Landscape photos

I just returned from a wonderful spring holiday in Iceland (this explains the silence on the blog here). Below is a quick subset of the images I took with my phone (the ones without family members).

These are the raw shots, without cropping or any colour/light adjustment. What is my approach to making these landscape shots:

• I actually do not overthink my photographs: just snap to catch the moment

• I hardly ever use the zoom function on my phone. If needed, I can always crop images later to get a zoom effect. Live zooming reduces the image quality and makes the image more sensitive to an unsteady hand / shaking.

• I tend to look for lines (roads, rock formations, etc.) to force some sort of eye movement in the images

• Where possible, I try to catch a small element in the foreground to create a sense of depth. (Often a family member taking the same photo, pictures of family taking pictures is one of my favorite themes)

• Painters already discovered this, often the sky is one of the most interesting visual elements. Try dropping the horizon in one of your shots.

• Most photos are taken at eye height. Create unexpected perspectives by lowering or lifting your camera

• Pay attention to the sides of your image. Adding a tiny bit of a wall or other structure in your shot can make the image feel “closed” or “trapped”, leaving it out gives a much more open feel.

Very often, it is impossible to capture a vast landscape in an image. The view is stunning, the image looks bland. This is only a problem for your audience though, for you, the image will trigger the memory of the real thing and therefore it is still worth taking.

Take the meme celebrities out of your decks

The current meme culture has created a number of stock photo heros that people may now recognize in the street. Cliche stock photos are bad, meme celebrities are worse. Time to double check your sales decks and web sites. Some of your older colleagues might not be aware of these yet…

iStockPhoto

Here is the background on the Hide the Pain Harold meme

iStockPhoto

Here is the background story about the Distracted Boyfriend Meme

Backgrounds

Some of the best images you can use in a presentation are those with lots and lots of white space. Photographers tend to crop images to make their subject stand out. Great for the image, but often less ideal for the layout of your slide.

Instead of searching for functional or descriptive words such as “car” or “bucket”, search for “background” or “wallpaper” in SlideMagic and something unexpectedly useful might show up.

These examples are pretty straightforward to recreate in SlideMagic, with your own background images and text. Still, I added them to the library so you can use the min your slide designs

Extreme wide angle effects

Online, I currently get bombarded with “ads” that contain city landscapes for some reason. What they have in common are unusual perspectives: the pictures draw your attention. (At least mine).

What is going on? You are seeing familiar compositions and/or places you recognize, but the camera angle seems different. Most shots use an extreme wide lens effect, might have been taken by a drone rather than from a standing position on a building, add a very strong zoom, only using a very small crop of the center of the original image and put an object in the front (either photoshopped or real).

All interesting techniques to learn from, I think soon we will see these types of images more on open source image collection sites, so you can use them in your presentations as well.

I discussed this effect earlier in this post about the “Corona crop”, with extreme zooming, you can make almost any public space looked packed with people.

Smile with your eyes

The current requirements to wear masks in public places shows that you can still smile without revealing your mouth. Do it when posing for a picture with a mask, and without one!

Me and my (disguised) daughter in Paris

In art, smiling with your eyes is taken to another level entirely though…

The genie is out of the bottle

I was a bit worried about Unsplash after the Getty acquisition, and the current home page of my favorite photo site confirms some of these worries, 50% of the space above the fold is devoted to promoting iStock (scroll down and they take another chunk at the bottom of the page). I think the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to free, open source images. And this page actually shows that there is no quality difference at all between images for which you pay, and images that are free. Unsplash has a responsibility to all the photographers that made their images available under a certain expectation of the spirit of the site. Hopefully it can find a suitable business model that will work for everyone. If Unsplash does not succeed, a new Unsplash will emerge somewhere.

Selecting the right photos

The photo shoot from a few weeks ago delivered almost 900 images. We are still selecting the ones to use. Here is the approach I take to go from 900 to 10…

I uploaded all images in a good photo organizing app (I use Google Photos). This enables me to scroll really fast through lots of images. (Desktops are slow to generate thumbnails). Also, it easy to mark images and share those. Trying to copy file names is a pain. Finally, I uploaded all images in full size, so that the photographer can download them in case touch ups are needed.

The I take different zoom levels: zoomed out, which ones have a great composition that pops out as a small picture, without seeing the fine details. Which images have lots of white space that I could use to overlay text. Zoomed in, which images instantly “speak to me”, where is the camera gaze just right, without paying too much attention to details. In a short period of time, I mark a lot, a lot of images.

