Anyway, I realize July is quickly coming to an end, so it was about time I posted some photos from June. But you still have a few more days to take some beautiful bokeh photos! Here’s the photos from June, where the theme was urban:

By Hynek S. - Beautiful bright sky!

By jinspain2002 - It's hard to get much more urban than this. I love all the yellow cabs lined up, and the person crossing the street.

By Atlantis_breeze - fantastic urban artwork

By evelynspikes - wow, that's a lot of windows!

By Christopher.F Photography - I was actually really hoping someone would post some light trails in June, and this is a fantastic example. (btw, Christopher posted some more fantastic photos of Chicago this month, so if you like that city as much as I do, you might want to check out his other photos)

By tpavankumar - Love the curved brick street, and the one car amidst all the bikes.

By Noctem Wolf - Oh, man. What great colors and detail!

By thedigitaliris - Love how this photo is both colorful and gritty.

By infion - I love the lighting in here.

By jan.etc - great skyline!

By caitra_ - great composition and I love the simple, bright colors.

By laura oliver1 - I'm such a sucker for rusty old things. And the splash of green behind this is just perfect.

By mtbcat - I think the flares from the light really add to this urban scene.

By Rick Zawodny - this is one of those photos that I really, really like... but can't put my finger on why exactly...

By shirley319 - Love the shallow depth of field on this.

By .:SindyHand:. - just beautiful. Urban, Disney-style :)

By Jon Game - just breathtaking!

By jennifercwlee - Great colors!

By kkaldrich - I've been through this tunnel so many times! I love everything reflecting off the 'ceiling'

Related posts:

1. The Best of Monthly Theme: Color May’s theme over in the iffles.com Monthly Theme Group on...
2. The Best of Monthly Theme: People You guys – I was able to recover all my...
3. The best of Monthly Theme: Textures January’s theme for the iffles.com Monthly Themes group on flickr...

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Don’t forget to submit your photos for June – the theme is urban!

By Jon Game - A perfect example of green!

By kalina813 - such bright colors!

By Atlantis_breeze - oh my!

By brad_mc - I love the colors in a sunset.

By .:SindyHand:. - colorful AND yummy!

By bumblebeezack - I love that you called this photo Tennis.

By Karamello - so very yellow, so very pretty.

By thedigitaliris - a perfect pink.

By Noctem Wolf - I don't know what this is, but it's definitely colorful.

By jan.etc - Have I mentioned how much I like to the colors of sunset? And to see it in bokeh? Yum.

By mtbcat - love the repeating pattern in the colors.

By team.breeze - What a beautiful shade of red.

By Governmentality - mmmm, colorful chard.

By miamiredbird - oh my, what a colorful bird, and great action shot, too.

By infion - love the green against the blue sky.

By kkaldrich - now those are colors I'd really like to sink my teeth into!

By rachel_pics - what pretty greens.

By neeta dewan - so bright and green! Love the composition, too.

Related posts:

1. The Best of Monthly Theme: Urban As I was gathering these photos of my personal favorites...
2. The best of Monthly Theme: Textures January’s theme for the iffles.com Monthly Themes group on flickr...
3. The best of Monthly Theme: Shapes Well, its about that time that I show you my...

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This recent photo of John & I breaks a lot of rules, and technically isn't a good photo. But I still like it. f/4.0; 1/13sec; 24mm; ISO 800

Remember, today is the last day of February, so it’s the last day to take photo with Shapes as a theme for the monthly themes group on flickr. Once again, I’m going to wait until next week to post my favorites, to give people time to edit and upload them. The theme for March is Mono (or, black and white, but Mono March is so much more fun to say, isn’t it?).

• Are you into film photography? The folks over at Epic Edits recently launched Feeling Negative – a site devoted to film photography.
• Can’t decide what route to take for you photowalk? flip a coin! Such a simple idea, but I love it. I think I might wait for the weather to warm up before I try it, though, that coin could get pretty cold right now!
• For those of you that use Lightroom, did you know that color sliders are useful even after converting to grayscale? Check this out.
• Here’s a cool trick to make zebra stripes in icicles.
• Do you spend too much time processing your images? Here’s 10 time-saving tips for post-production. I’m guilty of not following a few of these…
• Think every photography accessory is really expensive? Check out these 7 pieces of photo gear for less than $10.
• Ronan Palliser uses an example of a photo of a bride and groom to illustrate that sometimes it’s ok that a photo isn’t “technically correct” and some people might not like it for that. Sometimes, what really matters is just telling a story.
• I have to admit, most of this was greek to me, but if any of you use Aperture 2 and are thinking about upgrading to Aperture 3, it sounds like you might want to read this.

