February 20th, 2012 › Photography › Thomas Boesgaard › no comments ›
Photographers will travel all around the world, to get to that very special location. The location that only few other people have seen.
They spend huge amounts of money getting there, only to find out that they are not alone. That someone else is already taking photos there.
So how can you go to a special place? The place where only very few other people go? It’s simple. Stay at home. Do like Jay Maisel. He’s shot entire walls full of images just taken from his home. Or like Andre Kertesz, who spend his old age inside, working only with natural light from his windows, and whatever he had inside his home.
Your house – where you live. That place has a special viewpoint. And the light that enters the room, is different from all other places. You should take that opportunity. You might look out your windows everyday, or enjoy the light passing through the windows. But now and then, try to look through a lens, and capture it.
And since your friends and family might not be doing the same, then you can bring a camera when you visit their homes, and photograph from there as well. It’s another location where the public has no access, and where you can create some unique images.
October 2nd, 2011 › News › Thomas Boesgaard › no comments ›
I have added two new portfolios to the website:
Mixed Polaroids
This is some of my own favorite polaroids taken over the years.
Check out the portfolio here: Mixed Polaroids
UCI 2011 Road World Championships
I had planned to go there with some digital equipment – the standard 16-35 and 70-200 equivalent. But then I made a quick change of plans, and brought nothing but a Polaroid-camera and two packs of film.
Check out the portfolio here: UCI 2011 Road World Championships on Polaroid
I also created a another separate portfolio-site for these images:
Check out the site at rwcs2011.thomasboesgaard.com
July 28th, 2011 › News › Thomas Boesgaard › no comments ›
I was never a skateboarder myself, but I have always felt drawn to the skateboard-culture. I don’t see skateboarding as a sport, but more as a kind of creative activity. The trick is the art. And like a painter who sketches the same thing over and over again, the skateboarder will work on learning the same trick over and over again. It’s quite impressive when you think about it.
Skateboarding is also about photography. Lots of professional photographers who now do commercial stuff, started out skateboarding, then photographed their friends, and finally ended photographing for a living.
I wanted to try skateboard-photography myself, so I ventured out to my local and newly renovated park together with a friend. I brought a mediumformat TLR – the Yashica Mat 124G. I have only scanned a few of my images, and my first impression is that photographing skateboarders is difficult. Especially with a manual focus camera with slow shutter-speeds. Still, I already want to do more, and maybe the next time I will bring a few flashguns.
June 7th, 2011 › Tutorial › Thomas Boesgaard › no comments ›
Almost all the polaroids and similar photography that I produce, ends up in my macbook and maybe online. Working with polaroids are quite easy, and much easier than digitizing negatives or slides. In this article I’ll go through my personal workflow for handling polaroids.
Scanning
The most important part when scanning polaroids, or anything else for that matter, is working in a clean environment. So before you start up your software, find a microfiber-cloth and maybe a bulbblower. Give your scanner some love and care, and get rid of dust, grease and dirt. You will also want to wipe dust and fingermarks off your polaroid before scanning. Take care not to leave scratches.
I use Image Capture together with a Canon CanoScan 8800f. This is pretty simple software, but I find it does the job perfectly. You could also use Silverfast or Vuescan, but scanning reflective prints does not require all the powerfull features in those prementioned tool.
I scan to jpg with the least amount of compression. Scanning to TIFF would give more room for working with the files, but also delivers some huge files. I tend not edit my scanned Polaroids that much, so TIFF i not really needed in my workflow.
Deciding on the resolution to scan in can be a challenge. I prefer to scan just once, and therefore scan in the highest resolution I can imagine is needed for now or in the future. For me, that is 1200 or 2400 dpi. And what does that mean? Well,let me just give you some numbers and examples. 72-96 dpi will give you a scanned file that will more or less 1:1 when viewed on todays computer-screens. 240-300 dpi will make it possible to print the polaroid at 1:1 in a good quality. Anything above 300 dpi will allow you to make enlargements. I like to have the ability to print my polaroids at four or 16 times their original size. 600 dpi is a four times enlargement, and 1200 dpi is a 16 times enlargement. When scanning at 2400 dpi, I scan for the future.
