Nikon has announced the winners of its 47th annual Small World Photomicrography Competition. This year’s first-place prize was awarded to Jason Kirk for his striking image of a southern live oak leaf’s trichomes, stomata, and vessels.
In this article, I'll share a technique that I learned many years ago and that I still use occasionally. You can use it for removing people from a scene, but in this case, I will be using it to mimic one of a neutral density (ND) filter's main purposes: longer exposure.
Nikon has unveiled the winners of the 2020 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition: our annual opportunity to witness the most beautiful images that straddle the intersection of stunning photography and groundbreaking science.
In his TimeScapes series, photographer Martien Janssen has been "playing with the element of time," combining images in creative ways to create "a new type of dimension" in his time-lapse photography. And there's no better example of this than his film TimeBlend.
Focus stacking is a fun and easy technique you can do right at home with nothing more than your camera, lens, and editing software. In fact, the Fujifilm X-T2, X-T3, and X-T4 series of cameras—and many others—contain a "focus bracketing" feature that lets you do this automatically.
One of the greatest challenges in macro photography is the depth of field, or DOF for short. Not only does the zone of sharpness drastically fall off as we get closer to our subjects, other factors such as the lack of light and diffraction softening make it tricky to use narrow apertures on top of that.
It's more and more difficult these days to photograph places without crowds or cars. One of the strategies that can help achieve that is to wake up early and be there at sunrise, but in very popular places, there will be other photographers with the same idea as you. So, how can we take a picture of a scene without this crowd?
The 360-degree VR camera company Kandao Technology has announced Kandao Raw+, a new software tool that helps you create better low-light photos by shooting and combining burst shots rather than capturing single exposures.
Photographer Jonathan Usher of Wellington, New Zealand, recently created this photo of the Milky Way rising from the horizon near his city. But get this: he wasn't using a tripod or any other stabilization -- not even a rock. It's a "60-second exposure" shot handheld.
Here's a 24-minute tutorial by photographer Ian Norman of Lonely Speck that looks at how you can stack and stitch panoramas of the night sky. Norman says these are his two favorite techniques for maximizing the image quality of astrophotos.
Here's a 5-minute video by Tony & Chelsea Northrup that will teach you how to use Photoshop to stack multiple exposures of a moving silhouetted subject. The end result is a unique effect that conveys motion in an otherwise still image.
Want to remove noise in a high ISO photo while preserving the details and textures in your shot? Here's a simple photography and Photoshop technique that lets you easily do that.
If you are willing to get up early or stay up super late, Milky Way season is back in North America! Above is a shot I made on February 14th, 2016, in Sedona, Arizona. This image was taken at 5:45 AM, just prior to sunrise. Something I tried for the first time with this photo is taking 10 consecutive shots of the sky at a higher ISO (5000) and shorter shutter speed (15s), and then stacking the photos, which gives you awesome pinpoint stars with minimal noise.
Here's a walkthrough of how I made the shot.
A few months ago, photographer Adam Flor and I embarked on a sweet project. The goal was to shoot items using different colored backgrounds and use focus stacking to get full sharpness while shooting with a shallow depth of field.
The process was kinda nuts, but after seeing how it was done it wasn’t so bad. First, we grabbed small household items that had tiny details to them.
Teleconverters are a great way to get some extra reach without having to drop some serious money for a 400mm+ lens. It can be an essential tool for many photographers who are constantly cropping in on their images, even when shooting with a crop camera and telephoto lens. In case you didn't know, a teleconverter is a small lens element that attaches to your lens and increases the effective focal range, typically by a factor of 1.4x or 2x.
Also known as an extender, tele-extender, or a doubler (2x), teleconverters are an important piece of equipment for long lens photography... but is there a limit?
If you're ready to have your mind blown for the next three and a half minutes, go ahead and press play. And keep in mind that the masterpiece your eyes are about to take in was anything but an easy task.
Created by videographer Daniel Stoupin from 150,000 22-megapixel RAW exposures, he put together a 4K masterpiece (despite Vimeo only showing it as 1080p).
Between a recent post here on PetaPixel about the Beauty of Space Photography, and my own experiments on blending series of images using averaging techniques, I noticed some rather interesting alignments in technique.
Stacking long-exposure photos of stars leads to some pretty neat photos and time-lapse videos, but what happens if you use a similar technique for clouds? That's what photographer Matt Molloy does. His "photo stack" images of landscapes show clouds that look like smears and brush strokes across the sky.
We're shared a couple of "stacked star trail" time-lapse videos over the past few months (see here and here), but those videos comprised nighttime photographs taken from the ground. Photographer Christoph Malin recently decided to try his hand at the technique, but instead of using his own earthbound photographs, he used NASA photographs shot from the International Space Station. The resulting video, shown above, features the stars drawing trails across the "sky" while the Earth creates light streaks down below.
We've shared a number of examples of surreal images created using multiple exposure techniques or by combining images using Photoshop, but did you know that you can also create beautiful images by stacking actual film negatives? Photographer Laina Briedis did some experiments with 35mm film stacking, and achieved some stunning results. She combined photos of stars and sky with pictures of people, creating images that look like they were plucked from someone's dreams.
Raleigh, North Carolina-based artist Scott Hazard creates abstract images by tearing shapes into multiple prints of the same photograph, and then stacking the images on top of each other. He uses the technique to create things such as smoke, clouds, and portals in walls. He calls the project "Photo Constructs".
Here’s an illuminating (pun intended) video walkthrough by photographer Eric Curry, showing how …
Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky made this crazy …