Math major and photo enthusiast Kris Hollingsworth created this beautiful photograph in which he light-painted an entire poem! It took patience and perseverance: practicing the technique took 15 hours, while the actual light painting took another two hours. The image is actually 9 separate photographs in one — eight lines of poetry and the self-portrait of Hollingsworth.
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Here’s a good example of when HDR photography is useful: NASA created this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifting off for the final time by combining six separate photographs.
Each image was taken at a different exposure setting, then composited to balance the brightness of the rocket engine output with the regular daylight levels at which the orbiter can be seen. The processing software digitally removes pure black or pure white pixels from one image and replaces them with the most detailed pixel option from the five other images. This technique can help visualize debris falling during a launch or support research involving intense light sources like rocket engines, plasma experiments and hypersonic vehicle engines. [#]
Here’s a quick video tutorial by Olivia Speranza teaching how to create an infinite white background.
It’s possible to build this entire setup with white fabric, and cheap halogen shop lights or household tungsten bulbs, but after you add everything together, these [compact fluorescent lights] don’t seem like such a bad deal. Especially since they won’t generate as much heat or draw excessive power that can blow out household fuses. [#]
The trick is to light your background and subject separately, exposing for your subject so that the background is slightly blown out, showing as pure white.
Redscale is a technique where film is exposed on the wrong side — rather than having the light hit the emulsion directly, you expose the film through the non-sensitive side.
The name “redscale” comes because there is a strong color shift to red due to the red-sensitive layer of the film being exposed first, rather than last (the red layer is normally the bottom layer in C-41 (color print) film). All layers are sensitive to blue light, so normally the blue layer is on top, followed by a filter. In this technique, blue light exposes the layers containing red and green dyes, but the layer containing blue dye is left unexposed due to the filter. [#]
The two main ways for doing this are loading the film upside down (if your camera allows it), or by purchasing film that has been “converted” already. A third way is to make DIY redscale film by going into a darkroom, pulling out the film, cutting it, flipping it, taping it back together, and then winding it back into the canister. Messy, but it works!
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Photographer Joey Celis needed to shoot a photograph of eleven people in a dimly lit cigar lounge, but found it difficult to light the models without having lighting gear appear in the shot. In the end, he was able to make the image above with a single Speedlite.
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Photographer Denis Smith creates photos giant balls of light without any digital trickery, relying instead on light-painting. His technique is to spin a light around while slowly turning his body, creating spheres of light when seen in a long exposure photo.
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Flickr user Paul Little creates surreal images he calls “HDR Mixes” by combining different photographs with the help of HDR software. While you’re normally supposed to feed the program multiple versions of the same photo (which are bracketed), with HDR Mixes you use two photos of the same scene and a third that’s completely unrelated.
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Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher had the brilliant idea of using custom bokeh to spell out words in his videos, and spent a good amount of time developing and perfecting the idea. The above video, titled “Light Works”, is a demonstration of this technique in action. The results are pretty awesome.
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The concept of hyperfocal distance is used in landscape photography to achieve the greatest depth of field and acceptable sharpness for both near and far objects. In the two minute tutorial above, wildlife photographer Chris Weston walks through some hyperfocal distance focusing techniques. You can also find a couple informative tutorials at DOFMaster and Cambridge in Colour.
After photographer Ross Ching came across Dentsu London’s creative 3D light painting technique with an iPad, he decided to give it a try, combining it with timelapse photography to make a music video for “I’ll Try Anything Once” by The Strokes (seen above). The app he used was Holographium, which you can pick up for $5 from the app store.
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