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Worldwide Photography #37: Cairo

marcos333 — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:06:58 +0000

Worldwide Photography is a series of posts where every week we're going to show a city or location around the globe bringing the coolest photography samples of it. The photographs authors are all credited right above their pictures. Today feature: Egypt, Cairo.

For the next week we're going to feature Helsinki, Finland so if you want to send your submissions for the next Worldwide Photography, please tweet the tag #wwphoto and the link of the photo(s) on twitter. I'll be wainting for your submissions :)

selva

craizdgoat

sesa

Boris SV

stausi

Jari Kurittu

a.Lo <3

Marwa Morgan

KoRaYeM

... Arjun

Montenegro Luis

BenTaher

Mohamed Haykal

Ageel

KoRaYeM

mnadi

Julian Kaesler

Marwa Morgan

Bakar_88

Ranoush.

Marwa Morgan

TwOsE

Peter Gutierrez

Jamal Alayoubi

[ DHAHI ALALI ]

Mohamed Kazzaz

ania.egypt

Mohamed Kazzaz

Kaptah

CornérStoné

Elle

BeboFlickr

Marwa Morgan

Elle

About the author

My name is Marcos Torres, I'm Graphic Artist from Porto Alegre, Brasil. You can get to know more about me by acessing my Personal Website or by following me on Twitter: @marcos333. You can also see some of my last projects at my Flickr.

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Interview with Digital Artist Michael O.

aloa — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 10:04:06 +0000

Determined to be an artist he worked on his childhood dream to be good at drawing and found his very unique style. I am very pleased to show you an informative interview with digital artist Michael Oswald.

First of all we would like to thank you for taking the time to provide abduzeedo.com with this interview. Please tell us more about your art and design background and what made you become an artist and designer?

I think I always knew that art was in my future. Even as far back as preschool I can remember drawing pictures in class and wondering why no one else put as much time and effort into it. I do believe that the focus and determination it takes to be a successful artist is something people are born with so I don’t really see it as something I was in control of. My job was to nurture it and remember not to take it for granted.

Over time I considered graphic design as possible career, mostly because I never thought it would be possible to become a professional artist. So, I went to college for graphic design. The projects were mostly centered around commercial logos and advertising which felt too much like work to me and not a passion. While sitting in the back of the classroom, I would often play around in Photoshop and 3D Studio Max, creating images that I thought were cool but in my teacher’s words, had ‘no commercial appeal.’

How did you come up with your style, what made you explore more this style and what in your opinion is the main characteristic of it?

I knew that if I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, I would need both a unique style (that I could perform consistently) and a style that was within my limits. Yes, all artists have limits. My biggest roadblock was getting an idea from my head and onto the screen. I found that using photographs as references was the simplest solution. I never expected that process to become part of my eventual digital art style, let alone the main focus like it has become. Using photos as reference helps me set the foundation of an art piece which allows me to focus on other aspects of the artwork.

How would you break down your workflow in steps?

The first and most important step is coming up with a concept. I feel the best way to make interesting art is to have a good reason for making it. Just creating a pretty picture isn’t enough for me. Currently, I have about twenty ideas on my list and they are graded by how strong the idea is, how beautiful it looks in my mind and how easy or hard I think it will be to create.

The next step is finding the right model and setting up a photo shoot. Depending on the concept, I may need a model with dark hair or blonde hair, dark skin or light skin. These attributes are also broken down on the list. It is important to me to find the right model for an image and there have even been times when I have traveled to faraway places in order to find them.

During the photo shoot I try to pose the model as close to what I have in my head as possible. I keep the lighting setup very simple. This makes the transition from ordinary photos to unique artwork more interesting. I usually take around 400 shots at a photo shoot and end up keeping 3 or 4 of those shots. Inevitably, the photo is not exactly what I was hoping for but almost any changes needed can be addressed later.

