Here’s an interesting portrait of Steven Sasson by David Friedman, shot at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York. Sasson invented the digital camera as a Kodak engineer back in 1975, and provides an interesting glimpse in this video into how that first camera worked.
Did you know that flatbed scanners make fun portrait cameras as well? Just place your cat on the glass, do a quick scan, and you’ll have a strange looking portrait shot from below! Apparently this is pretty popular among cat lovers — a Flickr search for “cat scanner” returns thousands of results! This gives “cat scan” a whole new meaning!
“Cat Scanner” (via Photojojo)
Image credit: Cat Scan! by Tabbymom Jen
Who says you need uber-expensive lighting equipment to shoot nice-looking studio portraits? In this video, photographer Bert Stephani shows us what you can do with cheap halogen work lights (you can find them for about $30-$50) and a couple shower curtains.
(via f stoppers)
Why stick with a boring old Facebook picture when you can use the new photo strip as part of a larger, more creative portrait? That’s exactly what Alexandre Oudin did with his.
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Wanna give a unique present this Christmas? If you have two portraits of a particular friend (head-on and profile), Sculpteo can turn them into a miniature figure that resemble the “big head mode” from GoldenEye on the N64. Only the head is created from photos — you’ll need to describe the clothing and accessories you want to see on the figure (might we suggest a DSLR as an accessory?). A 7cm figure will cost you $75, while a 10cm one sets you back $130.
Here’s an easy to follow video in which commercial and advertising photographer Jay P. Morgan walks us through how he went about shooting a portrait of a jazz player with a three light setup.
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If you’re looking for creative portrait ideas, here’s a fun one to try: focus on your subject through the glass of a second lens. It’ll help throw everything else out of the focus (including the subject in the background) for a pretty cool look. You can also flip the photo upside down afterward for a right-side-up portrait.
Image credit: Life Through a Lens 2 by lytfyre
My friend recently had two stray kittens randomly walk up to her doorstep. I was called over to see them, and carried my 5D and 24-70mm along. There wasn’t much light to work with, and I didn’t bring a flash, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO for any chance of capturing a sharp image of the energetic kittens. I haven’t done a walkthrough post for quite some time (opting to post guest posts instead), but here’s a quick walkthrough of how I post-processed one particular image of a kitten. I used Adobe Camera Raw (comes with Photoshop CS4) with my adjustments, but you’ll have the same settings in Lightroom, Aperture, etc…
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About a week ago I did a shoot with the band Strange Birds as we were walking there was a point that I saw light rays trickling down right in front of us. I told all of the guys to stop and arranged them to my liking.
One of the most important things about shooting for me is having an idea of you want the photo to come out in the very end. I tend to adjust my white balance in camera and set almost everything up so it makes less work on the computer and closer to the final product. Below is the original image:
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Portrait photographer Gregory Heisler has done quite a few portraits for Time Magazine covers, including a few for their Person of the Year issues. This is an informative video where he steps through how he went about photographing Rudy Giuliani at the top of Rockefeller Center with the Empire State Building in the background. If you’re interested at all in portraiture and/or lighting, you’ll find this video quite educational.
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