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The Best Street Photography Workshops. period.

When you are looking for authentic street photography workshops that’ll teach you the real ins-and-outs about street photography, you have found the right source – I am a passionate street photographer, with an active history for the past decade and my work gets published nationally and internationally on a regular basis.

I’ll offer you the unique chance to take some amazing photos in the streets of New York that are as good as it gets. Under my guidance, you will learn about the important aspects of street photography. I have years of experience in photographing and publishing life as a fine art photographer and can show you a few tricks of the trade during a three-hour street photo walking tour.

The kind or make of camera you’re using doesn’t matter, as long as you know its basic operation… you can show up with a Leica rangefinder, any type of SLR or just with a simple one point-and-shoot that you use for everyday snapshots. You will learn how to make the most out of your equipment during my custom street photo tours… trust me, I have used any kind of camera you can imagine for publications – here a photo of Steve Jobs, published in TIME, taken with a film point-and-shoot camera, for example.

What it really comes down to is the big three
- storytelling
- timing
- composition

then there’s the technical stuff (for advanced users)
- zone/scale focusing
- how to outsmart your camera’s light meter

and last, but not least… editing
- Photoshop
- Lightroom
- printing

book your 3-hour One-on-One session now
credit card payment via paypal (please add your preferred date/s into the note field on the checkout page and I will confirm your date with an email)


Soundproject @Joe’s Pub NYC

TIME – The Year In Review

Markus Hartel, Apple Store 67th St. & Broadway, New York

my photo in TIME – once again… Spread in “The Year In Review”. Steve Jobs memorial, Apple Store @ 67th & Broadway, New York City

resizing film grain vs digital noise

street photography in black and white by Markus Hartel, New York

Oh I’ll bet this has been asked and answered a billion times, but has anyone ever seen a good explanation between the difference between film grain and digital pixels.

What I mean by that is that you can take a nice “clean” digital image from a good sized noiseless sensor and with some interpolation you can go very large with it even though you are beginning with a file that is actually much smaller than a full 35mm scan which is about 78 MB (or somewhere in that area if it’s RGB and 16 bit).

But as I say – I can take a much smaller digital file and easily go to that size with an interpolation program without seeing any noise or artifacts.

I’m not really saying it clearly but I remember when I began the switch from film to digital I had an idea that those grains corresponded to pixels and they just don’t. Anyone ever go through the same conceptual enigma?

film grain is somewhat organic and random, where pixels are ordered in a rigid grid and normal linear (or cubic, bicubic) algorithms just work better with that sort of “order”.

if you take a film scan with organic grain, it pretty much interferes with the pixel pattern and your imaging software doesn’t know exactly what to do with that seemingly random mess.

also, film grain looks differently in the highlights, midtones and shadows and that makes it even harder to compensate.
digital noise on the other hand is somewhat ordered and repetitive, hence makes sensor specific/heat map noise reduction in camera possible… it also explains why noise reduction algorithms (there, math again) work so well with digital, but fail miserably with the randomness of film.

Julia Dean Street Shooting Guest Speaker

Julia Dean Street Shooting workshop New York

Julia Dean workshop, New York June 24th to June 30th

thank you all & happy New Year

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Happy Holidays

Self Scan Portrait

scan portrait

A nickel worth of dreams

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listening to Tom Waits on my kick-ass headphones

after silencing my Mac Pro

crashplan boot disk space

Markus Hartel, New York street photographer, working at the computerone of the 4 internal HDDs (presumably the one with my user folder) in my MacPro tower has been extremely chatty for the past week – no wonder after two consecutive power failures and a bunch of itunes match downloading…

finally, I had the time to track the issue down… and I also noticed a suspicious decline in available space on the machine’s small-ish 120GB SSD boot disk with only 7GB available, I remember it being much roomier – 120GB is just about right for OSX, a bunch of applications and some room to breathe, but I think the last time it had like 50GB available… and all my other data is scattered around a bunch of HDDs.

first I thought it may just be a temp/scratch disk issue and I deleted some dormant apps (can you say flex and flash) and performed a deep cache cleaning, which gave me a gig-and-a-half back. only 8.5GB free? no way! sort by size revealed the top spot… something occupied 40+GB in the library

crashplan has the ability to do a remote backup from another machine (my laptop) and automatically occupies a space in the library on the boot disk (library/application support/crashplan). I always wondered where they stash their data… fortunately, crashplan’s software also has a setting (settings>general>inbound…) to place those inbound backups to another place, so I directed that to an external HDD instead, quit crashplan – reboot… and everything is quiet again… for now & back to listening to music while working…

well, I still have to track down RIMAlbumArtdaemon