When I started doing photography years ago, I really wanted to shoot fantastic shots, I wanted to make sure that my photographs would be considered for a gallery showing. All I had was Canon 10D and a flash. Most of what I shot was candid and in the style of photo journalism and even though this was fine I wanted more.
What kept me from shooting clean studio like portraits was the mistaken belief that I needed loads of expensive equipment.
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It’s easy to get complacent when shooting with a digital camera. It’s all so easy: line up the shot, press the button and move on.
Get back to base and you download your collection of shots, maybe send some to friends over the Web, perhaps make some prints for the album.
But take a good look at your work over the last year or so. How’s the colour? OK? So so? Or just plain brilliant?
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Adding a vignette to an image involves adding a subtle (or not so subtle) edge effect to it. A popular vignette technique involves darkening the edges of your image – it gives the image a slight border which helps keep the viewer’s eye in the photo. This is an effect which has been popular for years and which was is a feature of some classic film cameras such as the Holga (click to enlarge image below).
In this post Gary Cosby Jr. shares some great tips on shooting with available light.
Shooting available light can be both liberating and enslaving.
Sounds like a contradiction doesn’t it? In fact, shooting available light frees you from all the encumbrances of dragging strobe equipment around with its stands, modifiers, strobes and possibly even power packs. On the other hand, shooting available light chains you to whatever the light is willing to do at a given time of day. So you see now how it can free you or chain you up. There are a few tips and techniques you can use to tame available light and bend it to your will in many circumstances. Best of all, you don’t have to purchase a thing to use this technique.
Today Natalie Norton shares with us a series of 6 tips for photographing babies. It’s an appropriate topic – because yesterday (15th June) my wife gave birth to our 2nd son and I’ve spent a lot of my time today taking his photo! I hope you enjoy these baby photography tips.
A panorama is simply a wide-angled view of a physical space. To the photographer a panorama is usually several photographs that are stitched together horizontally to create a seamless picture.
This is going to be a pretty simple tutorial in which we create a panorama using Photoshop’s Photomerge utility.
I’m a sucker for good contrast in a photo. Since I mainly like to dabble in monochrome work, contrast for me is the gravy train – second only to composition. Regardless of whether you take black and white photographs or colour ones, take them of your cat or of war zones, I feel a little bit of contrast goes a long way to making a photo come alive. So, let’s investigate together just what contrast is, and how we can bring it out in our work.
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Digital infrared cameras – how can you tell if your camera is able to do digital infrared photography? Well, if you have a digital point & shoot camera – with an LCD viewing screen that you compose your shot in, there’s a super easy way to tell – more or less.
To find out if you have a digital infrared camera, try this quick test:
Hunt down a TV, VCR or DVD player remote control. Look at the end that points to the TV (or VCR etc), and you’ll see a little bulb or flat back plastic. This is the transmitter that sends the signal from the remote to your device. And, guess what? The signal (usually) uses infrared waves!
“OK, so what does all this have to do with my camera,” you ask?! Ok, I’ll get to the point!
Turn on your camera, and point the remote at it and look at it through your LCD screen. If you see your remote sensor light up with a white light, while looking through your camera LCD, there’s a very good chance that you camera will take infrared photos.
See what I mean?
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