Then the selection process switches to the “favorites folder” and it becomes a matter of “deselecting”. Take out the obvious mistakes (closed eyes, etc.). When images are similar, force yourself to pick one. If you really like an image, go back into the big pile to get all the images that were made around that time to get the best one. Step by step, you get closer to your 10 final images…

If possible do all of this on a desktop machine with a very large monitor and mouse with fast scroll wheel.

A team photo shoot in 2021

My wife and I organised a team photo shoot for the web page of our upcoming business. It had been a while since I did one.

Nice pictures can add greatly to the quality of your web site and/or presentation. Head shots are up to date, all look consistent, and best of all, you have an opportunity to take an image of the entire team together, given you the opportunity to show the energy that you are radiating as a group of people.

We decided to bring the professional photographer into our home rather than venturing out to her studio. Luckily, she was flexible enough to bring the required equipment. A photo shoot at home has the advantage that you feel more comfortable, and that you unlimited access to your wardrobe incase certain outfits/colours do not come across very well.

Ten years ago, many professional photographs were taking in front of the “gradient grey” screen. Fast forward to 2021, with Zoom calls in front of blurred bookcases, these backgrounds look very staged and dated. It makes the photo look like a high school yearbook picture.

They key thing the photographer brings is no longer the camera. It is the ability to engineer a relaxed pose of you, and even more importantly, get the correct light. A was amazed by how a modern “umbrella flasher” can give great image results in pretty much any lighting condition (so no longer the need for the studio).

While a woman can still dress up in a great outfit, I find that for men (me), wearing a full suit looks awkward, you get the “wedding groom” look on your corporate web site. Jacket/no tie, or a turtle neck work great.

Try convincing your photographer to make a number of photos without a composition, zoomed out, with lots and lots of white space around your image. This enables you to make your own crop in the presentation, and add text, or other visual elements such as logos later yourself. A good photographer will hate doing this, since it is very hard for a designer to make a picture without a proper crop.

Think of making some shots in front of a switched off monitor or screen, you can put text / images later on this. Think of making some shots of you delivering a (fake) presentation.

Ask your photographer to make some shots when you are not posing, i.e., in between sessions, when you are probably more relaxed and natural.

In any, we got some good material out of this day, and we are just getting started with sorting through the images. Ask your photographer to give you all the raw material in addition to the 20-30 shots she selected. You might not always agree which image looks best.

"Empty" images

When looking for images for your presentation (SlideMagic has a great built-in image search engine), consider searching for images that are relatively “empty”, i.e., images with a lot of white space. This allows you to set them as the background for your entire slide. See the example below.

Pick your keywords to find these type of layouts: empty, background, wallpaper, sky, cliff, horizon, etc. etc.

Photo by Zoltan Fekeshazy on Unsplash

Using brands in presentations

It is usually hard to find good images of products made by well known brands that are of high quality, not obstructed by advertising copy and free of copyrights. Free photo site Unsplash is trying to change that by building up a revenue model where photographers post (and get paid for) posting images with brands in it. (Curated for quality by Unsplash and endorsed by the brand in question).

This is very useful for presentation designers. Looking for a nice Harley-Davidson motorcycle? Here you go.

I agree with Unsplash’s observation that advertising has deteriorated in quality over the years.

But on their own web site, they can do a bit better with ads for their new shareholder/investor….

Photo by Harley-Davidson on Unsplash

Why do the Bidens look so huge in this picture?

Something does not seem right in this photo:

We’re pleased to share this wonderful photo from the @POTUS and @FLOTUS visit to see the Carters in Plains, Ga.!

Thank you President and Mrs. Biden! pic.twitter.com/QcA33iUev4

— The Carter Center (@CarterCenter) May 4, 2021

The Bidens look gigantic compared to the Carters. What happened? The photographer used a wide angle lens to fit everyone in the frame, but was standing very close to the subjects. The result: distortion. Look at Jimmy Carter’s shoes, they seem at the scale scale as Jill Biden.

This is the opposite effect of the “Corona crop” where taking a picture of people with a zoom lens, and then cropping a small shot, suggests a very dense crowd when people are not that close to each other.

If you are not an honest journalist but rather need a picture of a dense crowd for your presentation, you can use the “Corona crop” effect to your advantage, the resulting image might not reflect the truth, but it does not look weird. The “Carter crop” on the other hand, will always look distorted and unnatural.

Getty buys Unsplash

Getty Images who is in the business of licensing photographs to professional media is acquiring Unsplash, the open source image library (which is also powering the image search on SlideMagic). I remember how Getty acquired iStock as well back in 2006. With VC investors coming on board in the Unsplash Series B financing an exit would eventually happen.

The press release states that Unsplash will remain an independent unit inside Getty. Only the future will tell how this pans out. It would be a shame to see “suggested” (maybe more cliche) Getty or iStock premium images alongside Unsplash search results. Or open source photographers being lured in some sort of licensing-only revenue model.