I had a period as a polaroid photographer where I would not scan the white border. I simply omitted the border, because I thought that it should be about photography, and that the medium did not matter. That was a stupid idea. You never know how you are going to use your scanned polaroids in the future, and if you some day decide that it would be nice to have the white border, you would have to rescan. So scan the border, and add some space around the border, so you have something to work with. You can always crop your polaroid later in the process.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
I use Lightroom for cataloging and editing. When my scanned polaroids are imported, the first thing I do is to add a graduated mask on all four sides of the image. This is a bit specific to my needs, but I want my Polaroid to look good on a white background. Even though the backing in my scanner is white, it’s not 100% white. Previously I would use the brush-tool, and brush in +1 exposure all the way around the image. That took too long. The I created this preset for the masking tool:
It’s really quite simple. I add some exposure, in this case a full stop to make sure I’ll really get that white burned in. Then I desaturate to remove any chromatic casts. Oh, I also named it Polaroid Border.
I’ll make the graduation quite steep, and leave the middle just on the border of the image:
And as you can see, it’s now all pure white:
Then I crop the image almost to the edge, but I’ll leave some whitespace.
And that’s it:
The next step is either exporting for a print, working a bit more on the image, send to flickr, or – export the image and send it to my special Instant Photography website:
March 26th, 2011 › Polaroid › Thomas Boesgaard › no comments ›
When The Impossible Project shortly introduced their Chocolate Type 80 film, I bought a twinpack. At that time I owned a functioning Polaroid EE100 Propack camera, which can take both type 80 and type 100 film. Unfortunately that camera died a cold winter-night some time ago. It apparently was not that weatherproof.
I still had a very nice Polaroid 600SE. But that camera only has magazines that takes type 100 film. Type 100. Type 80. Type 100. Type 80. OK? What’s the difference? Type 100 is rectangular, and type 80 is more or less square. Below is an empty filmpack from each type of film. The one at the top is a type 100, and the one at the bottom is type 80.
Here is another view of the two filmpacks. Again we have the type 100 at the top, and the type 80 at the bottom. Notice that the type 80 has a notch on the left side. This will keep it from moving in a compatible camera, but prevent it from being used in a magazine or camera that only takes type 100 film.
Here I have tried to fit the type 80 film pack into a type 100 magazine. You can see that because of the notches it simply won’t fit.
Fortunately it’s very easy to modify a type 100 magazine to take type 80 film as well. Below is an image of two magazines. The one at the top is an unmodified magazine, and the one at the bottom has been modified. All you need to do is cut or file a hole for the notches. I used a pair of side-cutting pliers. Remember to go easy on the plastic. It’s better to cut a little at a time, and then test, than cutting too much at once. But don’t be afraid doing this – it’s hard to go really wrong.
After the modifcation, the type 80 film pack fits perfectly, as you can see below.
This modification will work with all type 100 film-backs. One thing to keep in mind is that that obviously type 80 is smaller than type 100. And because the type 80 film pack is placed in the right side of the film back, your frame will possibly be cropped on some film-back. For the 600SE all you’ll have to do do is frame the image on the left side in the finder. For the Mamiya rz67 it just wont work very well, because the standard polaroid-back centers the image. Some Hasselblad polaroid backs may work, since at least a few of them places the image to one side.
March 4th, 2011 › News › Thomas Boesgaard › no comments ›
Tumblr For Fun
I have created a tumbr-blog in addition to this blog. Why two blogs? Well, I like to keep things tidy. So this being a personal blog, I plan to only publish content created by me. But since there’s so much good stuff worth sharing around the internet, I needed a place for that. And that’s where I will be using my tumblr-blog.
Updates on this blog will also be published on the tumblr-blog.
