This weekend saw the Glastonbury music festival, which is just one of many music festivals taking place over the summer. These events make the perfect opportunities to take great photographs as you’re surrounded by ecstatic revellers, great lighting conditions, impressive stage constructions and mud, lots and lots of mud.
It shouldn’t be too hard therefore to take some memorable photos, photos that would look good printed on canvas and displayed on your wall. However, because the unpredictable nature of the British weather, and the all too predictable nature of the British mud, you probably don’t want to be taking your expensive SLR camera along to the festival with you.
You’re probably better off taking a cheaper camera, but ensure that it does allow you to adjust the shutter speed so you can at least have some control over your pictures.
Obviously you’ll want to try to take some photos of the performers on the stage; this after all is why people attend festivals in the first place. Try to get as close as possible to the stage for this as you’ll want the artist to be as large within your frame as possible. If you can’t get too close, don’t panic, you can easily make use of other aspects of the festival for great images.
For example, try taking pictures of the crowd, of their faces. The reactions of people to a performer can be extremely expressive and make for really interesting photographs. Also you could try to take pictures of the things that happen away from the stage, as they can sometimes be the more interesting things at festivals.
The portrait of the eighties’ golden couple of John McEnroe and actress Tatum O’Neal, which was painted by Pop-Art master Andy Warhol, is to be auctioned by Sotheby’s auction house.
On Tuesday July 1st the painting, which carries an estimate of between £250,000 and £300,000 is going under the hammer, with all proceeds set to go to the philanthropic organisation Habitat for Humanity.
The painting is one of Warhol’s finest works and represents his era of painting larger than life iconic celebrities during their prime, such as his works of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Both McEnroe and O’Neal were at the top of their game at the time of the painting. John McEnroe was a world number one, and a Wimbledon and US Open tennis champion. Tatum O’Neal was a successful Hollywood actress who had won an Oscar at aged ten.
McEnroe even commented about the experience of being immortalised in one of Andy Warhol’s paintings, in his autobiography:
Was I overly impressed? A bit star struck? Maybe. Maybe Tatum was too. It’s a funny thing when two well-known people meet: There’s an immediate magnetism, because you seem to have so many things in common – not the least of which is that you both instantly feel liberated from what the rest of the world usually demands.
If you don’t have over a quarter of a million pounds to spare for this painting, you could have your own photos on canvas in the same pop-art style.
Printing your photos on canvas is only half the job of creating canvas prints of your pictures. Your completed canvas photo print then needs to be professionally mounted and stretched to ensure you get the possible outcome.
Stretching the canvas print is an art form in itself and requires experience to get absolutely right. To do this we use ‘The Stretcher’, which is a special frame we use to keep your canvas taught, which is essential to preserve your image. The stretcher frame is made from 4cm wood that has been kiln dried.
Stretcher frames are the best way to mount canvas prints as they allow you to modify the frame afterwards should you wish to do so. You may want to frame your canvas print, remount or even remove it entirely. The stretcher frame allows this without any risk to the canvas.
It is imperative that canvas prints are framed in this way as canvas reacts differently to changes in location, heat, humidity etc; therefore you need to be able to readjust the frame to suit the location. Some canvas printers will frame your canvas in a different way, possibly even sticking your canvas print to the frame. You should avoid this as it will have a detrimental affect to your canvas
Back in the days of 35mm film cameras and sending your pictures off to the chemist or the photo labs to be developed, you knew that what you got back was what you’d taken through the camera lens. The camera, as they say, never lies.
These days however with digital cameras, a multitude of camera effects and of course the availability of photo editing software such as PhotoShop, the camera doesn’t just lie, it completely makes up what you want it to.
You can take a photo of your subject against a white wall, drop them into any background or setting that you want and create it so that it looks real. You can correct any errors with the picture, such as poor lighting and intrusive objects, plus you can even correct any errors with your subject. For example you could get rid of spots, red-eye, whiten their teeth or even reduce their weight.
The power of image manipulation software is incredible, but is it real photography?
The truth is yes. You don’t think those recent photos that have adorned OK magazine from Wayne and Colleen’s wedding didn’t go unedited do you? She doesn’t look that good without some airbrush and clone tool work from PhotoShop. If you want your photos to look as good as the professionals, especially if you’re looking to get them printed on canvas, you’ll want to find yourself some image manipulation software and give yourself a PhotoShop makeover.
It’s not cheating; it’s what the professionals do!
Further proof that collecting art was something for the super rich only happened yesterday when the latest work from French artist Monet sold at auction for a staggering £40.9 million.
His work, ‘Le Bassin Aux Nympheas’ fetched almost double what it had been estimated at, which would have made a new record even had it sold for the estimated £24 million. Instead the piece went for £40.9 million, smashing the previous record which was also held by Monet. His 1873 work, ‘Le Pont du chemin de fer a Argenteuil’ sold for £20.9 million in May.
‘Le Bassin Aux Nympheas’ was purchased by a mystery buyer. It was painted in 1919 in Giverny and has only ever made one public appearance.
Even though someone may have paid such a huge sum of money for the painting, you can still have artwork on your wall for much less. You don’t need to visit an art auction and purchase the next Monet masterpiece; instead you could turn your own photographs into works of art by having them printed on canvas.
