March | 2014 | Sébastien Grobelny

Weekly Photo Challenge: Street Life

March 28, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny 19 Comments

The challenge this week on the daily post is Street Life.
Here’s a view from corner of Broadway and the 50th stret in NY. It’s always busy and buzzing.

Here are the submissions so far:

By Sebastien Grobelny

Filed under Photography, Picture, The Daily Post Tagged with new york, nyc, photography, street

Macro

March 27, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny Leave a comment

Macro is an extreme close-up.
I believe these links deserve a close-up 😉

Challenges: You can still submit, vote and see results on Celine’s blog.
I finally created a page with tutorials I find useful. Don’t hesitate to propose your addition in the comments section. Last addition are “How to fix color banding” from FStoppers and “How to Enhance Detail and Texture with Intelligent High Pass Sharpening” from Vibranshot
Vivian Maier: Thanks to Donald at 50’lux, I heard about Vivan Maier and I find the trailer and the story fascinating.
The Clone Wars: It is no secret I’m a big Star Wars fan and I love to mix toys and “real” subjects, so imagine my joy when 500px did a blog post about Stormtroopers doing Awesome things
Wild Portraits: Petapixel had a beautiful post on Intimate black and white portraits of exotic animals in captivity that I recommend for the beautiful pictures.

Kiss me

By Sebastien Grobelny

Filed under News, Photography Tagged with 50'lux, 500px, animal, black, celine, exotic, fstoppers, high pass, petapixel, portrait, sharpening, star wars, stormtrooper, toy, tutorial, vibranshot, vivian maier, white

The Brooklyn Juggler and Batman at Fete Paradiso

March 24, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny 3 Comments

If you remember well, we already saw that Bane was at the Fete Paradiso and wanted candy, but did you know that Batman was there the same day? He rudely interrupted Kyle Petersen aka The Brooklyn Juggler. My guess is that he thought that the Juggler was another villain from the Riddler family.

By Sebastien Grobelny

Filed under Photography, Picture Tagged with batman, brooklyn juggler, composite, fete paradiso, toy

Weekly Photo Challenge : Reflections

March 21, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny 14 Comments

The challenge this week on the daily post is Reflections.
I’m going to go once more with the Manhattan skyline from “Once more with feelings”

Here are the submissions so far:

By Sebastien Grobelny

Filed under Photography, Picture, The Daily Post Tagged with manhattan, postaday, reflection, Reflections, skyline

This is how I [blog] roll

March 14, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny 4 Comments

Since I started blogging, I have never shared with you how I was keeping up with all the news. I have basically 2 tools:

As Greg recently reported in “The holy trinity of WordPress.com blogging”, WordPress is an amazing tool in itself. If you like, comment or follow I will always visit and most likely like, comment or follow back. I find it easier to connect with people on WordPress that have enabled the social features.
To WordPress Reader, I prefer a RSS Reader. In the past I used Google Reader, but since his unfortunate death, I have moved on and now uses NewsBlur. I currently have more than 100 feeds that I defined as Photography but it’s only one of my categories (read I have way more feeds :D)

I use Newsblur daily, WordPress Reader almost weekly and time to time twitter, instagram or tumblr as a complement.

I have 2 rules I follow:

I will follow you if you post great material (tutorial, pictures, interesting opinions…) on a regular basis (as my number of feeds is unlimited I’m pretty loose on the regular definition..The better the material the looser I will be). Most of the time I will follow on WordPress first and if I keep coming back, I will add you as a RSS feed to be sure to not miss anything you post
I will not follow people that don’t post original content. If you post pictures, I’m looking for your pictures not somebody’s else. If you happen to post somebody’s work on occasion, I will look for the credits.

If you need help with RSS feeds don’t hesitate to contact me, I truly believe it is a world changing tool.

If you believe I should follow you too (or someone you know), don’t hesitate to leave a link in the comments and I promise I will visit it.

