#the shadings a bit funky but its all on one layer so you can forgive me

[teatreearts]

Some things never change

[seo42training]

Types Of Western Dresses & Accessories To Complement

One of the best things about summer is the freedom it gives especially when it comes to wearing dresses. This is the season you can rock that little pretty dress that you have been saving all along. Summer dresses can be worn to weddings, beach vacations or even semi-formal events and parties. You will enjoy as much freedom with the Men suit shoes too in summer, hence pulling off that look you have always wanted with your cute summer dress is easy. However, you always should ensure that you choose a dress that works for your body type. A few pointers will help you do just that so you step out confidently and in style.

Summer dresses for apple shaped women

If you are an apple, it means that your weight is more around the middle and this means you need to choose dresses that loosely fit especially around the tummy. You can show off legs and arms, but let the dress flow to conceal your midsection. Avoid spandex dresses that are figure hugging because they will end up emphasizing your tummy which is what you are trying to avoid.

Summer dresses for rectangle shaped women

This body shape tends to be straight up and down, meaning there is really not much difference between the width of the hips and bust and waist. There is no obvious waist with this shape and a dress with volume in the right places should be the way to go. Illusion dresses will work leather jackets  for this look because they create curves and slim the shoulders. Look for a dress that has ruffles around the neckline and one with a bottom that is voluminous like a skater dress.

Summer dresses for hourglass shaped women

If you fall in this category, then you are in luck because it means you can rock any type of dress you wish. This body shape has a well-defined waist and all you have to do is highlight your curves with a dress that shows off this slim point. Belted summer dresses will work amazingly well with this shape; you can also go for dresses that emphasize the waistline. If you want to turn heads and look irresistible, go for a figure hugging dress to flaunt the curves.

Summer dresses for pear shaped women

This body type tends to carry a little more weight sherwani on the thighs and hips with a trim waist and shoulders that are shapely. You therefore want a dress that draws the attention up. Empire dresses and A-line summer dresses will suit this body best. As for the neckline, you can go for cowl, halter or boat neck to look just as fabulous. You want to stay away from peplum, dresses and body-con dresses as they will only bring attention to the lower part of your body. Sleeveless styles can also work and full skirts will help disguise any bumps and lumps you may not be very confident with if you are a pear.If there could be an award for the most forgiving item in a woman's closet, it would definitely be maxi dresses. It is the perfect beach cover up and an ideal workplace dress. Versatility is where the dresses for women win all the brownie points. Ultra-voguish as well as the more conservative women can don maxi dresses with élan and not worry about a thing. They would be fitting all criterions of being trendy, without side stepping their cultures/belief systems.

There are different styles and silhouettes you can try!

Stay elegant and classy no matter what life throws at you. If you're dressed in a maxi, then any impromptu meetings at office or dinners with family will be covered. So at least that part's taken care of! Floor sweeping styles always work great in order to reflect class or your dainty cool leather jackets  mood of the day. For daytime dos, cotton crinkles are great but avoid them if you have to make some strong impressions at the workplace. The floaty chiffons and georgettes are reserved for that department. Any cocktail dinners or marriage functions can also be graced with these dresses. Just clench that flowy and shiny silhouette with a metallic belt and that dress would be no less resplendent than a gown. A thigh-high slit is for the bold and beautiful. Get playful with prints. If we weren't so interested in maths at school, doesn't mean we can't try out the geometrical patterns in maxi dresses. Off shoulder dresses are great if you want to bare your shoulders and sun-dress up! And how can we forget to recommend you the ever-so-stylish body con dresses. It's time to highlight those curves you've worked so hard to achieve. You have a great room for hits and trials with a maxi dress. The same maxi can be accessorized in many ways, and each look would work. We can't think of any reason how anyone could go wrong with them!

Styling cues to always remember!

