A New Way To Do Value Studies!

I shared the new surround-view images of the statues I posted about last week and was thinking about the mistake I made of photographing at a too-fast shutter speed, resulting in unnecessarily noisy images, and fell into the rabbit hole of looking for solutions.

One such solution I read about was black-and-white-only cameras. Because their sensors are optimized for black-and-white only, they produce far less noise.

I don't know if that is the right path, because I like separating sculptures from their backgrounds by increasing saturation, since these statues often have colors that differ from their backgrounds. Increasing saturation makes them pop out.

But then, as I was studying that, some YouTube reviewers said it made them see the world differently, looking around for the tonal compositions their black-and-white cameras would capture.

I tried to turn my phone into a black-and-white camera, but that wasn't possible. That is when I realized I had the AR Drawing Tutor , which shows a photo reference over your drawing through the camera on your device, and the Value Study APP, which allows you to do value studies of photos.

What if I slapped these two together?

And so the Value Study Camera was born!

Value Study Camera

Open that page, let it open the camera, and you see the world around you in black and white. You can adjust the camera feed's exposure and contrast, then turn on posterization to see the live feed posterized, effectively reducing the number of tones in your surroundings.

It is useful for artists to reduce the number of tones in their compositions, as this gives them more punch and clarity. Give it a spin!

In fact, make this an exercise you do today: grab your phone, open the Value Study Camera page, and go outside to start taking photos with that app. Try focusing on the abstract shapes you see, and you will start to see many more in your surroundings. This makes you a better artist. Try it! You will look at your surroundings differently.

Yours sincerely,