In the computer I manipulate the image by first breaking it down (changing the color tones, moving body parts around, changing the backgrounds out etc…). Then, in so many words, I paint over the top of the image to make it look like a painting. This is done in a variety of ways (blurring, smudging, airbrushing etc…). Those who are interested in my style would be surprised to know that it takes very few tools and tricks but rather a lot of tedious detailing.

Technically speaking, I use a Canon 5D, usually with a 50mm 1.4 lens, a PC (quadcore with 6gigs of ram), CS2, and no, I don’t use a pen tablet. When hearing this, most professionals would just call me stubborn and set in my ways but I would say to you, find the components that work for you, not what someone else says you should. Let your output speak for itself.

What's the importance of the computer in the creative process?

I am trying to imagine how my artistic process would work without the aid of a computer. I do not think it would be possible. I would say that it is the most important tool in my arsenal but it is just that, a tool. I do not expect it to be a miracle worker.
Prior to using a computer I dabbled in airbrushing and I think that is the closest thing to what my work would look like if I did not use a computer. I am glad the technology is available and now I sat sit at a desk eating Cheetos and not have to move for hours!

Apart from the profits, what type of satisfaction do you get from your work?

It became clear to me a long time ago that inspiring others to create art is the most fulfilling aspect of my career. I’m happy to say that my work is not something I do selfishly. In fact, there are many times when I do not feel like working but I continue on knowing that some digital art fans are waiting to see what I come up with next and aspiring artists are looking to me for inspiration. Reading their comments and accolades is very gratifying …and addicting!

I also enjoy the people surrounding my business including other photographers and artists that I collaborate with, companies I work for and meeting new models from around the world. It helps bring the feeling to my work that it takes a community to make art and that I am not alone in its creation.

What are your favorite 5 websites, and why?

My two favorite websites are constantly jockeying for the first place position in my mind… DeviantArt.com and ModelMayhem.com. DeviantArt [ http://michaelo.deviantart.com/ ] is a wonderful community website full of aspiring artists and colleagues. The ability to comment on and ‘favorite’ individual artworks gives me a lot of information as to how art fans approve (or disapprove) of my new work. I highly recommend this site for those who are looking for critiques of their art and to possibly build a network of friends or a fan base.

ModelMayhem.com [ http://www.modelmayhem.com/198781 ] is a very simple and efficient site dedicated to matching photographers (or artists) with models. Since models are such an important part of my style, this website is an invaluable tool to creating my work. I would also say that this is the only part of my work that gets me off of the computer for a while. Bringing real people into the creative process is a great benefit to my style.

My third favorite site, which I am a bit new to, is Facebook. Unlike my own website, I can easily add new artwork or news updates here, plus I can also learn a little bit more about those who enjoy my work and contact them if I am visiting their area.

Forth would be istockphoto.com There are a number of stock photo sites out there these days but I have always been partial to istockphoto (although I am not too happy about the higher prices these days). If websites like this didn’t exist, my job would be a lot harder, particularly for background imagery and effects.

Lastly, if I had to pick a favorite non-art related website, I would say Rhapsody Although more of a program than a website, Rhapsody is a music site similar to itunes that lets you stream music in full clarity and length of just about any song you can imagine. I always like to have something playing in the background while I work – particularly the kind of music that puts me in the right emotional mood for whatever image I am working on.

Any advice for those who are starting out their career? What kind of references are important for those who want to work with this kind of style?

In my experience, a lot of the details surrounding my style worked themselves out over time. By not following in another artist’s footsteps or reading how-to books I was open to finding any technique. Through luck, I stumbled into one that is unique. This is the method that I suggest to all artists. Find a style that satisfies you.

The reference material only needs one crucial element. It needs to inspire you!