I promised I would eventually got around to posting more links to your blogs, but I don’t seem to have any! Have any of you sent me a link that I never posted? I feel like I’m missing some… once again, all you have to do to get your blog mentioned in this section of my “Weekend Links” post is to leave me a comment and tell me! (btw, priya82 – I got your link but the blog had only one post that was a year old and it didn’t have any photos on it, so I wasn’t sure if that was the right one?)

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by Eva und Michael. What bright colors!

by team.breeze. Oooh, that red!

by ShellyS. I don't know what this is, but I really want to wrap myself up in it!

by evelynspikes. So many textures in one photo - the peeling paint, the bricks, the stones... yum!

by coraline97. If this is not the definition of texture, I don't know what is. I'd love to see an experiment using this as a texture on a photo

by Jon Game. The detail, the shallow DOF, and the amazing colors. Just fantastic.

by laura oliver1. Not only do I love the texture and DOF, it was really nice to see some green in with all the other winter photos :)

by jinspain2002. Ouch! :)

by Eva und Michael. I love that it's black and white and I love the grain in it

by hanamik. The texture on the ground is a great contrast to the cute shoes!

by mtbcat. I especially like how the lock itself looks brand new against the old, textured chain.

by mtbcat. The pop of yellow against that texture? Perfection.

by summer_daze. This texture is formed by sap leaking from the leg of their coffee table. How freakin' cool is that?

by Sarire. Not only do I love the texture, but look at the pops of blue and green there on the right! Nifty!

by Stephanie.Grace. This is one of my favorite colors at the moment, so I had to choose it!

by jafael. I love how the entire frame is filled with ouchies!

by thedigitaliris. Love the texture of the wood and screws and paint

by .:SindyHand:. I love everything about this photo - the composition, the DOF, the warm tones... and of course the texture!

by laura oliver1. This one took my breath away.

by dpksh. The peeling trees are just fantastic - especially against the pure white snow behind them.

by Tokyo Rhino. Do you know what that is in the foreground? It's the snout of a mom of that baby rhino. Awesome.

by Inspirophoto. Love the colors.

by BirdingRVer. Another texture that makes me say Ouch!

by GenBug. I'm a sucker for raindrops, and these are shaped so perfectly.

by bouncyczech. I love that this is something so recognizable, but not how we usually look at it.

by Rick Zawodny. So much texture!

by laura oliver1. Such great timing with the raindrops and the ripples make a great texture.

by jinspain2002. I have to admit, this photo didn't scream texture to me, but it was so incredibly beautiful I had to include it anyway.

by Grumpy Cake King. Not quite sure what it is, but I definitely love it.

by kkaldrich. This one actually made me chuckle when I first saw it :)

by shirley319. Beautiful.

by shannon.waller. It's like a tiny little dish of texture!

by melissac79. A beautiful (and cold!) texture.

Don’t forget – February’s theme is Shapes! So keep posting to the group!

Related posts:

1. The Best of Monthly Theme: Urban As I was gathering these photos of my personal favorites...
2. The Best of Monthly Theme: Color May’s theme over in the iffles.com Monthly Theme Group on...
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This is about it as far as family portraits go in our house. He looks thrilled to be with me, doesn't he?

I’ve gone through the iffles.com monthly themes group on flickr and have picked out my favorites from January (which was hard – there were so many good ones!), and those should be posted tomorrow. February’s theme is shapes, interpret that however you like and submit them to the pool!

• Brian Cooney recently got a chance to photograph his first basketball game – his little brother’s. He was nice enough to write about his lessons learned.
• Have you ever wondered how three bananas can help improve your wildlife photography skills? Well. Wonder no more.
• I love bold colors, but they’re sometimes hard to capture in photography. Here are some tips to help you do just that.
• Tara Whitney is doing her own persnal project this year – trying to capture at least one family portrait each month, for one year.
• I’m sure you’ve heard how every time you open and resave a jpg file, you lose a bit of quality. To see that in action, check these out.
• Take a look at Epic Edit’s Introduction to Curves.

And now for more of YOUR links. I’m always willing to look at your photography-related blog – all you have to do is tell me in comment that you want me to, and I’ll link to it in the next Weekend Links entry!

