Photos printed on canvas always look better than pictures that printed on paper and framed to be displayed in the home. Canvas printing makes for some great imagery to display on your wall and always acts as a wonderful talking point whenever your friends and family come around.
If you’ve decided you want a canvas picture for your home, but you can’t find any of your own photographs that you’d like printed on canvas; you need not worry as we may be able to help with that.
Most people have a picture they treasure, whether that is of their children, their pets, their favourite holiday or even of themselves. However if you haven’t got a photo you think you would be worth becoming print on canvas you can always look at our gallery of canvas photography to choose an image.
You can pick any picture in the photo gallery and have it printed on canvas for display in your home. There are many professional images taken by professional photographers, all of which would look beautiful when printed on canvas for your home.
Printing photos on canvas is a relatively new thing in the world of photographic printing, yet it’s something that has caught on in a big way. The beauty of photos printed on canvas is that they’re injected with a certain authenticity that isn’t present with photos printed on paper.
Indeed, framed photographs have existed for a great many years as the media of choice for displaying one’s pictures within your home. Whether they be hung on the wall or positioned on the bookshelf or sideboard, photo frames are a very common sight within homes in the UK.
Canvas prints however offer a different dynamism to photographs. They turn humble pictures into works of art, making ordinary photos look good and very good photos look exceptional.
The reason photos on canvas look so good is probably because most people associate canvas with art, and generally only the very rich can afford to have art displayed in their homes. By printing photos on canvas anyone can display canvas pictures in their home, and not just ordinary canvas pictures, but canvas pictures displaying their own photos.
Taking photos of people outside is a great way of combining nature with portrait shots, and often brings the best out of your subjects. However when lighting your portrait photos outside you should rely on natural sunlight to light your pictures, even Mother Nature needs a helping hand sometimes. When you rely on sunlight you’ll often get light that is too harsh, or too flat, or creates dark areas on the subject’s face. To rectify this you should use something called a ‘fill flash’, or the ‘mode’ setting as it is sometimes known on digital cameras.
This will ensure that you don’t lose any of the details on your subject’s face.
The Fill Flash will create a subtle flash that throws a little light onto your subject’s face. It’s often used by professional wedding photographers to ensure that the bride and groom get the best possible pictures of their special day; particularly when faced by the strong sunlight every bride wants for her wedding day.
The Fill Flash on a digital camera takes a reading of the amount of light in the background of your image, and adjusts the level of the flash to compensate. This ensures that you’re not left with a strong backlight causing a dark effect on your subject’s face, silhouetting your subject.
Be sure not to stand too fare away from your subject though as the effective range of the flash is usually no more than 10 feet.
With the Fill Flash you can experiment using different natural lighting techniques. For example, you could position your subject with the sun behind them, or to the side of them, creating what is often known as ‘rim lighting’. This creates a slight halo effect behind them, highlighting their outline.
You don’t need to be a professional photographer to take great looking pictures; in fact you don’t even need to be a professional photographer to have your own exhibition. ‘Through the lens’ is an exhibition for amateur photographers Helen Plant and Phil Green, both of whom are members of Southampton’s ‘Camera Club’.
Having no formal qualifications in photography and being completely self-taught, both Helen Plant and Phil Green have been awarded a Distinction by the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain.
Helen Plant says about her love of Photography:
I am fascinated by the shapes, colours and textures of nature in close-up as well as on occasions a more abstract approach to the wider landscape.
My preference is for subtle colours and lighting and relatively simple compositions.
Both Phil and Helen use digital cameras, though Phil Green says his love of photography stems from the traditional SLR camera.
Most of my photographs are of nature subjects taken within twenty miles of home. I cover my local patch with an emphasis on the welfare of my subject. This is a major factor and one of which I am fiercely proud.
The ‘Through the lens’ exhibition begins on June 28.
When you think about the great centres of Pop Art around the world, Swindon isn’t usually at the forefront of your mind. New York perhaps, but Swindon, in the heart of Wiltshire? Not usually no, however this Tuesday Swindon will be home to an art auction featuring some of the leading art luminaries, such as David Hocney and Clive Barker.
Kidson-Trigg at Highworth are staging the art auction this week, where 300 works of art go under the hammer in a dispersal sale. The works are all 20th Century, containing modern art, contemporary art and traditional artwork. They are all currently owned by the Jarvis Hotel group.
The Hotel chain has many hotels in the Swindon area, and they’ve built up the collection of artwork over the last fifteen years. They’d purchased the art mainly from auction houses in London to decorate their range of hotels.
Pippa Kidson-Trigg is one of the auctioneers, and she states:
It is a genuine dispersal sale, everything has to sell, so pictures have inviting estimate prices, and we hope it will provide purchasers with the opportunity to enjoy and invest in affordable art amongst the infamous names of today’s Contemporary artists such as Gerald Laing, (one of the original wave of pop artists), Clive Barker (one of the leading British Pop artists) and Sir Terry Frost RA (One of Britains most succesful C20th artists).