Where to find this artist

http://www.bymichaelo.com/ - Official website and portfolio
http://www.facebook.com/MichaelO.Digital.Artist - Facebook Page

More work

About the author

Aloa is the moniker of the german/greek graphic designer/filmmaker & musician Alexis Papageorgiou. Im glad to share great artistic work with the readers on Abduzeedo. Contact me on aloa@abduzeedo.com or follow my Twitter and Facebook page

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Beautiful Photos from the 2010 NatGeo Photography Contest

guest — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:58:14 +0000

Every year National Geographic promotes a photographic contest, with the categories "people", "places" and "nature", which awards the winner $10000 and publishes their picture in the NatGeo magazine. Accepting entries from all over the world, this year's submission period was closed on November 30th, and the entries were already unveiled. The rules for the contest allow minor modifications on image editors, but some of the photos are so amazing that they seem completely manipulated.

So in this post we've selected 20 of these fantastic photos to share with you. You can also see more images, including from the previous years, in the National Geographic website.

About the Author

Hi, my name Mariana Schneider, I'm a design student at ESPM in Porto Alegre. I'm a lover of all kinds of art, from music to painting, but photography usually catches my attention for showing us the amazing things that we look at everyday but never really see. You can find me on Twitter and see some of my own work on deviantArt.

The Architecture Photographer Nelson Garrido

fabiano — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:13:14 +0000

I've already published some architecture posts with amazing photos, and if you realize, a lot of them are from the same phtographer, he's the portuguese Nelson Garrido. His technique and style for photos like those are simply awesome. The lights and colors bring even more value to each project. And as this is not enough, he also has some experiments and food pictures that are also beautiful!

Because of that I made a collection with some of his photos, definitely you should check how great photos turn good projects into awesome ones!

Architecture

Foods and Experiments

For more information about Nelson Garrido visit ngphoto.com.pt.

About the author

I'm from Brazil, co-founder of Zee with Fabio. Nowadays I like to play with Fireworks, Photoshop and improve my skills in CSS. If you wanna request some posts, please feel free to contact me or follow on Twitter.

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Unbelievable Mosaic Portraits

paul0v2 — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:56:41 +0000

These are nothing like the usual mosaics you seen before, these portraits are so amazing by the way they are created and how amazing the result is. These mosaic artworks are created by the Greek designer and visual artist Charis Tsevis.

To find ou more about Charis Tsevis visit his website http://www.tsevis.com and his flickr account.

Click on each image to view the bigger version of it.

Michael Phelps

Barack Obama

Twitter Angel

Mimis Androulakis

Ronaldo

Callie Shell

HERmark

La Ballerina

Kobe Bryant

Alex Song

Oguchi Onyewu

Eddie Pope

Valentino Rossi

Akon

Yvette Jarvis

IKEA Sweeden

About the author

Hi there! I'm Paulo Canabarro, 26 year old web designer - paulocanabarro.com I'm from Brazil currently living and working out of Providence RI, USA. I'm truly passionate about design of all kinds, finding and sharing inspiration here has become part of my life. If you like to know more about me or get in touch visit my website paulocanabarro.com Stock me at Twitter and Dribbble

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30 Funny Photomanipulations of Animals by HumanDescent

aloa — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:31:28 +0000

Everyone loves photomanipulations, the image editing technique that gives us unlimited space for creative ideas, especially when working with a great working tool like photoshop. Once used for editing images of politicians its now open to the world. HumanDescent made plenty of good manipulations morphing different animals together. I selected 30 of my favourite and hope they are also your.

HumanDescent currently works in Web Content Management but would like to go more in to graphic design, so visit his portfolio

Where to find him on the web

HumanDescent.com - Website & Portfolio
Flickr.com/photos/humandescent/ - Flickr Account
Humandescent.deviantart.com/ - DeviantArt Account

Where to find him on the web

HumanDescent.com - Website & Portfolio
Flickr.com/photos/humandescent/ - Flickr Account
Humandescent.deviantart.com/ - DeviantArt Account

About the author

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Super Cool Photo Treatment in Lightroom

paul0v2 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:36:37 +0000

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a sharpness effect on your photo using lightroom, it's almost like an fake hdr effect and at the same time the result is very close to what Dave Hill gets on his photos.

