Posts Tagged ‘Sony World Photography Awards’

Photography Monthly (UK), August 2012, Issue 137, Special Collectors’ Edition.
Cover photograph and six-page feature, pages 56–61.

The magazine also ran a web companion, “Photography’s next dimension?”, on July 10, 2012 (archived copy).

Transcription

Feature by Photography Monthly staff. The article runs on pages 57, 58, 60 and 61; “The History of 3D Imagery” by Jessica Bracey on page 59 is a companion piece and appears in the spread image only.

Nick Saglimbeni is early, which, considering he has only had two hours sleep and spent the previous evening at London’s Park Lane Hilton Hotel shaking the photography establishment to its core, is impressive. Also impressive is the fact that, despite the sleep deprivation and establishment rocking, he still looks every bit the LA photographer: bronzed, relaxed, an easy smile and an almost Zen ability to calm any unaligned moods that surround him.

His award is not with him – it’s in an “okay” hotel up the road on London’s Strand – but his Hilton Hotel victory is written all over his face. In the broad smile, you can see the words Sony World Photography Award for 3D Photography 2012 etched into perfect white enamel and, in his eyes, you can read the pride of being the winner of the category in its first year of the competition. And when he speaks, well, you quickly gauge that this is not the culmination, but the beginning, of the 3D photography journey.

“The public does not really know what to do with 3D yet,” he says. “3D photography is not mainstream, but awards like this will certainly help raise its profile and also show that 3D photography is not what it used to be.”

What 3D photography “used to be” was something that meant poor technique, poor quality and poor composition. The fact it has been finally accepted as something to celebrate is not, as some may cynically suggest, Sony jumping on the Avatar bandwagon, but a testament to the hard work the group of photographers currently working in the genre have done to bring 2D photography standards to the 3D market. And Saglimbeni, now the official leader of this new 3D brigade, admits there was much to overcome to gain this acceptance.

“With 3D, you used to get an old man on a bench, a bee pollinating a flower, a strawberry… I mean, who even gets excited about that stuff in 2D?” he laughs. “And the cameras just got worse and worse, to the point where 3D photography was synonymous with throwaway-camera lens quality.”

Saglimbeni was probably not the first photographer people would have thought would try and change this situation. Since turning pro in 2003, his focus has been purely 2D, building up a very successful glamour and commercial career. His roster of high-profile clients currently includes the likes of Maxim, FHM, GQ, Sony Music, Skechers and Wacom. He also runs an all-encompassing studio called Slickforce that offers everything from shoot locations to post-production services. He also runs a workshop called Photokamp throughout the year covering both studio and location shooting, and he has produced two best-selling tutorial videos, Mastering Retouching and Mastering Compositing. It seems incredible he found the time to try and embrace a whole new way of photographing. What’s more incredible, though, is that Saglimbeni didn’t even used to like 3D. “I really didn’t understand the point of it,” he admits.

This changed after a chat with an old tutor from university, who was an avid historian of historical filming techniques. As he was talked through forgotten processes and the undervalued advantages of each were pointed out, Saglimbeni suddenly had the realisation that there was all this untapped potential in existing technologies and it struck him that the prime example of this was 3D.

“I had this idea that with 3D I could explore concepts that traditional photography wouldn’t allow – I could create a spatial awareness that simply doesn’t exist in traditional photography,” he recalls.

So he got to work. First off, he immersed himself in the world of 3D, posting on 3D forums, researching the different ways of creating a 3D effect and assessing what was out there already.

He discovered that, at the basic level, 3D is a trick of the mind, it is showing the viewer two slightly different images simultaneously to create an impression of depth and space. How you create that illusion can differ.

For a film like Avatar, circular polarisation was used to create the effect, whereby a video projector switches between left and right eye frames 144 times per second. However, the traditional method – which has been around for a hundred years or more – is anaglyph, where the 3D photograph contains two images of different colours (generally one red, one cyan), which when seen through the familiar filtering glasses creates the 3D effect by enabling the viewer to see the two images at once.

Despite reservations over the fact it stripped an image of colour, Saglimbeni decided to stick with the anaglyph method, mainly because of affordability and accessibility.

“I love to use a lot of colour, so the thought of nearly monochroming my images was pretty horrifying,” he admits, still looking slightly uncomfortable at the thought. “But I wanted anyone to be able to view the images, in any part of the world, which meant cheap glasses to view them which anaglyph has, and it meant that with print as well as digital images you really only have the anaglyph option.”

Saglimbeni, though, was still a long way from showcasing any images to the public, in print or otherwise. For starters, he had no camera. While there are some 3D cameras on the market – with the FujiFilm FinePix Real 3D W3 widely credited as the best of the bunch – Saglimbeni felt none were capable of the quality and flexibility for the genre-transforming professional photos he wished to take. So he decided to build one himself.