When you’re composing your photos, one of the things you’ll need to decide on is just what parts of the picture do you want to be in focus. For example, you might want your subject to be in sharp focus at the front of the frame, while having the background out of focus. This will draw attention to your subject.
Alternatively you might want your entire photo to be in focus. You can change the focus of the photograph with the aperture of the camera, to alter the depth of field.
If you’re photographing a landscape shot you’ll want the entire picture in focus.
You can increase the depth of field by reducing the aperture, allowing you to get more of the shot in focus. If however you increase the focal length you’ll have a small depth of field, which will mean you will only have one small part of your composition in focus, for example your subject.
A wide-angle lens has a very high depth of field, allowing you to have objects very close to the camera in focus, and objects as far away as the horizon.
Photography, by its very nature, is a visual medium. It’s the capturing of an image on film using light reacting with chemicals. It’s all about the visuals, the look, the composition, the colours and the tones.
It might surprise you to know then that an exhibition of photography with a difference took place in the Ukraine recently. This exhibition was different because the photographs were actually for the blind.
The photographs use a unique piece of software that takes a photographic image and traces over the lines in the detail. It then manages to create an embossed version of the picture so that it can be touched, and experienced.
This makes the photos ideal for the blind to experience because they are able to follow the embossed lines with their fingers and ‘see’ the image as though it were written in Braille.
You can see examples of the art on the BBC website.
One of the things you’ll need to decide when you want to take up photography as a hobby is whether to opt for a classic 35ml camera or to go for a new digital camera. Purists will say that nothing beats film; in much the same way they vinyl lovers will say they’re better than CDs.
There is a lot to be said for 35ml film. It’s the way photography was supposed to be, with pictures crafted as an art form. However to take it seriously you’ll need your own darkroom, which for developing the film itself has to be completely dark. Then you’ll need all of the chemicals, and the projector. It’s a very expensive, time consuming hobby.
Of course you could always have your films developed in a shop, or by sending them away. But when you do that you’re putting your trust in someone else and you have no control over the outcome.
Then the film itself isn’t cheap. Every picture you take costs you to develop. Whereas with a digital camera you can take as many photos as you want without any extra cost. You don’t need to pay to develop any film, because there isn’t any, and the camera’s themselves, with the aid of SD cards, can store hundreds of photos.
Digital cameras are easier to use, and the results are instant. When you use a film camera you have to wait to get the pictures back. With a digital camera you can see the photos straight away, so you know if you have the shot you want or not.
Also with a digital camera you can choose which photos you want to print, you don’t have to get them all developed.
If you’re looking to get into photography for the first time, you’re probably better off with a digital camera rather than a 35ml film camera.
Taking photos is fun and shouldn’t be something that you take too seriously, but by the same token you don’t want to waste time snapping away if you’re going to get bad results back. You want your pictures to be of a high standard, pictures that you’ll be proud to show your friends and family. Pictures that may even be good enough to be printed on canvas.
With that in mind there are a few things you should avoid when taking photos to make sure you don’t fall into any common pitfalls.
- Don’t stand your subjects in front a strong light source
A common problem with many people’s photos is that they position their subjects in front of a strong light source, such as a window or the sun. This creates backlight, and means that the subject of the photos is too dark. This results in very little details being visible on the subject’s face.
- Don’t turn your camera off and put it away at social gatherings
A good photographer always has their camera with them. If your camera is switched off and has the lens cap on, you’re not ready to capture those moments of magic that happen when your friends and family get together. Be sure to have your camera with you, to hand, and ready to snap at a second’s notice or you’ll miss the best moments.
- Don’t hesitate when taking photos
Taking pictures should be second nature. If you take too long and try to compose the perfect shot you’ll miss the best moments. Take more pictures not less, particularly if you have a digital camera. You can always delete them later.
Valerie Solanis doesn’t go down in history as one of those infamous people who changed history by assassinating someone famous. Instead she’s barely remembered by most as the woman who tried, and failed, to murder the Pop Artist Andy Warhol.
In 1969, on June 3rd, just days before Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Valerie Solanis shot Andy Warhol in his office in Manhattan, New York.
Solanis was familiar with Warhol had she’d actually appeared in one of the pop artist’s films. A victim of a tragic past where she was abused as a child, and the author of the book ‘SCUM Manifesto’ which was a tirade against the male species, Solanis believed that Andy Warhol possessed too much control over her own life.
She came to this decision after Andy Warhol had lost a play that she had written and sent to him.
Tragically Warhol didn’t survive long after the incident as it had affected him profoundly. He died in 1987 after telling many of his friends that he’d felt dead for a long time. Solanis served just three years in prison for the attempted murder, and died herself just 14 months after Andy Warhol in a hotel in San Francisco.