With the creation of hdr photos, it feels like an window was open to a new way and look on photographs, the lights and colors so bright and sharp, the result was so amazing that was hard not to fall in love when you saw some hdr photos for the first time.

Hdr photo also opened the mind of thousands of photoshopers to try to recreate the same effect without the work of taking a bunch of photos with different exposures or so on. That so desired shortcut would turn your simple pictures into great photos.

Well, a lot of time went by and a lot of people still experiencing with some of these effects, looking for that special recipe that can bring your work to the next level. Some artists have been using some great effects on their photos and also defined this new style of photography like the very well known Dave Hill, the guy that puts a doubt in every ones mind about how he does it.

Searching for the same answers as everyone else I dug into google looking to learn more from other peoples experience and learned that only very few experiences were successful and worth a try. The best way to approach this was told by Scott Kelby and here I will share with you the experience I had by following his steps.

First thing you going to need is Adobe Lightroom, if you don't have it don't hesitate to download a 30 day trial here.

We are not going to go dept into lightroom, just the basic knowledge we need to pull up this effect but if you look around and start playing you will notice that it isn't that hard to get around this software.

Our first step is to open Lighroom and import the photo you want to work on, I am going to use one of my own photos that I took in NYC a couple years ago.

Click on the images for a bigger view

Now we are going to change to Develop mode so we can start working on our photo, we only going to work with the Basics.

It’s important to realize there is no perfect recipe, you have to feel the changes as you make it to get a better result out of it. The first change we are going to make is to bring Recovery all the way to 100.

Our next step we will bring the Fill Light up, but when we do that the photo gets really light and we have to use Blacks to make the photo look normal again.

So you have to have in mind that as much Fill Light you put you have to always follow with Blacks, so you will decide how much of a light or a dark look you photo will have, I personally like to bring up Fill light until a point that it’s not making the photo look all white and follow with Blacks with only half of the number of Fill Light. In this case I will use Fill Light 80 and Blacks 40 (don’t hesitate to experience other settings)

Our next step is to bring the Clarity up to +100

And now we are going to give more Vibrance to the photo but we don’t want to get way to vibrant because that will make you lose some of the lights on the photo so I bring the Vibrance to +70 (This is something that will change depending on the photo you working on so you need to get a good feeling of how vibrant you want it to be)

For our final touch we will desaturate the photo just enough so it will still have color and that desaturated feeling to it as well, so depending on how much Vibrance you apply you may have to apply less saturation to get the right look. Set the Saturation to -60.

Depending on the photo you may have to change up a bit as I said before but the steps are very simple and here you can take a look on the before and after result.

Here is the final result:

Click on the Image to compare the final result with the original.

Other samples using the same effect.

Click on the Image to compare the final result with the original.

About the author

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Stylish Photography Inspiration: Paddy Fernandez

abduzeedo — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:58:54 +0000

Paddy Fernandez is an experimental photographer form the Unite Kingdom, that despite of his young age, has already developed a very interesting style in his photos and in special in his portraits. With a really cool sense of illumination, also some images mixing desaturation with colors and of a bit of humor Paddy's work is definitely worth checking it out.

For more information about Paddy Fernandez, visit his DeviantArt page at: http://paddyf123.deviantart.com/

About the author

Abduzeedo is a blog about design. There are all sorts of articles for those who want to look for inspiration. Also you will find very useful tutorials for the most used applications out there, with a special selection of Photoshop Tutorials and Illustrator Tutorials. You can get in follow us via Twitter at @abduzeedo

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30 Amazing Snowboarding Photos

paul0v2 — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:22:49 +0000

A little while ago I posted some skateboarding photos, most of you guys liked so I decided to keep on going with the action sport photos and today I selected some sick snowboarding photos, just sit back and enjoy!

Click on the photos to find out more about the author and to see the photo in a bigger size.

