The Goodman’s Blog: Lifelong Learning and Sharing

We visited the new Vermeer Centre in Delft, Holland. We had earlier seen his “The Girl with a Pearl Earring” in the Maurithuis Museum in the Hague. The Centre has a studio which simulated the window light that the Dutch painter used for most of his paintings.

I took the opportunity to pose my wife and tried my version of a Vermeer photograph.

I texturised the photo to simulate canvas and added the frame digitally.

They had been dancing non-stop for an hour, during a videoshoot for a tourism promotion documentary in Bangkok. The police were kind enough to allow me to shoot close.

After playing back the image, I knew I had to do something to the background, as it was distracting attention from the two dancers. I used Gaussian blur. However, it was difficult to do the blurring properly, as I was using the mouse instead of a stylus and I was getting impatient doing it. So you’ll see parts where the blurring was not so good.

Lesson for amateurs: When doing photo-editing, be relaxed and don’t take it too seriously. It’s only a hobby, not a livelihood!

She was a participant in an annual parade in Singapore called Chingay, held during the Chinese New Year period. Her dress and hat were full of flowers.

She was sandwiched in a group of 50 other participants. Instead of shooting her with the others, I approached her and asked if she could step out of the group and I then asked her to pose alone.

While I was “directing” her poses, many other event photographers rushed to my photoshoot location and started snapping her. I was fortunate, though, that she only took instructions from me and gamely posed.

I’m so lucky.