The Internet viral sensation “Double Rainbow” video was captured on January 8th, 2010. About two weeks later on the 23rd (and long before that video went viral), I saw a double rainbow myself when looking out my window. I quickly grabbed my camera (a Canon 40D at the time) with my 16-35mm lens (I wanted the widest shot possible) and ran out to shoot the rainbow.
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My friend recently had two stray kittens randomly walk up to her doorstep. I was called over to see them, and carried my 5D and 24-70mm along. There wasn’t much light to work with, and I didn’t bring a flash, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO for any chance of capturing a sharp image of the energetic kittens. I haven’t done a walkthrough post for quite some time (opting to post guest posts instead), but here’s a quick walkthrough of how I post-processed one particular image of a kitten. I used Adobe Camera Raw (comes with Photoshop CS4) with my adjustments, but you’ll have the same settings in Lightroom, Aperture, etc…
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Living in the Southwest United States gives me a great opportunity to capture lighting. Every summer “Monsoon Season” arrives, officially June 15 through Sept 15th, in Arizona. Prevailing northwesterly winds carry humid air north out of Mexico where it meets the hot air of the desert, resulting in powerful thunderstorms nearly everyday. The thunderstorms often produce localized areas of heavy wind, thick blowing dust (Haboobs), rain, and most importantly, lightning. I regularly track the storms on the local Doppler radar feeds and try to guess where the best shooting will take place.
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I took this shot with my Canon EOS 450D, and a Canon 50mm f1.8 — my favourite lens in the case of portraits especially.

I chose to make the shooting session about a hour and half before sunset when there’s still a lot of light, but with a warm, lovely quality to the light. I prefer warm tones, and to emphasize these tones and balance the cool colours of my model dress and tree leaves I set White Balancing to “cloudy”. You can see in the picture that the sun was on the right side of model, so she didn’t have too much direct light on her face. The white wall behind acted as a discrete reflecting panel, resulting in light that’s quite uniform.
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The stop motion music video for Oren Lavie‘s song “Her Morning Elegance” took the web by storm last year, amassing over ten million views on YouTube and receiving a Grammy nomination.

It’s crazy how much work went into making the three-minute-long video: 6 weeks of scripting, 3 weeks of storyboarding, and 48 hours of shooting resulting in 2096 still photos. The hard work sure paid off, eh?
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About a week ago I did a shoot with the band Strange Birds as we were walking there was a point that I saw light rays trickling down right in front of us. I told all of the guys to stop and arranged them to my liking.

One of the most important things about shooting for me is having an idea of you want the photo to come out in the very end. I tend to adjust my white balance in camera and set almost everything up so it makes less work on the computer and closer to the final product. Below is the original image:
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Portrait photographer Gregory Heisler has done quite a few portraits for Time Magazine covers, including a few for their Person of the Year issues. This is an informative video where he steps through how he went about photographing Rudy Giuliani at the top of Rockefeller Center with the Empire State Building in the background. If you’re interested at all in portraiture and/or lighting, you’ll find this video quite educational.
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Editor’s note: This walkthrough was originally published on Clint Decker’s Flickr account. We found it pretty informative and asked him to share it here.

Here is a little video on how I did the photography with Canon Speedlites while dropping items into a tank of water.

With a white background, I used a Canon Speedlite 580ex II on the left and right of the fish tank with water. They were set to manual 1/128sec.

I had a Canon Speedlite 430ex II on a chair behind the fish tank pointing towards the white background so it would come out pure white. This was set to manual 1/64th of a second (I would of done 1/128 but the 430ex II can only go down to 1/64). You want to go 1/128 so it freezes the splash mid air.
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The main thing with in flight hover fly photos is not to try, by that I mean if you go out to take one you will end up normally chasing a hoverfly all over the place with little chance of success. I only take them when an opportunity arises.

In this case the males of this species of hoverfly patrol the flowering bush looking for females . When they spot one they go into a stationary hover for about 10seconds whilst they decide if the female is what they think it is and if it’s a suitable mate.
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Here’s a really neat video about the making of a Speedo ad campaign that is running all across Europe right now. The video traces the production from its conceptualization to its final post-processing and illustration. The actual shoot and filming took place at the Pinewood Studios Underwater Stage in the UK, where several major films were also shot, including many 007 and Harry Potter movies. It’s pretty remarkable to see so much equipment underwater.

(via f stoppers)