Месяц: Январь 2008

I did this for a contest here at Photochopz.com and it did rather well. I chose it for the tutorial because its both advanced and simple at the same time. One of those where you need to trust yourself to turn what looks very difficult into a cut and paste job. The secret to this is all in the sources (Download below). Note that they are both of good size and quality and the lighting is similar. Other than that though, they don’t seem to fit together very well. Thats what this is for. Download the pictures below and work along with me.

The impact and success of a portrait can be the result of lighting, composition, body language, lens choice, camera angle, clothing, color, texture or even luck. With a few portrait techniques, your luck will improve dramatically. There are many stylistic methods which can make a photographer’s work a little unique and help your own style develop over time.

I should have seen this one coming. What can you do if you have a ton of SBs and a bit of duct tape? A multi-super-sb-ring-light.

I’m even going to give you a head start on improving your photography for 2008. Here are four links with “tons” of info, for aspiring to professional wedding photographers.

Photoshop might have made it easy to create faked photographs, but you don’t need fancy editing skills to manipulate the truth. Photographers have been faking images almost as long as they’ve been making them simply by setting up shots that look natural.

Blown skin highlights is an unfortunate but common problem on portraits that are otherwise well exposed. I’ve read and tried many techniques with mixed results. So I developed this technique, using the best steps I’ve found in the work of others. Would appreciate feedback and improvements.

One way to interpret the chart is to choose a camera with which you are familiar and an ISO at which you were satisfied with your results.
Then holding that Dynamic Range value constant examine other camera models.
For example, you should get about the same quality of image from a D200 at ISO 200 as the D300 at ISO 560 (1.5 stops) or the D3 at ISO 1600 (3 stops).

Последняя в прошлом году серия PhotoshopUser TV. Которую, кстати, можно скачать для просмотра в оффлайне.

Imagine yourself, camera in hand, walking through a busy metropolis. The sights, the sounds and the smells of a bustling city overwhelm your senses. People all around you are scurrying to and from work. Others are sitting in outdoor cafes enjoying lunch. You can see worn out shoppers, their hands filled with packages, moving from store to store. The city is alive with activity.

This Photoshop Tutorial shows 3 ways to Burn and Dodge in Photoshop. Each method is discussed as to it’s best application in your work flow. There are three BONUS tips along the way too. You can also click directly on the “video” to see a larger view.

Nothing that I was not expecting, since I had previously talked to Westcott headquarters in the US and they told me that the only umbrellas they make now with the round tips are the White one’s with a removable black cover. They also told me that they had a few problems with the round tip production because they easily tear apart.

Seeing that as I’m writing this I am mid-travel on my way to Trinidad, I felt it appropriate to talk a little bit about gear safety while traveling. As seasoned CameraPorn readers may know from previous posts, I from time-to-time travel to Trinidad (read here, here and here). This and a recent, horrible gear theft experience of a friend of mine (more on that later), got me thinking a little bit more about gear safety. Now I’m not talking about professional swimsuit photographers off to Bali, or insane conflict photographers to a war zone. I’m talking about you, and me and most of the readers of this blog… serious hobbyists, traveling for fun and shooting pleasure. For me these trips usually mean a hot, sweaty, foreign country, though the tips I’m going to share can apply to almost anything from a day trip to the desert or an adventure to remote villages in India.

So you drove across town for a impromptu photo shoot and when you arrive you realize you forgot something as basic as your camera batteries or your tripod. For larger photo shoots, you should use something like our photographers checklists we have used before. Some people have asked for something simpler for those quicker spur-of-the-moment shoots. We have put together a page that you can print out, cut it into multiple pieces, laminate it, and have some quick-use checklists handy. If you laminate them you can use a dry-erase pen to check off the items you want and then wipe it off to use it again.

I have been taking pictures seriously for about 5 years and been around major photography forums for about the same time. Here are, compiled in one post, the 7 bad habits of digital photographers…

GIMP is the undisputed king of image editing in Linux platforms, and is next only to Photoshop in popularity in Windows and Mac platforms. With a large community of developers and an even larger pool of users, it is no surprise that GIMP is very popular.

I was recently on a food photography forum where the topic of the day was “what’s the hardest thing for you to photograph”. Several of the forum participants mentioned that they had a very difficult time photographing steam. Coincidently, I was in the middle of photographing a three-day steamed vegetal food-packaging shoot. Since I had just had to deal with that very problem, I thought I’d document what went into a professional food photography job where capturing steam was a very important aspect of the shoot. The images and information (tips and tricks) below are from that shoot.