Automating Mass Portraits With QR Codes
May 15, 2012
For Mother’s Day this year, my church decided to offer free portraits. We did something similar for a back-to-school event last year, and while it was well-received it also ended with our communications director spending the better part of a week sifting through photos and breaking them up by family. This time around, I decided to see if I couldn’t automate that process, and in the end we managed to pull it off with almost no human post-processing effort, and no extra equipment aside from a box full of printed cards. We sent everyone home with a card that gave them everything they needed to get their photos online the next day. You can find all the code I wrote to make it work in theGithub repositoryI set up for the purpose (click the “Zip” button at the top of the page if you just want to download everything). You’ll need Python to run my scripts, and a web server that supports PHP if you want to use the web viewer. This is how I made the whole thing work, and how you can replicate the process.
Photographic Exercise
December 30, 2010
As far as activities go, photography is pretty benign. Aside from lugging the gear around, there’s generally not much physical exertion to be had on a shoot–not on the part of the photographer, anyways–and it’s certainly far from perilous. My last shoot at Lewis Park, however, turned out to be the exception to the rule. Admittedly, I never truly feared for my life, and none of my muscles ached the next day, but I definitely did a lot more shoving and clinging and climbing than I’ve ever done for a photograph before.
Christmas Portrait, Part II
December 16, 2010
For this year’s Christmas portrait, I put my girlfriend inside a snow globe. In the last entry I talked about the hard part: photographing the snow globe. Today’s entry covers photographing Danie and actually getting her into the globe, which was really more drudgery than anything.
Christmas Portrait, Part I
December 16, 2010
Last year I made a Christmas portrait of my girlfriend, and we’ve decided to make a yearly tradition of it. Last year’s was a simple affair, just a standard headshot with a Santa hat and a red-gelled background. This year we’ve decided to go for something much more involved, and I’m going to be compositing two photos together. I won’t reveal my plan until the composition is finished (that should be up in a blog post tomorrow morning), but I’ll start out by walking through the creation of one of the photos I needed: a snow globe.
Splash
December 3, 2010
I haven’t gotten a chance to shoot anything recently, and my screencasting plans have fallen by the wayside thanks to technical problems, so today I decided to dig up some photos from an older shoot and write a post about it.
A little over three years ago, I shot my friend David’s senior portraits. We were both competitive divers at the time (although the “competitive” part was debatable in my case), and he wanted a set of diving portraits, so I went with him to practice one day to shoot. I had a 300mm f/2.8 lens checked out (one of the perks of editing the school’s yearbook), and I planned to put it to good use. I thought we’d get there a good hour before the sun went down, during which time I’d make some nice available light shots with the 300, and then once the sun set I’d play around a little bit with some lights.