Andy Warhol was famous for creating art based on popular culture figures of the Twentieth Century, such as Marilyn Monroe and Wayne Gretzky. He’d create his canvas works in his own unique pop-art style, a style that has become instantly recognisable nowadays, even for those with only a passing knowledge of art.
If you’d like an Andy Warhol style canvas picture hanging from your wall, you don’t need to invest the millions of pounds it would take to own one. No, instead you could have your own photographs, even an image of yourself, turned into a Warhol inspired work of art, pop art.
Taking your pictures, and adding your photos to canvas doesn’t just mean you have your pictures printed on canvas. Instead, you can have your pictures worked on to create original works of art that show off your character for everyone to see and enjoy.
Warhol’s style is to have bright, strong colours repeated in a grid style, so that you may have four or more images of your face on the same canvas.
It’s art, but it’s art with your own pictures.
In the digital age finding your photographs shouldn’t be a problem. It’s not like you’re having to deal with masses of negative strips like we used to have to organise when we used 35mm film cameras. In those days you’d need to keep them safe in wallets and make sure they didn’t get dusty or creased, because if they did you wouldn’t be printing any more photos from them!
No, today we just need to save our images to a computer or a storage device and we can store tens of thousands of photographs as easy as we’d save files on the Internet. Then they’re ready for you whenever you need them to print as pictures, upload to websites or print on canvas.
However, you need to be careful with your digital pictures because you won’t have any negatives to rescue you, should you happen to lose the file or delete it accidentally. Therefore you should copy your images and keep backups, because if your computer crashes and isn’t recoverable, can you afford to lose the images it contains?
You can use an external storage drive, a USB flash drive, or even upload your photos to Flickr or some other such file saving website. The more copies you have of your pictures, the safer they’ll be.
Imagine if the worst happened right now, and you lost every photo on your PC; have you made backups?
When looking to take great photos that will look good printed on canvas you’ll need to ensure that you do everything possible to get the best shot, and the clearest possible image. As canvas prints can be very large in size, any blemish or imperfection in the picture will be very obvious in the final canvas print.
Therefore, one tip you should take heed of when taking your pictures is to use a tripod as much as you can. This might seem obvious, but many photographers try to ignore their tripods and work without them. They take too much time to setup, they’re too cumbersome, and they think they don’t need one. Particularly with today’s digital cameras having image stabilizing technology, the tripod isn’t required anymore.
That’s just not true however, the tripod is just as important now as it ever was. Using image stabilizing doesn’t allow you reduce the shutter speed enough for adding any creativity to your photographs, or for taking pictures in lower light conditions.
For example, you could reduce your shutter speed down to 1/15 or 1/30 a second, which would allow you to create great burred effects for action photography. This isn’t possible without a tripod, thus using the tripod could be the difference between a good photo and a great photo.
One thing many people don’t realise when they come to have their pictures printed, whether that be on paper on printed on canvas, is that the resolution is important to the outcome of the print. Many digital cameras these days allow you to choose the quality of the image that you’re saving, offering smaller file sizes and lower resolutions in order to save space and fit more pictures on the SD card. The downside to this is that the quality, or resolution, of the smaller files is too poor to print.
This means that when they are printed they come out fuzzy, grainy and blurry.
Cameras take pictures this low quality because they’re fine for use on the Internet, such as on Facebook or MySpace. The Internet displays images at the resolution 72 dpi (dots per inch) which is fine when the pictures appear on your computer screen. However 72 dpi is far too low a resolution to be printed. Instead, when printing an image you’ll require a resolution of a minimum of 300 dpi.
If you were buying images from a photographer’s website you would generally pay more for the higher resolution versions. Fore example the 72 dpi version may be the cheapest because it’s only useful for website work, where a 300 dpi or higher resolution image would cost more as it can be printed.
With this in mind ensure that if you’re looking to take a photo with a view to printing it on canvas, or on paper, that you choose the highest quality setting on your digital camera and use the highest resolution available. The higher the resolution, the better quality the photograph.
For most people, and especially women, your wedding day is the most important day of your life. You want it to be perfect. Every detail has to be just right and everything has to go off without a hitch (despite of course the ‘hitch’ you’re there for!).
However it can also be very stressful, and many things can go wrong. Above all else though, the wedding photographer isn’t something you want to go wrong. The pictures from your wedding are what last, capturing those enduring memories of your special day. They’ll stay with you for what should be a long and successful marriage, so you’ll want to make sure you have the best photographs you can.
In order to do this, and have wedding photos that will look good enough to be printed on canvas, you’ll need to make sure you choose the right wedding photographer. Make sure you see their portfolio first, and get an accurate quote on the prices they charge so that you know how many photos you’ll get and what sort of album you’ll be presented with.
Then you should consult with the people that matter, such as the bride and groom’s parents, on what sort of photos they’ll want. Be sure not take too much input though as it’s your day, and the photographer is the expert.
When you come to choose a photograph for printing on canvas you should pick one that shows the happy couple in close up, as the canvas texture always look great on skin tones.
Above all, enjoy the day. If you’re stressed and worrying about things, it will show in the pictures.