• Josiah is also sharing his 365 photos on his blog (appropriately called A Photo a Day). My favorite of his recent photos is this one of a snowy tree-lined road. I like that he also talks about how he edited the photo.
• bumblebeezack recently started a photoblog with some great photos on it. My favorite appears to be of the underside of some bridges – impressive!
• Noreen has a photoblog, too! She’s going to try to complete all the DPS assignments this year, so be sure to follow her blog to see her submissions. In the mean time, check out 3 different angles of a famous Seattle landmark
• Ashlie is posting a photo a day (not necessarily one she took herself, but just anything that inspires her) and writing 1000 words to go along with it, which I think is a really cool idea. Check out the first post.

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What’s the first thing you notice about the above picture? I’m guessing it’s either the colors or the texture. Adding a texture to an image can completely change the way it feels – often making an ordinary photo look a bit more vintage or retro.

Adding a texture in Gimp is actually quite easy to do.

Here’s the image I’m going to use to walk you through how to do this:

All I’ve done to the image so far is a crop. To add a texture, you need to find some sort of image to use as a texture. There’s all sorts of ways to create and find textures, but I’m going to start off by giving you one! This should be big enough for your texture needs and you can find it here.

What is it? It’s a tile from a floor in my house.

All you need to do with it is create a second layer on your image that’s the texture. Did you know you can drag and drop from Windows Explorer onto your photo in Gimp and it will create a new layer? Or you can open the image in Gimp and copy and paste it. Just make sure that if you do the copy/paste option that you click the “Create New Layer” icon in order to turn your Floating Selection into an actual layer:

Once you’ve got your layer on there, you might want to move it around or stretch it. For instance, there’s something that looks like a little worm in the top of the texture that I’d rather not use, and I like the sides of the tile to line up better with the sides of the photo. That is not actually a worm, by the way. I think it’s the stem of a leaf that I tracked into the house. Let’s say that it is, because I do not want to think about there being worms in my house. Blech!

Anyway, after moving my texture layer around, it now looks like this:

Now – the magic! Change the Layer blend mode to Overlay… and poof, you have texture on your photo:

I’m not satisfied yet, though. With my texture layer selected still, I open up the Levels and start adjusting:

This brings out the detail in my texture more:

However, now it’s just a bit too much, don’t you think? So I adjust the Opacity of the texture layer down to 60 and get this:

Now for fun, to really give it that vintage feel, I run the Vintage Film effect (discussed here) on the photo layer and I end up with this:

I’ve really been into this vintage thing lately. I’m probably over-doing it. But it’s hard not to with all the pretty fall colors around here.

Where to get Textures

The texture I used in the first photo in this post was from Alexis Miller’s Photography Tips blog. You can also try searching the web – or even just flickr for textures. There’s a group on flickr called Textures for Layers that appears to be full of free textures people can use, but you have to be a member to see the photos, and I’m not member, so I can’t vouch for them.

Or, instead of finding someone else’s image to use as a texture, start looking for your own. The one I posted above, as I mentioned, is my tile floor. I also have a texture from my hardwood floors (they’re original to the house – built in 1927 – and the ones in the kitchen are all water damaged, which might be bad for the floor, but makes for good textures), of my plaster walls, my textured ceilings, my concrete driveway… and this is all just around my house! If you start looking, I promise you’ll start finding things to use as textures.

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The Background

It’s very easy to concentrate so much on what you’re taking a picture of, that you forget to notice what’s in the background, for instance, this photo of my niece is one of my favorites I’ve taken of her:

… but I think it could look even better if those bookshelves hadn’t been in the background.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s what’s in the background that really makes the shot. Like this photo of a lamp on a bar near my house:

The reason why I love this shot is because of the background – those are bottles of alcohol lit up by a green light causing the beautiful bokeh.

Negative Space

Related to The Background, be sure to take advantage of negative space – pure emptiness around your subject. This is a great place (in my opinion) to play around with breaking the Rule of Thirds, too. It really gives you a chance to make your subject really pop, like this apple:

And I don’t think this photo would have had quite the appeal if it was cropped to directly around the face:

The negative space is what really makes that photo *pop*!

Lines

Try to take note of all the lines in your photos. While I know you can fix these things in editing – by rotating the image or using the perspective tool, or even a crop, it’s better to get them right in camera.

First, pay attention to converging lines, they’re very pleasing to the eye. Roads and train tracks are a classic example, but here’s the latter from a slightly different perspective:

Also pay attention to where the lines – such as pathways, trails, roads, and yes, train tracks – start and end in your photo. I like to have my lines start in the corner of my photo, like this:

In the photo above, on the left, the wall curves into the bottom left-hand corner of the photo, and almost to the upper left hand corner too – I can’t tell what happened there… looks like there’s something between the camera and the wall? Regardless, you get the idea.