By Sebastien Grobelny

Filed under Editorial, Photography Tagged with blog, greg urbano

Macro

March 13, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny Leave a comment

Macro is an extreme close-up.
I believe these links deserve a close-up 😉

Challenges: You can still submit, vote and see results on Celine’s blog.
Big News: As reported by PetaPixel and Greg, Getty made millions of photos available for free.
Follow up: PetaPixel had some interesting thoughts about the move by Getty in this article.
Mad Men: Hilarious video of Jon Hamm and Jimmy Fallon photobombing tourists.
Mad Editing: If you believe that editing of models has gone too far, look at what College Humor has done.
New venture: Zack Arias just launched a new website called DEDPXL. They have Q&A, news, Assignments, Critiques. I thank Celine for showing me Zack’s world through Photography Q&A
Cool cool cool: Loved this very creative ad from Subaru
Hit-Girl: Great idea from Kaija Straumanis showcased on PetaPixel. I love the creative use of composites and don’t think I could have thought about this on my own. Brillant.
Magic: FStoppers gave us the secret of the levitation effect. *Mind blown*

By Sebastien Grobelny

Filed under News, Photography Tagged with ad, celine, college humor, editing, effect, fstoppers, greg urbano, jimmy fallon, jon hamm, levitation, petapixel, photobomb, photoshop, subaru, video, zack arias

Your postcard made it to England.

March 12, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny Leave a comment

Another postcard from Greg, this time in England. I really love the idea and hope to see a lot of different views. Mine was Ode to HDR

Filed under Photography Tagged with blog

Green

March 11, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny 6 Comments

In their latest blog post, 500px announced the theme for next week. The theme is Green.I thought about this detail I took in 2007 at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Detail of snake

To participate, just post over 500px and use the tag 500pxgreen.

By Sebastien Grobelny

Filed under Photography, Picture Tagged with 500px, green, snake

Motion blur

March 10, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny Leave a comment

If you have seen my Marseille post, you may have noticed the picture below.

A building in Marseille

This is an easy effect I have seen being used more and more recently. I will try to show you how to achieve it. I believe it creates an ethereal look and works very well when dealing with some king of pattern. Feel free to download the picture and try it for yourself.

Original file

1. Straighten (optional): depending on the direction you want to give, you may need to straighten up first. I wanted to give a 90 degrees angle here so I had to straighten the window frames. To do this open in Photoshop, duplicate the layer, select the ruler tool either by picking it up in the Eyedropper tool group or clicking Shift+I until you get it. I did put my starting point at a window corner near the bottom and the end at an upward corner on the same column. The longer the distance, the more accurate you will be. Once done, go to Image -> Image Rotation -> Arbitrary. It will display the angle calculated. Just validate. Use the cropping tool on the result.

Just before the cropping

2. Selection: Use the rectangular Marquee tool (M) and select the zone you want to apply the effect to. I selected a zone that is about 1/3 of the picture and in the center. As I may want to redo this step in the future I will create a new layer with the selection. With the selection still active go to Layer->New Layer->Layer via Copy.

The new layer from Step 2

3. Motion blur: Duplicate the newly created layer and with the Magic Wand Tool select the empty space at the bottom by clicking anywhere in the empty space. With the Shift key pushed do the same thing on the top part. Then go to Select->Inverse to get your original Marquee tool selection. With the selection active go to Filter->Blur->Motion Blur. A box like the one below should appear.

Step 3 Options

Angle will give you the direction of the movement. Below are 3 different angles

0 degrees. Only the distance is a factor here.

45 degrees

Minus 45 degrees. See how the direction is opposite to the 45 one

As I want a downward direction here, I will use -90 degrees. Distance will impact the force of the effect. The lower the distance is , the more you keep the forms.

Distance 100

Distance 300

Distance 600

I used the -90 / 600 px setting. As I want to also have this effect upward I do another copy and apply the effect with 90 degrees and still 600 distance.

Move the layers up and down to your liking. You should get something like this.

Result of step 3

4. Overlap : You can see that were the layer overlap you have some transition issues. To fix this I used a Polygonal Lasso (L) selection as follow

Step 4 Selection

I select the upward layer and a use the Erase tool (E) on it. Once done I do the same with the downward layer.

Step 4 Result

5. Integration: The last step is to integrate your motion blur with the rest of the picture and do the adjustments you wish.

Here’s a creative use by someone way better than me:

Photograph alone by Margareta Adela on 500px

alone by Margareta Adela on 500px

By Sebastien Grobelny

Filed under Photography, Picture, Step by Step Tagged with 500px, motion blur, photoshop, tutorial, video

Ode to HDR

March 7, 2014 by Sébastien Grobelny 12 Comments

Recently Greg posted an article titled “Where in the world is my postcard?“. I received mine on Tuesday and took it to a spin to Time Square during my lunch break. Not sure in hindsight if that was such a good idea between the tourists, high sun and all the construction work at the moment. I shot it with my ipod and as an hommage to Greg, I applied a HDR effect to my submission with Snapseed.

By Sebastien Grobelny