In The Bag - Namibia Landscape Workshop

In the past I have been asked several times about the equipment that I travel with on workshops and landscape shoots. I have the ‘Composing The Desert’ (http://www.emilvonmaltitz.com/Namibia.pdf) Namibia landscape workshop coming up in November with Tailor Made Safaris, so it’s a good opportunity to discuss the gear traveling along with us. Before starting though, it’s worth noting that I’ll be driving up from South Africa, so am not as constrained by airline restrictions as some of the other photographers on the workshop will be.

Creating a Watermark signature in Photo Shop

I recently wrote about how to watermark an image using Lightroom (see this post) so as to protect your images from image theft once they are published on the internet. As shown (the old article is now posted on the blog here), it is fairly simple to watermark images automatically using the export features in Lightroom. I have received a number of request on how to create a graphic signature with a transparent background, so here it is:

Back to the Museum - Lit portraiture on the fly and telling a story.

 From the outset I have to admit that I am a fan of Joe McNally, David Hobby and Don Gianatti’s portraiture work using small lights to create intriguing portraits (they don't know who I am from a bar of soap, but have all been quite instrumental in honing my lighting skills and techniques). Obviously working to brief one’s portraits have to actually be useful from a commercial point of view (every photographer would love to create portraits like Sebastião Salgado, but showing an individual in the grittiest of light isn’t necessarily what they are going to want, and remember, THEY are the client). I recently found myself back at Durban’s Natural History Museum to create portraits of several staff members for the upcoming edition of their in-house Thola magazine. In the darkened corridors of the displays I once again found myself pulling tricks and ideas from the three photographers mentioned above.