Perhaps the most important line to pay attention to is your horizon line. If your horizon is not level, the whole photo is going to look wonky. … like this photo:

Don’t you feel like you’re falling over now?

Symmetry

This is another time that I think of roads and train tracks, but also docks:

Symmetry in a photo breaks the Rule of Thirds in at least one direction (the dock in the above photo is sitting on the bottom third line, though). But it’s just so pleasing to the eye.

By the way, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that horizon is not level. Well. It IS. I triple-checked it. Must be an optical illusion caused by those crooked poles sticking up in the middle.

Wanna know another secret? I cloned out some litter left on the dock. I love the clone tool. I wish getting rid of litter in real life was that easy…

Details

Finally, concentrate on the details. Everyone in your whole family is taking photos of your new niece’s face, but only you will think to capture her hand as she starts trying to crawl:

A field of an entire field of dandelions might be powerful, but can also be powerful to see just one from a different angle:

It’s in capturing the details that you really get to show something they might not have seen otherwise.

…so what about you? Any composition details that you like to keep in mind when you shoot? Let us know!

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You might be thinking, “oh, c’mon iffles, I’m not that stupid, I saw the Desaturate in the Colors menu. I know that makes it black and white! I don’t need your help!” And, ok, if you want to settle for what GIMP thinks are the best settings for black and white – go for it.

I, on the other hand, like a bit more control. I like using the Channel Mixer. Here’s the photo I’m going to use as an example. It’s a picture of our friend Josh (”our” meaning John and myself. Chances are, Josh isn’t your friend). It was taken the morning he got married! There was really no reasoning behind picking this photo, I just kinda randomed into it in my collection and decided to play with it.

First let me show you what the photo looks like just using Colors –> Desaturate. If you bring up that dialog box you’ll see you have three options – Lightness, Luminosity and Average. Let’s check out Lightness:

Hmm… It looks kinda flat, Josh is the subject of the photo and he has hardly any contrast. We could fix this by playing with contrast and levels, but we shouldn’t have to. Let’s check out Luminosity:

Wow, that’s worse! I didn’t even know it was possible! Let’s do this ourselves with the Channel Mixer, which you get to by going to Colors –> Components –> Channel Mixer (at least, you do in my version of Gimp. I understand it’s been moved a few times, so if you can’t find it, leave me a comment with what version of Gimp you have [which you can find by going to Help --> About], and I’ll help you find it)

You should now see this dialog box:

Be sure to check the Monochrome checkbox near the bottom there, and now you can determine how much of the Red Filter, Green Filter and Blue Filter will go into your monochrome image. Typically you would adjust these so that the percentages add up to 100%. It’s not necessary, but the experts say to do it, and they’re usually right – if I slide my sliders so they don’t add up to 100% the brightness of my image seems off. That being said, sometimes you want that effect, so don’t be tied down to the 100% thing.

…so… uh, what exactly are these filters and how do I know what percentage to put them each at? Well, the easiest explanation is that the red filter is turning everything Red into White, and everything that’s exactly the opposite of Red into Black. Honestly? I can never envision what any of them are going to do, so I always try each one at 100% (leaving the others at 0). Like so:

All Red

All Green

All Blue

After looking at these, I can see that I like All Red the best, and All Blue the worst. To me that means I want the highest percentage with my Red slider and the lowest with my Blue (on a side not, my blue slider is almost always the lowest, if I even set it all. It’s always the red and the green competing for the top slot) I’m sure there’s a technical way of figuring out what sliders to put where by looking at your photo and thinking “well, his shirt is green and I want that to be dark”, but honestly, I just figure out which one I like best and then play around with my numbers to make ‘em add up to 100. First, I typically set my Blue around 10. I hate leaving it out completely, I feel bad for Blue, I don’t want Blue to feel useless. Then I start futzing around with different combinations of the Red and Green channel that add up to 90 – always giving Red the higher number since I liked that channel at 100% more. I finally settle with 70/20, so my final Channel Mixer looks like this:

Making my final image look like this:

That’s a big improvement over the default that Desaturate gave me, in my opinion – Josh’s face looks a lot softer, and there’s more contrast between his face and his shirt. I know this is more work than just doing the Desaturate, and I admit to “cheating” – if doing one of the Desaturate options gets me close to what I’m looking for, I’ll just do it and then adjust the levels to get even closer to what I want, but if it’s something I want to show to other people and/or print, I’ll always use the Channel Mixer, just to be more confident about what I’m getting.

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