punctuation resulting from empty tokens in a text annotation is now removed.
• Text can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so that it’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Watermarks can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so they’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Estoteric errors that resulted from leaving width and height fields blank are now trapped.

For those that use lightroom here are the details of this great export plugin – actually something worth donating money to the author for:

LR2/Mogrify is a Lightroom 2 post-process plug-in that can embellish your images as they are exported from Lightroom. It’s flexible interface allows you to add borders, watermarks and text annotations to your images.

It’s also capable of exporting optimum JPEG images that are no larger than your requested size; great for uploading to web sites that limit the file size.

LR2/Mogrify uses ImageMagick to process the images. ImageMagick is a collection of powerful, freeware command line utilities for processing images.

In contrast to the original LR/Mogrify for Lightroom 1.3 and above, LR2/Mogrify is implemented as a "post-process" plug-in (new to Lightroom 2.0), allowing it to work in tandem with any export plug-in. This allows you to process your images using LR2/Mogrify and still have them sent to your final destination using the export plug-in of your choice.

LR/Mogrify and LR2/Mogrify are donationware plug-ins and are distributed via the Photograper’s Toolbox. The trial version limits the number of images that can be exported in one go to ten. Donating towards one of the projects removes this restriction and will give you a serial number that works with both.

You may also be interested in my LR/Enfuse plug-in to blend multiple exposures together.