For all maxi dresses, a statement neckpiece biker leather jackets  with matching footwear would be good add-ons. Dresses are not just all-occasion but also all-season wears. You could transition into fall seamlessly as you layer your maxi with a cardigan or jacket with boots. Bohemian tassels always make a great pair with a maxi so shrug it up and further add on with ankle length booties and hat to make heads turn. Strike the unadulterated casual appeal with shirt dresses. You will be looking cute as a button in a shirt dress combined with sneakers and a low bun hairstyle. Satin maxi dresses or other wrap styles could be your OOTD for a formal setting where the social gathering could be for a cause or a celebration. Casting a spell right away with maxi dresses would be easy. Just try it!

Where to shop for maxi dresses..!

Maxi dresses for ladies are great options when formal afternoons turn into casual soirees or romantic dinners. Shop for maxi dresses for women online and that way you'll be feeding yourself more plus size leather jackets fashionably as well. Online shopping houses in India bring to you all famous clothing brands under one roof hence looking for that appropriate laidback meets serious maxi dress won't be a problem at all. Gaze at the magnificent collection of accessories and footwear also that might go impeccably with the dress that you have chosen for yourself. And if you don't find anything, just turn off your laptop and revisit the site after a few days. Trends keep returning and re-returning. There is nothing to lose!Western dresses have a large array of styles and design patterns which Seo training certification magnetise our attention instantly. There is a wide collection of dresses in both online and offline markets where it becomes really difficult to choose from for any fashionable women. With such a huge variety of styles, these dresses are further divided in terms of occasion-wise wearing. And this is where one gets confused. Be it a wedding, cocktail, and lawn side party, college farewell or reception, at each and every occasion one needs to select a different type of dress. It all depends on the mood or tone of the event. Each and every dress has its own purpose and it all depends on how you accessorise it, will further pitch up your appeal. For business suits for men  instance; where wedding dresses need to be light in weight, sheer, and subtle in colour, party wear dresses should be somewhat flashy.

Bodycon Dresses - Bodycons can be said as the second skin of the wearer as this type of dresses is generally tight and glues with the skin to showcase your proper body shape and figure. These SEO training course body-hugging dresses are silhouette-skimming dresses which make your look completely astounding. These can be also worn as party wears with skyscraper heels or can be played out with printed block heels and retro shades. In general, these drapes are available in plain silhouettes, single shade and plain design. But one can also buy online western dresses like this with quirky prints as well.

Peplum Dresses - It's an essential for every blue suits for men fashionista's closet. Peplum dresses showcase amazing mid-wave umbrella type of silhouette which starts from the waist of the dress. One should opt out sleek jewellery, shoes and accessories to complete her look. Avoid shoes while complementing and put on small heeled ballerinas or pencil heels. These dresses are formal environment-friendly as well.

Cocktail Dresses - Cocktail party is an event where clinking of glasses and laughing on dark humour is a trend. On this special occasion, one needs to put on something which is highly comfortable to wear all day long and showcase sophisticated designs and hues. Little embellishments on the neckline or sequins all over the dress are some SEO Training special features of this type of dresses. You need to be a little bit more creative while choosing complementary accessories and jewellery. Try out contemporary choker necklaces with chic hanging earrings.

Wedding Dresses - A wedding is a big fat event in which a stylish and fashion serious woman is supposed to dress in eye-catching western wears. White, pastel, and coral hues are much in trend nowadays. Whatever is the colour, design or style, the bride or bridesmaids needs black men in suits to look comfortable and absolutely stunning on this day. And wedding dresses here solve the purpose. These dresses are generally made of net and satin or silk fabric with less yet alluring designs. Apart from any casual wedding at the church, garden weddings, beach wedding, and banquet weddings can be enjoyed with the different type of thematic dresses.

