Buying a professional portrait lighting setup like the much-loved Kino Flo lights is just not within everybody's budget, especially if you want LEDs. But you can actually build a reasonable alternative for just a couple hundred bucks and about an hour of manual labor.
Researchers at Radboud University in Holland have managed to do something pretty crazy. Using hundreds of thousands of photographs, they've trained a neural network to take a hand-drawn sketch and create a photorealistic portrait from it.
I had a great opportunity to do a “behind the scenes” of a recent portrait feature shoot which my very good friend Daniel Hambury was doing for the London Evening Standard. In fact I was mainly assisting, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to document what happens as it’s something I’ve always been intensely interested in.
In some sense, you could call photographer Jason Chen's latest work multiple exposures. Except that, instead of capturing two images on a single frame of film, he's literally weaving together two prints in a fascinating exploration of "time, movement, process, and mutation."
Recently I had the opportunity to shoot a young up-and-coming golfer named Taylor Pendrith for SCOREGolf magazine’s 2016 ‘Power’ issue. The creative team at SCOREGolf wanted to show Taylor in his swing, hitting the ball, displaying the incredible power this young man is becoming known for.
I love capturing one light photos for my studio shoots, and I recently bought a 120cm octobox to add to my set of diffusers. I’ll be sharing with you a simple but elegant lighting setup only using one light and some interesting stuff found around the house.
You’re hitting the road and your camera is at the top of the old checklist. Your goal is to make photographs that will be memorable and bring back the feelings of being there. So how can you do that?
Brazilian photographer Marcos Alberti's 'Wine Project' portrait series is dead simple: give your subjects some booze and photograph them between drinks. But the resulting portraits are taking the Web by storm.
Victoria Yore and Terrence Drysdale are a couple made in photography heaven. The first is a beautiful model, the second a talented portrait, landscape, and travel photographer, and together they've created a series of wanderlust-inspiring images that are going viral.
People often complain about how terrible they look in their passport photos, and it doesn't help that the US government has some pretty strict requirements regarding the layout, lighting, and composition. That's probably why everyone seems to be talking about Prince's official passport pic, which the musician shared with the world recently.
Using a single, ordinary still camera, you can shoot a traditional 2D static portrait of a person. With an array of multiple still cameras, you can stitch together a 3D portrait. To add yet another dimension, you can use video cameras instead of still cameras.
That's what Tim Macmillan, the founder of a company called Timeslice Films, did. Using a crazy camera array of 53 GoPro cameras, Macmillan created a moving 4D portrait of his own head.
Here's a short 3-minute video by Australian photographer Pete Leong on how you can set your flash and camera settings to illuminate portrait subjects while a bright sun is in the background back-lighting them.
"Although I'm using a Profoto B1 in this video you can do the same basic thing with speed lights which is what I do a lot of the time also," Leong says.
Louisiana-based photographer Hannah Hawkes is taking heat this week over a family portrait she shot and shared on her Facebook page. The Christmas photo shows the father holding a sign that reads "Peace on Earth" while the mother and two daughters are gagged with green tape and bound with Christmas lights.
The photo soon went viral in a negative way for Hawkes, as commenters around the Web condemned the photo as "sexist," "degrading," and promoting violence toward women.
Once a year, photographer Andy Reynolds takes his camera and lighting gear to …
For their official Christmas card this year, the Norwegian photography store Stavanger Foto …
Here’s a short and sweet 3-minute video tutorial by photographer and retoucher Glyn …
Tested recently put on a show at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. One of the presentations was by local photographer Michael Shindler, who specializes in wet plate collodion photography.
In the 12-minute video above, Shindler transforms the theater into a studio and darkroom, introducing the live audience to this 19th-century photography process by creating a large-format tintype portrait of Adam Savage (the co-host of Mythbusters).
Love the look of wet plate collodion photographs? Did you know you can give any digital photo that same look using Photoshop? It's a technique that can be learned in about 10 minutes.
Toronto-based cinematographer Jon Simo created this trippy portrait showing how an infrared camera sees things compared to an ordinary camera.
Red Bull recently came to me with an interesting idea: "We'd like you to photograph NBA star Anthony Davis dunking the sun.”
I responded, “Can we also have him dunk the moon?”
A client named Nick recently approached me as he was finishing his degree, wanting his portrait taken to commemorate the event. With his references, wardrobe, and location, I saw an opportunity to replicate some of the lighting I had seen in Spielberg's Lincoln. As a period film set in the mid 1800s, light "sources" were limited to daylight, moonlight, or oil lamps and candles. My hope was to capture the magic of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's lighting, while also adapting it for the purpose of a more traditional portrait.
Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing their war torn countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, bringing very few possessions with them as they make their dangerous -- and often deadly -- journeys toward what they hope is a better life.
The International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organization, commissioned photographer Tyler Jump to shoot a series of photos to document what refugees brought across the Aegean Sea to Lesbos, Greece.
Newborn baby photographers often capture the same elements in their shots: a nude baby sleeping serenely as their doting parents' smile and gaze. What you don't often see, however, are the many unexpected accidents that happen. And there's one truth many baby photographers know very well: babies can't stop the shoot to request a bathroom break.
Starting today, Instagram users will no longer be limited to posting square photos. The Facebook-owned photo-sharing company just announced that it is finally enabling support for landscape and portrait format photos and videos.
Los Angeles-based photographer and retoucher Julia Kuzmenko McKim just released this 1-minute time-lapse …
It is said that eyes are the windows to our souls and when focusing in on a portrait, we do our best to make sure they are razor sharp. With a bit of help from Photoshop, we can take the beauty of the eyes a step further. Today, we will be examining a method that I have personally used over the last few years to truly make eyes pop and give them another dimension of depth.
Panasonic has built a new 3D photo booth over in Japan that uses 120 Lumix GH4 cameras arranged around a circular room. The GH4 has a price tag of $1,500, so this new photo booth has a retail cost of $180,000 for just the cameras alone.
Tokyo-based editorial photographer Irwin Wong is starting a new series of videos titled …
Photographer Nick Fancher is the author of Studio Anywhere, a photographer's guide to shooting high-quality portraits in unconventional locations and with low-budget tools and materials.
As one of his latest projects, Fancher built a v-flat catchlight with interchangeable white shapes as a flexible tool for portraiture.
The Finnish app development studio Sumoing has just launched Relook, a new photo-editing app for iOS that it calls the first professional-level facial retouching app.
Unlike other image editing apps out there, Relook is designed specifically for touching up faces, bringing many of the powerful tools used by pros on desktop software into the world of mobile.
I recently had the absolute pleasure of meeting and shooting with Mackenzie Johnson! Today I'm going to share how I turned my portrait of her into a painting. Not everyone is a painter, but with a little time and patience -- and Photoshop -- I believe anyone can achieve this effect.
NASA astronauts often pose for lighthearted portraits, and here's another fun example: astronaut Leland Melvin's official NASA portrait includes his two very excited rescue dogs, Jake and Scout.
ZY Optics, the Chinese company behind Mitakon and Zhongyi lenses and adapters, has announced its new Mitakon Speedmaster 85mm f/1.2 lens. It's an ultra-fast, manual-focus portrait lens that gives photographers an f/1.2 aperture without breaking the bank.
In this video Peter Hurley shares advice on how to shoot better portraits of people by making them feel …
Check out this trippy portrait of the sketch comedy duo Hello Generic. It's a portrait of a portrait of a portrait... 18 levels deep.
I’ve dreamed about shooting Houston Rockets guard James Harden for a long time. How can you go wrong with that beard? He’s just awesome looking. I wanted to pose him with ZZ Top for the last couple of years -- or at least with Billy Gibbons -- but alas, no one has bitten on that idea yet. (You hear that Texas Monthly? It would be a great cover. Trust me.)
Anyway, the call finally came some weeks ago from Sports Illustrated. Harden had a super tight schedule with the All-Star Break coming up, and the editor asked if we could put together something with the iconic Houston skyline with only 24 hours notice.
Back in December 2014, we shared about photographer Justin Bettman's Set in the Street project that involved building elaborate "indoor" sets on outdoor sidewalks in New York City, shooting portraits on them, and then leaving them for the public to pose with.
This past Valentine's Day, Bettman's ongoing project took a different (and romantic) turn: he built a set for a stranger to propose to his girlfriend in.
Photographer Kayli Rene has captured quite a few family portraits for clients, but a somewhat unusual one has captured the world's attention. It's a photo she made recently for Sierra Sharry, the mother of a 6 month old boy who lost her husband in an accident last year. At Sharry's request, Rene included the husband as a ghostly figure in the shot.
The resulting photo (shown above) has seen been "liked" by hundreds of thousands of people and has been featured on news shows and websites across the country.
Here's a behind-the-scenes video by photographer David Iliyn showing how he recently did an outdoor photo shoot with a musician with 12 separate off-camera flashes.
Alison Zavos of Feature Shoot recently had the opportunity to sit down with …