Art on a Kitchen Table

One thing you can absolutely cannot do in a photo exhibition is walk past an image by Edwin Loyola. Your mind would have to be preoccuppied with other things for you not to notice the image, and you'd have to be insensitive not to stop and take a long second look.

"Showstopper": that's what characterizes most images born in the fertile mind of Edwin. He pushes colors to their limits without getting them gaudy, and plays with familiar objects in a way that makes them look new, never seen before.

Working with only one or two elements is often a mountain of a challenge to photographers, both advanced and novice, because bare, minimalist sets look so unfinished, making it difficult to stop adding elements. Try it next time, with only two or three everyday objects, and you'll see what we mean.

To create the image used on our cover, Edwin placed the plate (yes, that's really the color of the plate) on black felt paper, available at stationery stores, and arranged the strawberries on it.

This was shot at eight in the morning, so Edwin had nice directional morning sunlight streaming in at a low angle. He used a Fujifilm Finepix 602Z, that non classic rangefinder zoom camera that preceded Fujifilm's d-SLR series, set on metered manual exposure mode.

In Adobe Photoshop, Edwin created four alternating black and white squares arranged in a checkerboard pattern, and dragged the image on the plate over. To finish the exercise, he added a drop shadow using the Drop Shadow Image Layer Style in Photoshop.

Now doesn't that remind you of the aged-old advice to "keep it shimple, shtupid"?

I-MAG PHOTOGRAPHY does not edit any photograph we publish, printing it and cropping it as it was submitted to us, with the exception of images we use on the cover, which necessarily get cropped to fit the odd proportioons of the magazine. In this case, neither the magazine nor the photographer had any serious objection to converting the image into a vertical image and "extending" the checkerboard pattern to size.

We mention this (and show the original here) in order to show respect to the artist's original concept...

I-MAG PHOTOGRAPHY
Page 12/ Volume 2 Number 1 (Issue 14)




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after 4 days in tacloban, im back sa manila... parang ayaw ko na bumaba sa plane... traffic na naman... usok na naman... ingay na naman..e wala eh..ganun talaga..hahahaha

but okay lang..got a link from fafa parc's multiply.. Good news.. featured ang work ko as cover sa feb issue ng i-mag/photography... salamat parc, tito ed and kuya neil..(siguro next time di muna ako mumurahin... hahahaha..salamat sa tiwala)


Camera: Fujifine pix S6o2z
Manual Setting
Available light
with minimal editing (photoshop)

minsan hindi kailangan SUPER CAM ang gamit mo para mapansin (di po ba?)... hahahaha.....magpakabaliw lang...


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Volume 2, Number 1

Cover: Art on a Kitchen Table
by Edwin Loyola

ART PHOTOGRAPHY
The Third Dimension
What is Art? by Tilak and Shanika Hettige
Seven Steps from Snapshots to Art Photography
The Five P's of Photography by Jun Miranda
Commentary: Where Photo Contests Fail

PHOTOGRAPHY
A Thousand Words
Elements: Photo Challenge Winners

IMAGE EDITING
Color Correction by the Numbers by Jun Miranda, ACI, ACE, CTT
Making Skin Pop by Parc Cruz
Guide Map to Adobe Camera RAW by Jun Miranda

TIPS & TECHNIQUES
Practical Panoramics by Mark Floro
Have iPhone, Will Photograph by Dominique James
Selective Focusing Magic by Dominique James

PROFILES
Rudy de Leon, photographer nonpareil
Emil Davocol, master photographer
SLR Camera Club, the club that shoots together
Tribute: Nap Jamir, the Father of FPPF

COMMENTARY
Ed Yap doesn't plant bonsais

PHLOG (Photographers' Log)
Sony futuretech
Picatoo promotes tourism
P.I.X., SE Asia's pro photo con
B is for Batanes and Boracay
Mercedes Benz around the bends