If you have your 35mm film processed and printed at your local lab, have you ever wondered how it’s done? In this post, I’ll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour on the entire process.
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One of my favorite recent projects was a deceptively simple image of an ant on black. Black is easy enough to arrange for the upper portions of a photo. Just make sure foreground lighting is powerful enough to overwhelm the ambient light. Black all around is a challenge, however.
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The photograph above is reportedly the world’s largest piece of long-exposure light art. It was created by light painter Michael Bosanko in a 35,000-square-foot aircraft hangar in Coventry airport in October 2012.
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French photographer Serge Ramelli made this short 30-minute tutorial that teaches the basics of using Lightroom 4 to post-process your digital photographs. If you’re just getting into using Lightroom and shooting in RAW, it’s a helpful primer that will allow you to hit the ground running.

Ramelli has a number of other Lightroom 4 tutorial videos, as well as a YouTube channel chock-full of helpful photography tutorials.

(via Serge Ramelli via Reddit)

I recently captured the macro liquid splash photograph above, and found that it came out looking like it was computer generated. Here’s a brief description of how the photo was created.
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Faking the look of old films is becoming ubiquitous in the world of mobile photo sharing apps, but so far the popular apps have stuck with various films and not older photographic processes. If you want to create a photograph that mimics the look of a wet plate, it’s actually pretty easy to do in Photoshop.
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Back in March, a client for whom I’ve done some light consulting work asked me if it was possible to capture a 360-degree-image that can be rotated afterwards. I said of course, but didn’t think that much about the consequences — it’s a project that would wake me up at nights for the next few months.
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Back in 2011 and 2012, Paris-based photographer Max Riché shot a creative series of portraits of athletes (including several Olympians) in the French National Sports Institute. Titled “Becoming an Athlete,” the project featured a strobed-style look that shows the athletes progressing from ordinary people to world-class athletes, all within single frames.

Riché has just released the behind-the-scenes video above that shows how he created the photographs.
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It has been a long time since I have asked for something photo related for my birthday. I usually don’t ask, just because I’m very particular about what equipment I use, and my friends and family know it. But this year, it was different. I thought about dabbling in some old school photography, so I asked for a Polaroid 600 camera. My fiancée stepped up to the plate and delivered, gifting me an awesome 1983 Polaroid Sun 600 LMS. I had some fun with my first pack of film, but then it was time to start pushing the envelope.

An idea hit me one day, and I knew I had to try something that I’ve never seen done before: shooting off camera flash with an older Polaroid 600 instant camera.
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Slovenia-based professional photographer Borut Peterlin was recently tasked with shooting a portrait of painter/illustrator/author Milan Erič for influential Slovenian magazine Mladina. Peterlin decided that he wanted to create a wet plate collodion photo, but spent weeks worrying about whether he would be able to accomplish it given the tight schedule of the on-location shoot. He writes:

I can’t get rid [of] questions like where will I work, who will complain about it, where will I get water, will there be a drain to waste used water and developer, will there be enough light, will the person being portrayed have enough patience and what if something will go wrong with chemistry? If everything goes well, I make a portrait in an hour and if it doesn’t…

The night before the shoot, Peterlin decided to just play it safe by shooting the portrait on standard film and then converting the picture into a wet plate “in post” in a darkroom.
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