If you want to do street photography, attacking people with cameras like Fabio Pires does in London probably isn’t the way you should go about doing it — unless you’re trying to give photography a bad name. Does anyone know of any good behind-the-scenes videos of good (and candid) street photography being done in a respectable way?

(via Reddit)

Street photographer Eric Kim generated some buzz last month by recording himself shooting on the street with a GoPro mounted to his Leica M9. Now, he’s back again with an even cooler point of view: through the Leica M9′s viewfinder itself. This 10 minute video of Kim doing street photography in Santa Monica was recorded using a HTC EVO 4G smartphone stuck to the back of his camera.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if this kind of footage existed for all the iconic photographs taken throughout history?

Photo restorer Bob Rosinsky of Top Dog Imaging wrote an interesting article describing how he restored a tintype photograph from the 1870s brought to him by a client.

My standard operating procedure is to use an ultra-high resolution camera combined with a top-of-the-line macro lens to photograph tintypes. I use strobe lights to illuminate the artwork. Strobes produce “hard” light, much like the sun on a clear day. In addition to the strobes, I place a polarizer over the camera lens and polarizer gels over the strobe lights. This eliminates all reflections and enables the camera to pick up a greater tonal range along with more detail.

[...] I began the laborious process of restoration, which involved a prodigious amount of retouching.

Reminds us a bit of this 76-year-old Chinese Photoshop master’s work.

Restoring a Photograph from the 1870s (via kottke.org)

P.S. Earlier this week another tintype photo from the same decade sold for $2.3 million.

Some friends of mine asked me to shoot a quick band photograph of them recently without any preparation or planning. Luckily, the location was pretty nice (we were at a hostel) and the weather was a bit cloudy so there wasn’t harsh sunlight.
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I imagine, almost everyone interested in photography has seen the stunning pictures created with a technique called light painting. You set your camera to long exposure, 20 to 30 seconds or even longer, and use a light source, a flashlight or LED light, to “paint” with it. Most pictures have some kind of magic touch to it because you see only the track of light afterwards and not the actual light source. Light stencils are somewhat related to light painting. It uses the long exposure as well but uses a flash to illuminate a stencil to stamp the motive into the picture.
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If you want to know the ins and outs of shooting a college basketball game, check out this awesome behind-the-scenes video with pro sports photographer Miguel Olivella. In it, he walks us through things like where to be, what gear to use, camera settings, and various tricks he has under his sleeve that help him get the perfect shot.

(via Scott Kelby)

What does it take to shoot portraits of random strangers on a sidewalk? Photographer Clay Enos, known for his portraits for the movie Watchmen, walks us through his process for capturing impromptu portraits of passers-by on a white backdrop.

One takeaway is that it pays to be outgoing and social, since your conversation skills can do a lot towards making subjects feel at ease.

(via f stoppers)

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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Certain higher end flashes have a strobe (AKA repeating flash) mode that can flash repeatedly, freezing a moving subject in various positions in a single exposure. This tutorial will teach you how to create a similar effect using light painting techniques, resulting in the above photo.
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Last night my pastor emailed me telling me that he had accidentally deleted an entire folder of photographs off his Sony compact camera, and that Sony’s technical support informed him that it would cost $200-300 for them to recover the photos. After I got a hold of the memory card, I checked some of the recovery programs I’ve used in the past, but discovered that they now require paid licenses to actual do recovery (though analysis is free). I then stumbled across PhotoRec, a free and open source command-line application that’s bundled with TestDisk, something I’ve successfully used to regain access to inaccessible external hard drives.

In this post I’m going to show you how you can use PhotoRec to recover your photos if you’ve accidentally deleted them or formatted your memory card.
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