Two things make me optimistic:

• The current photographers on Unsplash submitted their images under an understanding about how they are allowed to be used, it is not possible I think to change that across the board retrospectively

• Now in 2021, it is very easy for “another Unsplash” to pop up if the culture and spirit of the current site changes.

But some well-known photographers on Unsplash think differently:

Happy for Mikael & team, but I would be getting off Unsplash platform. I cannot be part of a platform owned by @GettyImages which has been a terrible web citizen & has a history of squeezing the creatives and customers. It was great to be part of @unsplash but time to say goodbye https://t.co/THSOlHK5bH

— OM (@om) March 31, 2021

Let’s see what happens.

Making Bernie memes, and image positioning in more serious presentations

Everyone is super imposing the image of Bernie on other photos at the moment. Why do certain images look realistic, others not? Some pointers that might help with your Bernie creations, but can also be useful when you need to make more serious presentations.

• Think of the size of Bernie versus reference objects close to thim. Putting him next to other people makes it easy to get it right. In the absence of reference people, focus on other objects to compare the size to. The size of Bernie versus objects that we know the size of, tricks the brain in getting the perspective of the image right.

• See at what angle the image of Bernie is taken. The legs of his chair show the angle at which the floor should run. Bernie’s image is taken from a long distance with a zoom lens, therefore you will see that most compositions that you took with a phone (lens 1.7m above the ground, subject probably 5-10 meters away) will not work.

It is hard to get these right. Simply move and zoom the image around a lot until you see that it fits right. Here is Bernie in my living room keeping Grifin company, In SlideMagic I put the living room as a ‘frame’ image, and made one big grid box as the foreground for Bernie. Then, I switched off the titles.

(@taber has already done the hard work for you, download a Bernie image with transparent background here).

How to crop headshots in your presentation

The ideal design for a slide that shows your team is a group picture, all taken together. Unfortunately, these are almost impossible to produce. Teams change, and people are hardly ever in the same room (especially now with the virus).

The next best thing is a collage of headshots. Professional graphics designers have a specific approach to line these up properly:

• Make sure that the eye line of all the head shots is more or less the same (at 25-33% of the image height

• Make sure that the sizes of the heads are more or less the same

In PowerPoint and Keynote, this is an absolute pain to do. Getting different images to have the exact same size is tricky. Cropping images to position eye ines is tricky to do, and might undo part of the work that you did to get them to be all the same size.

In SlideMagic, things are easier, because it works with fixed shapes and smart cropping.

Below I plopped in 3 portrait images from the built-in image search engine of SlideMagic. In 2 of the 3 cases, the “AI” smart cropping algorithm did already a reasonable job, in the last case, totally not. But first things first, all images have the exact same size, and are spaced out absolutely perfect.

Next, we are going to drag the central dot at eye level for each of our team members and drag the images inside their boxes so the eye lines line up.

Now we can zoom the headshots to the right size by dragging the zoom slider at the bottom of the slide. SlideMagic keeps the eye line at exactly the level you set it to when zooming.

SlideMagic remembers the layout and crop of your image, for example if you change the aspect ratio of your slide to 4:3, the image still looks OK

Focal point cropping!

******* UPDATE: The new focal cropping is now out of beta and part of the regular SlideMagic release ********

Happy new year to you all, 2021 has already an important feature update.

I am testing an exciting new feature for SlideMagic: focal point cropping. (I first spoke about this back in August.) For each image in SlideMagic, you can set a focal point, a dot on the most important part of the photo. This can be a face, a feature of your product, a quote on a screen shot for example. If you subsequently change the size or shape or zoom level of the image, SlideMagic will re-crop the image so that your focal point appears in the right spot.

I have seen many examples of focal crops in other applications, but no one did get it completely right. That small house on the mountain you focused still disappears on certain screen sizes, or pictures get completely stretched and distorted when resizing screens or changing the composition of your slide. In SlideMagic, everything stays in place.

A particular design decision in web technology standards made it particularly hard to do (without having to divide by zero). Over the winter break, I rewrote the entire image rendering engine of SlideMagic, which was a bit like replacing the foundations of a house while people continue to live in it.

A lot is going on here, in terms of underlying math and how the user interface works. I won’t spell it out in detail here, the app should respond naturally without you having to think about it. The basics are in place now, but I still see a lot of improvement opportunities to the image cropping algorithm including automatic object detection.

I have released the feature only as a beta version at the moment, it will not update for non-beta users. Before the official release I want to make sure everything works for new presentations, maintain backward compatibility for older presentations, that there are no hiccups when downloading templates from the SlideMagic template database. If you want, you can install the latest beta version via Github here, the next time you start SlideMagic again, the latest current version will install back.