About the author

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Super Cool Photo Manips by Mariano Villalba

PauloGabriel — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:30:08 +0000

For us here at Abduzeedo, photo manipulation is a true art. When you have liberty to create, you get yourself a real challenge in your hands: to design a cool photo manipulation that others might believe is an actual scene.

When people get such challenge, you get to know who's actually good, and who's not. The good ones make you believe what you're seeing... they make it smooth and you just gotta show it to someone else. And that's actually why we're featuring Mariano Villalba today. This guy's photo manips are totally cool. Some are surreal, some macabre... but everyone sets you in a storyline, ant that's the idea. For more of his work, visit his profile at DeviantART. You'll really enjoy it. Hope you like it. Cheers! ;)

About the author

Hello, everyone! I'm Paulo Gabriel, designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil, born in 1984. I have worked as a webdesigner since 2006, but websites and blogs have been a hobby for me since 1999. Here in Abduzeedo, I try to bring only the hot stuff for you... and hope that all of you enjoy my posts! For more cool stuff, you may also follow me on Twitter.

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Photo Inspiration: Adam Andrearczyk "Alcove"

paul0v2 — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:31:49 +0000

I am glad that I came through this man's work because it's just amazing to see his photos, the beautiful concept that sometimes make you stop and think what is this that make it so good, everything I would say, check it out yourself.

All this is by Adam Andrearczyk for more visit his DA gallery http://alcove.deviantart.com/

Show some love if you like it. Thank you.

photo

Worldwide Photography #37: Cairo

Worldwide Photography is a series of posts where every week we're going to show a city or location around the globe bringing the coolest photography samples of it. The photographs authors are all credited right above their pictures. Today feature: Egypt, Cairo.

selva

craizdgoat

sesa

sesa

Boris SV

stausi

Jari Kurittu

a.Lo <3

Marwa Morgan

KoRaYeM

... Arjun

Montenegro Luis

BenTaher

Mohamed Haykal

Ageel

KoRaYeM

mnadi

Julian Kaesler

Marwa Morgan

Bakar_88

Ranoush.

Marwa Morgan

TwOsE

Peter Gutierrez

Jamal Alayoubi

[ DHAHI ALALI ]

Mohamed Kazzaz

ania.egypt

Mohamed Kazzaz

Kaptah

CornérStoné

**Elle**

BeboFlickr

Marwa Morgan

**Elle**

About the author

Sponsored Links:

Interview with Digital Artist Michael O.

Determined to be an artist he worked on his childhood dream to be good at drawing and found his very unique style. I am very pleased to show you an informative interview with digital artist Michael Oswald.

First of all we would like to thank you for taking the time to provide abduzeedo.com with this interview. Please tell us more about your art and design background and what made you become an artist and designer?

How did you come up with your style, what made you explore more this style and what in your opinion is the main characteristic of it?

How would you break down your workflow in steps?

What's the importance of the computer in the creative process?

Apart from the profits, what type of satisfaction do you get from your work?

What are your favorite 5 websites, and why?

Any advice for those who are starting out their career? What kind of references are important for those who want to work with this kind of style?

Where to find this artist

More work

About the author

Sponsored Links:

Beautiful Photos from the 2010 NatGeo Photography Contest

About the Author

The Architecture Photographer Nelson Garrido

Architecture

Foods and Experiments

About the author

Sponsored Links:

Unbelievable Mosaic Portraits

These are nothing like the usual mosaics you seen before, these portraits are so amazing by the way they are created and how amazing the result is. These mosaic artworks are created by the Greek designer and visual artist Charis Tsevis.

Michael Phelps

Barack Obama

Twitter Angel

Mimis Androulakis

Ronaldo

Callie Shell

HERmark

La Ballerina

Kobe Bryant

Alex Song

Oguchi Onyewu

Eddie Pope

Valentino Rossi

Akon

Yvette Jarvis

IKEA Sweeden

IKEA Sweeden

IKEA Sweeden

Elle

Elle