faking

How to Shoot Golden Hour Portraits with No Sun (and a Powerful Flash)

What happens if your portrait clients request golden hour lighting... outside of golden hour? That's the situation photographer Pye Jirsa of Lin & Jirsa Photography found himself in recently while shooting a wedding. As you can see in the 4.5-minute video above, Jirsa was able to deliver by using creative lighting, a powerful flash, and a couple of colored gels.

Recreating the Look of Tintype Photography Using Photoshop

The other night I came across the work of photographer Victoria Will, who made real tintype portraits of some actors who attended this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The portraits themselves were excellent but what really drew me in was the effect of the tintype medium and the old lens and camera that was used to make the images; very narrow depth of field, low tonal range, and non-uniform exposure across the frame. I decided I wanted to see if I could replicate the look of tintype using my Sony A7R and some Photoshop massaging.

Faking 1000FPS with Final Cut Studio and a Canon 60D

We've featured a couple beautiful examples of fake slow-motion video created using Twixtor shot with the Canon 7D and 550D. If you don't want to shell out $300 just for Twixtor, you can do something somewhat similar using only Final Cut Studio. The above footage was shot at 60fps using a Canon 60D and created entirely with Final Cut Studio. Yes, yes, we know the wheels look strange, but it's still a neat effect and might produce interesting results with the right kind of footage.

Canon 7D Footage Slowed Down to 1000 Frames per Second

If you don't have the $2,500 needed to rent a Phantom camera for a day but would like to have super slow motion in your videos, you can fake the effect using special software designed for the task. The above video by Oton Bačar was recorded on a Canon 7D at 60 frames per second, but was slowed down to mimic 1000fps in After Effects with Twixtor, a plugin that allows you to speed up or slow down footage smoothly. It uses warping and interpolation to provide smooth results, avoiding the choppiness that you see when you play normal video back in "slow motion".