This may sound strange, but designing a wedding album can be more stressful than actually taking the pictures. When you’re shooting a wedding, you try all sorts of different techniques to get the shot. That way you have a lot of options available to you later when designing the album. However, when designing the album, you don’t have the luxury of “covering your bases,” so to speak. You have to take 700 images and eliminate down to 60-100. There are a lot of criteria to meet:
Do these images tell the story of the day?
Do you have all the formal and family shots that the client wants?
Does this client like big pictures or lots of small ones?
What’s more important to the client: beautiful formal pictures or candid fun ones?
I am planning to buy a new PC with Windows 7, but should I pay extra for 8 GB of Ram instead of 2 GB? It’s not too expensive and I assume it would make my computer faster. Is that correct? L.H.
Answer
Upgrading a new PC with extra Ram can help boost some aspects of performance but note the following. The conventional 32-bit version of Windows 7 can utilize only 4 GB of RAM (actually, only about 3.4GB). If you buy a new PC (with 64-bit CPU) with 8 GB of Ram, the vendor should install the 64-bit edition of Windows 7. Check out the various versions of this OS on the Microsoft website.
A fast new PC with a 64-bit CPU and a 64-bit edition of Windows 7 can have some benefits, but also some drawbacks.
Note: The upgrade to a 64-bit system will cause compatibility problems re: drivers for some hardware you already own and for some software programs as discussed on this Windows forum. (more…)
Chiricahua Sunset. The combination of the positioning of the pieces and the positioning of the views (see text) combines to create a sense of movement.
If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.
So far in this series we’ve discussed images “in the box” of a single rectangular frame. Today, I’ll talk a little about ways to “think outside the box” and use multiple images together as part of a single artwork.
First, a few words of terminology. Diptychs were traditionally any sort of artwork or other object with two plates connected together with a hinge. These days the hinge is optional, and the term is applied to any sort of art in which two pieces are meant to be hung together (usually in a particular arrangement). Triptych refers to the same idea with three images. Polyptych is the general term for two or more pieces. Multiples is sometimes used similarly to polyptych (although the former might be two images printed separately on the same piece of paper). I’m going to stick with “multiples” here as the most inclusive term.
In nearly every multiple, we’re encouraged to consider the relationship between the individual parts of the artwork. The relative placement of the different parts within the artwork is one part of this; if the two halves of a diptych are laid out left to right, we’ll be far more likely to “read” the left image first and the right image second. To the extent that the images combine to tell a story, the left segment of the image will usually tell an earlier part of the story, the right segment the latter part. Not every multiple tells a story (Andy Warhol’s famous silk-screened multiples of Marilyn Monroe don’t seem to really imply a sequence in time), but many do. (more…)