Shift Dresses - These dresses are like the reincarnation of 60's era and its clothing styles. Featuring short and straight structure, these dresses lie a little above the knees and look great when spiffed up by gladiator flats or block heels with laces. Quirky prints or sparkling wedding sherwani shades are in trend. These dresses can be worn at casual meet-ups and as a funky college wear. This western wear for girls with captivating fashion sense is a must-have for summer, spring and autumn season. In winters, one can wear them with pop coloured leggings and boots.

[lorrainecparker]

Lenses: My Likes, Dislikes, and the Return of the Cooke Speed Panchro

Every lens has a feel and a purpose. Some reproduce the world perfectly, some imperfectly. They all have their place, but I have come to appreciate “imperfect” over “perfect.”

There is a sense in cinematography circles that digital cameras are too “clean.” Common complaints center around the fact that film’s analog nature introduces certain characteristics to an image that sensors don’t. The most obvious is that randomized grain, visible in film, is replaced in the electronic world by noise, which is less random and has a different “feel” altogether. Less obvious is the quirky way the three color layers that make up film (from the top down: blue, green, and finally red) reproduce images. Blue, being the top layer, exposes much more easily than red, because light has to travel through several layers of filtration before it reaches that bottom red layer. The red image tends to be just a little bit softer than blue or green, perhaps because red light has to travel through more layers before exposing, or possibly because its wavelength is longer so it focuses differently. (This is well known: the scenes that camera assistants dreaded the most in film took place in red-lit darkrooms, as lens focus marks became useless.)

It is these intangibles that gave film an abstract beauty, and abstraction is what audiences crave. Audiences don’t want to see realistically captured images: they want to see interpretations of reality that are more interesting than the reality they see daily. The more unique and compelling an image is, the more attractive it is to an audience… within reason, of course.

There’s only so far a color grade can be pushed, and even then the look tends not to be very “analog,” or randomly distorted. That’s why old glass is seeing a resurgence. Such lenses work their magic before the light strikes the sensor, and—unlike a color grade which works at the color bit depth of the source or intermediate digital files—they work at the full bit depth of the sensor. And old lenses do some wonderfully unpredictable things.

Lenses have always been a bit of a kluge. Zooms, in particular, are compromises in every way, and often show all sorts of defects from the distortion of horizontal and vertical lines to color fringing around contrasty objects. Primes are generally less prone to annoying distortions, but certainly possess more positive distortions that give them “character.”

One overlooked quality of lenses is lens color. A while back, while shooting a travel job, I had to mix Cooke S4 primes with an Angenieux 24-290 zoom due to limited equipment availability. It wasn’t long before I noticed that the Cookes, which are nice and warm, contrasted sharply with the Angenieux zoom, which appeared cool and cyan. While this is relatively easily fixed in a color grade, it does add time and expense to that process, and a less experienced colorist might not fix that issue at all.

When I got home I set out to compare and contrast lens colors so I didn’t end up in this situation again. I knew that director wanted to work with either Leica or Cooke primes, and I needed a zoom that would match either choice. This article illustrates how I compared both Cooke and Leica primes to Angenieux and Canon zooms in order to determine which pairing was the best match for color. In the end I found that the warm Cooke and Canon lenses matched fairly well, whereas the Leica and Angenieux lenses were a better match because they were both cool and a bit green.

What’s interesting is that the lenses weren’t simply an overall hue, but showed variations in how they transitioned from warm to cool. For example, in a range from blue to red, the purple hues transitioned to red faster on the Canons than on the Cookes but their overall warmth was the same.

I’ve come to think of all the common lens choices in the following ways:

Cooke S4 primes. They don’t always play well with horizontal and vertical lines, but those distortions work magic on faces and figures. They render skin tone as wonderfully “creamy,” and the quality of the out-of-focus image (known as “bokeh“) is painterly and slightly dreamy. They tend to pop warm hues and downplay cold ones, which—once again—is wonderful on faces. Their low contrast doesn’t work well with white limbo backgrounds, but otherwise they are my go-to favorites.

