Michael Freeman

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10 months ago

Five questions, but not five happy answers

1 year ago

20 Books to Read Before You Shoot

One of the great things about lists like this is that they’re personal. Well, they wouldn’t be much use to anyone if they weren’t, would they? So, being personal means a license to be opinionated, one of life’s little luxuries. It means being able to dismiss things you don’t like, whatever anyone else says about them, and including things that no-one ever heard of. So [...]

1 year ago

HOW TO WORK FOR FREE

1 year ago

Use Memory Colors to process

The received wisdom on color balance is that, ultimately, the light that falls on the scene is what counts. Measure that perfectly, and have a workflow that is perfectly calibrated, all the way through your monitor and to the printer, and you’ve cracked it. Well, yes and no. I sense some hackles rising. What could possibly be wrong with measuring the color of light properly?  And [...]

1 year ago

e-commerce: step one

The idea of selling stock seems to generate more than its fair share of fantasy. Well, it sounds good, doesn’t it? You have all these pictures, and a quick trawl through any online stock library confirms what you privately thought — yours are easily the equal of the bulk of what’s on offer. So, simply find an agency that will take your images, upload them, sit back and wait for [...]

1 year ago

Shooting 16:9

For some reason, I hardly ever see anything written, or opinions passed, about the creative pros and cons of different image formats. And yet the frame dynamics start to work on any potential composition as soon as you raise the camera to your eye. It’s not just that the edges and corners interact with your subject, but that the shape really does have an influence. The more elongated this [...]

1 year ago

The Devil's in the Detail

Upscaling has been on my mind this last week, with three things coming together at the same time. First came the submission notes sent by a stock library I’m joining, Aurora Photos. Although I’ve dealt with them by proxy for a number of years, via another site, now I’ll be sending files directly. They reminded me that the minimum file size is 50 MB uncompressed. For most of the [...]

1 year ago

Getting obsessive

Do you ever get unreasonably obsessive about a picture that you decide you must have? It happens to me more often than it should. Back in the Spring, I thought I’d make one last trip to China to polish off the Tea Horse Road book, and the strong motivation was to travel to the upper Salween River. Now, I really didn’t need to do this because after 16 weeks of shooting spread over the [...]

1 year ago

Really Bad Taste: Food Photography's Most Challenging Subjects

Warning! Do NOT scroll down to the lower images if you have a delicate stomach! I just returned from China, where one of my more memorable culinary experiences was in Nanjing. Our host ordered a local speciality, an egg which had been allowed to go half-term before being boiled. Ah-hah, think about it. Actually, I’d come across this before, most notably in the Philippines, where both origin [...]

1 year ago

Oh No....Infrared Again?

Infrared posts are on the up, and it’s no surprise. Digital has made infrared photography accessible and predictable. Well, if not exactly predictable, at least you can see immediately what you shot, and do something about it if it’s not right. Infrared in film days (actually there are even some new infrared films being made for the die-hard core of enthusiasts) was alchemical. Only [...]

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