For an amateur, he says building a 3D system is relatively easy. “The most affordable method is to mount a camera on a horizontal plane and to take two pictures mimicking the distance between left and right human eyes,” he explains. “Once uploaded, these photos can be manipulated to become a single 3D image.” (Visit the Photography Monthly website for a guide on how to make your own).

Saglimbeni was after something a bit more sophisticated than this slightly rudimentary arrangement, so he made a list of everything he felt kept 3D inferior to 2D – things like sharpness and lens choice – then sketched out a blueprint for a camera that his engineer friend German Pinchevsky then built.

While he is reluctant to go into too much detail about the camera as he fears people “ripping off the design,” he does reveal he has two cameras: one for studio work and one for use when on location.

The latter, he says, is slightly less sharp because of its smaller size. Beyond that, he will only say that using the equipment was a steep learning curve and that the camera can upload images in 3D already or as two individual images that can then be used to create the 3D image.

Where he is a lot more open about his technique is how to use his top secret equipment to create award-winning 3D imagery. He says the first thing he did was to look at those who in cinema were doing 3D so well, and that meant Avatar. From that film he learnt something about focus.

“Look around your room right now,” he instructs. An empty bar and some bored waiters come into view. “You can focus on whatever you want to, right? Nothing is really out of focus. That is how your viewer looks at your 3D image. People expect the same freedom in 3D images because 3D’s selling point has always been that it’s more real than 2D.”

He adds that composition is just as important. “When an object is a football field away from you there is no depth to perceive, so the 3D image is lacklustre,” he says. “There is nothing to see. And when it is too close then it is uncomfortable for the eyes to view it. You also need to accentuate curves and angles that will make the image pop out of the page.”

You also have to contend with motion blur, he reveals. “Motion blur is something that is very damaging. If someone’s hair is blowing in the wind and it is blurry in the image as a result, in 3D it throws your brain as your eye cannot work out what to do with it. To combat it, I have started shooting on ridiculously high ISOs in those situations, rather than use a longer shutter speed.”

While revealing all these rules, however, the evidence of some of the images he showcases seems to go against them. A shot of a tribesman in Kenya, for example, has Mt Kilimanjaro out of focus in the background. Saglimbeni says this is because after strictly adhering to all the 3D rules at the start, the more he got used to the kit the more he started playing with those rules to see which could be bent to get a more artistic feel to his images.

“We are still very much in the wild west era of 3D,” he says. “You have the freedom to experiment and make mistakes without judgment. I went back to taking artistic liberties and saying ‘this is how I want you to see my image’. It wasn’t about technology, which was what most of the other 3D photographers were focusing on, it was about the aesthetic. So pretend you are five years old again, and go out and start your finger painting!”

Saglimbeni explains the key to that freedom he enjoys is the post-processing and the leaps forward his post-production supervisor Joyce Park has pioneered. With 3D, getting the two images aligned so you create a single 3D image that is both in focus and is not jarring to the eyes and brain is incredibly difficult. As for retouching after you have created that image, well that is even harder. Park, says Saglimbeni, got round both these issues.

“She very quickly made herself an expert in stereo alignment, anaglyph optimisation, and – the Holy Grail of 3D photography – retouching in 3D,” he explains. “It meant we could do in stereo what we had always done in 2D – and more.”

This obviously required a lot of hard work and a lot of practice, but Saglimbeni is considering giving photographers a helping hand with a tutorial series that lets others into Park’s secrets, once he has completed his current series, Mastering Lighting.

If you can’t wait that long then Saglimbeni is giving you plenty of opportunity to view his images and to try and mimic the award-winning style he has created. His 3D work can be seen in a magazine he has created especially to showcase his 3D techniques. World’s Most Beautiful (WMB) was launched in September last year with content that ranges from travel photographs through glamour images and 3D adverts. It is available in print and digitally for Apple and Android devices – the latter, says Saglimbeni, is where 3D really shines.

“When you have a print image, you are left with a darker image, but on a backlit iPad you get much less of a halo and a much crisper image,” he explains. “The best part is that you can zoom into the image as well and still get the 3D, and also see the detail.”

Saglimbeni is not a full-time 3D aficionado just yet, though he is still shooting 2D for his clients on a daily basis and will continue to do so. He says that the mass market is simply not ready for 3D yet, so it will remain quite a niche area until a major player like Apple or Canon releases and promotes 3D products and workflow.

Until that happens, though, Saglimbeni is keen to encourage anyone excited by 3D to give it a go. His experience has been entirely positive and he says it is a great way to develop as a photographer.

“If 3D photography excites you, you should start right away,” he advises. “It is a fantastically creative medium and very, very rewarding.”

Biography

Nick Saglimbeni has been a professional photographer since 2003. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, he moved to Los Angeles to study cinematography at the top-ranked USC School of Cinema. He got his first break on US urban magazines and is now one of the leading glamour photographers in the US, listing Maxim, FHM, Kim Kardashian and GQ among his clients. He has picked up many awards, including the Sony World Photography Award for 3D.

www.nicksaglimbeni.com