Zeiss Ultra Primes. These are my workhorse lenses, as they tend to be a little cheaper than Cooke S4s and are more often available when rental houses are busy. They are very clean and the wider lenses show gentle barrel distortion, which I find pleasing in an old-fashioned way. They don’t flare easily, and in general are just good, decent, all-around lenses. Where Cooke S4 lenses don’t work so well on white limbo backgrounds, Ultra Primes are much more contrasty and work perfectly.

Zeiss Master Primes. I’m not a fan. They are very, very good lenses, but they are so free of distortion that I find them a little boring. Still, they are probably the sharpest low light lenses around, and some of the sharpest lenses available overall. They show a little barrel distortion, like Ultra Primes do, but unlike Ultra Primes I find the quality of that distortion a little disturbing. For some reason the distortion never feels symmetrical to me, as if the lens is slightly offset in its mount, even though it is really the world that is slightly offset in relation to the lens. I can spot this effect fairly easily.

If I’m shooting a project where I know the production company wants to resize the image significantly in post, these are my go-to lenses as I know there aren’t many lenses that are sharper. Like Ultra Primes, they show a lot of contrast and are very resistant to flares.

Leica Summicron-C primes. I’ve used these, and they are nice lenses, but like the Master Primes they are almost too perfect. They are also a little cool and green, which is easily corrected but not my favorite look on faces. Still, they are razor sharp and free of distortion, and sometimes that’s the look you want. In a recent video comparing these lenses to Ultra Primes, I noticed that the Leicas didn’t cause highlights to bloom as much as the Ultra Primes but the field of view was completely flat, where the Ultra Primes added a bit of roundness to the image. I found the Ultra Primes to be technically lower in quality but artistically more pleasing.

Zeiss Super Speeds. These old lenses have a lot of character. Their bokeh is distinctive: highlights are hot in the center and bleed off into a gentle glow. They show more flare than their modern counterparts (Ultra Primes are basically updated Super Speeds) and a bit more barrel distortion, and they aren’t as sharp as the other lenses on this list, but they still do a surprisingly good job. In the early Alexa days I was often able to get that camera on jobs by compromising on lens choice to keep costs down, and I came to enjoy matching such an awesome camera to a set of old and worn Super Speed lenses.

Speaking of old and worn lenses… this is the part where I talk about my new favorite lens. A company in the U.K. called TLS (for True Lens Services) has been rehousing old Cooke Speed Panchro lenses, from the 1920s through the 1960s, for modern motion picture use. They have all the functionality of modern Cooke primes, but the funkiness of old and worn lenses from an era when lens technology was a lot less forgiving. (Recently, while shooting handheld with these lenses and controlling my own focus, I found myself spinning the focus knob crazily and wondering why it wasn’t engaged… but then noticing that focus did actually change. That’s how insanely smooth the focus mechanism is on these rehoused lenses!)

A Cooke Speed Panchro lens in a new TLS housing. The focus ring is so smooth that it often feels as if the follow focus isn’t actually engaged!

These rehoused old lenses are so popular that Cooke Optics dug the designs out of a filing cabinet somewhere and is re-releasing them as a brand new product, the Cooke Panchro/i Classic, in all their funky glory.

This decades-old Cooke Speed Panchro lens has a beautiful and unique look that works well for our digital age, but the physical design isn’t conducive to working as quickly and precisely as we must on modern productions.

The updated Cooke Classic updates the classic Speed Panchro design while giving camera assistants the kind of focus mark precision they need when working quickly and precisely at low light levels. It also makes the lens compatible with standard accessories, as does the TLS housing.

Cooke Optics recently released this promotional video showing off the “new” Cooke Speed Panchro, now known as the Cooke Classic:

These are the most imperfect lenses I’ve ever used…  and I absolutely LOVE THEM.