Below some screen shots where you see the feature in action:

This new cropping engine also enables me to take out this “hack” to deal with different image aspect ratios and images

Corporate title pages

I added a number of new title pages to the SlideMagic slide template database: looking up in the downtown area of a city. The sky in the center of the image is a nice empty background for your text.

Typing “title” in the search bar of the SlideMagic desktop app now gives a lot of options to get you started with a title page for your presentation

Pick one of these designs (or an empty slide), and use the image search feature to add the image that you prefer

Image cropping with a focal point

SlideMagic can switch back and forth between multiple layouts, and needs to handle rapid changes in the grid of a slide. As a result, aspect ratios of images get changed all the time, tripping up your carefully selected image composition. At the moment, the app is storing different crop and zoom levels for different aspect ratios, but that solution is not ideal. (You see how Squarespace gets it wrong with the banner image of this blog post).

I want to get to the point where a SlideMagic user can click a focal point of an image, after which the app will do the hard work of re-adjusting the crop automatically. Doing research, I see a lot of “AI” applications that can figure out what the focal point of an image should be, there seems to be nothing that deals with focal point-based cropping itself. The solutions I see, are ones where you can store multiple crops of the same image, after which the most appropriate one gets selected.

I started scribbling a manual algorithm to come up with reasonable compositions. Here are the first (manual but automateable) results applied to some cows on a beach in Africa, the first image is the original.

It works pretty well, on the the extremely horizontal one gets cropped too low, I would have shown a bit more sky on that one. Let’s see if we can get this to work, both in terms of the algorithm, and the user interface.

Photo by Vince Gx on Unsplash

SlideMagic slide search results now in colour

Another day, another improvement

I stuck to showing images on slide search results in black and white because I would be sure that the photos would not clash with the accent colour for the slide users had picked (most users will swap SlideMagic blue for their own logo colour). That worked, but it came at a price: slide templates all looked a bit sad. This is not only due to the greyscale colours, but also because of the way the greyscale filter was applied: many colours were translated into too dark tints of grey I think.

This morning I re-rendered the entire slide database (the server is still a bit tired) and images in slide templates now show up in colour.

It is worth the trade-off I think. Of course it is possible to go back to a black and white image in the SlideMagic app, simple untick the ‘colour’ box and the image will show up as grey scale (you can always go back to colour if you want).

The colour option is only available for the slides that I added more recently, after I switched off the colour option when ‘flattening’ or compressing slides. Obviously new templates will all appear in colour, or I will set them explicitly to black and white when I feel that it serves the slide’s message better.

This addition of colour coincides nicely with the more mature SlideMagic product I think, slowly but certainly it comes out in its full shiny colours :-)

Let me know what you think.

The "corona crop" to change the appearance of crowd sizes

A recent tweet:

Can we all stop believing the accuracy of those telephoto-lens "packed" beach/street photos. It's a cheap trick, and one easily done. Below are 2 photos taken by me 20 seconds apart. Change the angle to straight along + crop = corona-tastic looking crowd. pic.twitter.com/AlpHvumW2p

— Ed Fidgeon-Kavanagh (@Clearpreso) June 25, 2020

Why does the crowd look denser in the second image? When you make an extreme zoom in an image your brain loses the context in which the original photo was taken. Images are 2D, so no sense of depth here.

Lessons:

• When news outlets publish images to show crowd sizes, see at what angle they are taken. Drone shots from above are the most reliable

• If you need an image of a crowded street or other public place in your presentation, you can use this effect to your advantage. Download a very high resolution image with a flat camera angle, and apply a big zoom/crop.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Working on improved image cropping

Working with images is turning out to be one of the most powerful uses of SlideMagic. The built-in image search gives access to an endless flow of great images, and the grid makes it really easy to layout these photos in a beautiful and consistent way on a slide.

Aligning images has always been difficult in presentation software (it is only worse in word processors), and that bit is solved by the SlideMagic grid. Next up is image cropping. Most design tools use some sort of overlay that allows you to mask/reveal an image. Even as a professional designer, I still struggle with this.

In SlideMagic, you simply drag an image around in a box to decide what part of the photo you want to reveal. I am working on 2 improvements:

• Showing the entire image in semi-opaque when you are editing/dragging it around to give you. a better orientation of what you are doing

• Creating a way to keep the image focused on the most relevant part regardless of changes to aspect ratios or zoom levels of the photo. At the moment, I store to image positioning versions (one for 16x9 and one for 4x3), but in future releases I want to automate this

The challenge here is to offer something that works without turning SlideMagic into a complicated photo editor. Work in progress.