These lenses flare like mad. I remember a time when that was a bad thing, but modern aesthetics have changed. In this article I showed how lens flares introduce depth by creating a wash of light across the image at the point closest to the viewer, creating a barrier between them and the image. A setting sun gives one a sense of infinity within the frame, but a lens flare does the opposite by appearing closer to the viewer than everything else.

Flare can be used for dramatic purposes by forcing the viewer to look harder to see what’s going on. Suddenly eliminating that flare is even more dramatic as it suddenly drops the viewer right into the shot.

Flares adds a layer of depth between the viewer and the subject.

Eliminating that flare drops the viewer right into the shot.

I used TLS-rehoused Cooke Speed Panchros lenses on a recent commercial, where we played “peak-a-boo” with the sun by flaring the lens and then shading it, and this added a lot of drama to what would have otherwise been a fairly boring shot.

One of the things I love about these lenses is that the out-of-focus image is very smeary and painterly. It also seems to have layers. In this shot, which moves slightly from side to side, the out-of-focus branches in the foreground distort the out-of-focus branches in the background, like ripples in a pond. The layers of branches seem to interact with each other.

I exploited this characteristic in a recent commercial where we put wine glasses directly in front of a 100mm TLS Cooke Speed Panchro, with the aperture wide open, and the glass in the foreground of the shot created wonderful ripple effects in the background as they moved through the frame.

It feels as if the light from the soft branches in the distant background has to bend around the closer branches in order to reach the lens.

This shot shows another element of the Cooke Speed Panchro look: when used with the aperture wide open, the front of the lens cuts into the image somewhat, creating a soft vignette around the frame that also distorts the boken into ovals. The highlights at the top left of this frame should be circles, but they are cut in half by the lens housing itself. The result is swirling effect that pushes the eye into the center of the image. All lenses do this to some extent, but these lenses do it in the most interesting way I’ve ever seen.

This “swirling” effect can be eliminated by stopping modern lenses down one stop from wide open, although older lens designs (like the Cooke Speed Panchros and the new Classics) often require 2 ⅔ stops before this effect dissipates. This effect is easy to see: look through the back of any lens, with the aperture wide open, and hold it such that the front end of the lens becomes visible, cutting off part of the image circle. Then close the f/stop down a stop or two. Now that the hole is smaller, you can’t see the edge of the lens cutting into the image anymore.

Cooke lenses have a creaminess to them that make people look great. What’s also interesting about this image is that we can see that the highlights have a very slight edge to them, where the outside of the highlight is a little brighter than the rest of it. “Perfect” boken means this highlight should be exactly the same brightness all the way across, but that can often feel a bit too “clean.” Zeiss Super Speeds make the center hotter than outside edge, but Cookes make the outside edge hotter than the center.

Too much of this can be unpleasant. Many still lenses will turn out-of-focus background highlights into donuts, with a very dark center, and those don’t blend together very well. The effect is very distracting as the background highlights end up appearing almost as sharp as the foreground. These Cooke lenses add just the right amount of edge, giving the bokeh the feel of a lens that’s not quite perfect, but in a pleasing way. The highlights feel less like donuts and more like diamonds.

Throwing everything out of focus shows just how smeary and almost ghostly these lenses render out-of-focus backgrounds.

These lenses aren’t the answer to every production, but when they do work for the story or the product they really are amazing. At the moment it’s possible to find TLS-rehoused Cooke Speed Panchros at a lot of rental houses (I’ve found them in my native San Francisco Bay Area, and I also used a local set on a recent project in Phoenix). This summer you’ll see these lenses re-released as brand new Cooke Classics, and I suspect you’ll be able to find them everywhere.

At least I hope so… I’m going to be asking for them quite a lot.

(You can read my article on Cooke’s anamorphic lenses here.)

Art Adams Director of Photography

The post Lenses: My Likes, Dislikes, and the Return of the Cooke Speed Panchro appeared first on ProVideo Coalition.

First Found At: Lenses: My Likes, Dislikes, and the Return of the Cooke Speed Panchro