effect

In the past, double exposing film was one of the most popular special effects used in photography, and often could be hit or miss. The idea was to combine two (or more) photos into the same image.

For many years I’ve played with the idea of recreating various lighting looks that many of us may know and love from the natural world around us.

You’ve likely already heard of the “Ring of Fire” photography technique. This is a visual trick popularized by famous wedding and portrait photographer, Sam Hurd. The Ring of Fire is created by using a piece of copper tubing to reflect light coming into the camera.

Soratama is a system of lens attachments invented over in Japan that allows you to capture the world in floating crystal balls.

Photographer Tajreen Hedayet of Tajreen&Co has released a simple, straight-to-the-point tutorial that will show you how to capture soft, colorful, 'dreamy' looking portraits even if you don't have much budget to work with.

The Droste effect is when a photo recursively appears within itself -- the photo within the photo within the photo, "tunneling" forever. Here's a 12-minute video by photographer and retoucher Antti Karppinen that shows you can create a Droste effect photo for yourself.

In this 5-minute video from The Slanted Lens, learn how to create a window in a seamless and add beautiful shafts of light into your studio shots.

In this 6-minute video, photographer Mark Denney talks through the Orton Effect and how it can be used to make dreamy landscape photos in an instant.

In this tutorial, I'll break down how I create light trails from video and how you can create a video panning shot. A panning shot is where a camera pans horizontally to track a subject in a frame, keeping the subject sharp, while blurring the background.

Here's an interesting effect you can capture in-camera without any digital trickery: place a waterproof camera directly under a running faucet. The camera can look up through the stream of water at the aerator, and the resulting footage looks like you're traveling through a tunnel of water.

Here's an interesting effect you can create entirely in-camera: photograph a backlit keyboard in the dark using a long exposure while moving your camera around.

Here's a fun little 7-minute video tutorial on how you can create interesting water illusions using an ordinary camera and some sound. It has to do with syncing the water drops to your camera's frame rate.

Here's a neat example of an ultra-telephoto lens being used to add a dramatic effect to a scene. For this scene from the 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema used a 2000mm lens to compress the foreground and background so that they look much closer than they really are.

Kaleta Bartosz was on a boat with his girlfriend off the coast of …

I recently had the absolute pleasure of meeting and shooting with Mackenzie Johnson! Today I'm going to share how I turned my portrait of her into a painting. Not everyone is a painter, but with a little time and patience -- and Photoshop -- I believe anyone can achieve this effect.

Want to give your photographs a “Hollywood movie” look? Here’s a fantastic 25-minute tutorial on how to do cinematic …

Earlier this year, I dropped my Minolta 28mm f/2.8 in the ocean where it sat submerged for at least two minutes. I don’t have any tools on hand to tear it down to clean it out. I let it sit overnight on the air conditioner. The next morning, it had drops of water all over the inside elements and the aperture blades were sticking.

Here's a neat video that shows what you get in a star trails time-lapse if you slowly move your lens' zoom ring over the course of the long exposures. Long exposures naturally create star trails around Earth's axis of rotation, but throw in some motorized zooms and you can turn those ordinary trails into some pretty trippy effects.

As timelapses become more and more ubiquitous throughout the photography and filmmaking community, people are continuously looking for unique ways to stand out and separate their work from that of others. One such trick that many use in their creation is a little effect often referred to as dolly zoom or vertigo effect.

The premise behind it is that as you capture each frame of your time-lapse, you slightly and consistently move the camera’s location, so that when the video is pieced together, you’re left with what looks like a dolly shot captured over an extended period of time. And here to help show just how to do just that is Eric Stemen, in the above video.

When Toronto-based photo enthusiast Alexander Kolomietz had a birthday party recently, he asked …

Here's another example of a strange effect caused by the shutter of a DSLR. YouTube user drummaboy5189 captured the above video by playing a 61Hz sound through his speaker and then pointing his Canon 6D at it while filming at 60 frames per second and 1/4000s shutter speed. What resulted is a "rolling speaker" effect.

Photographer Jesse David McGrady has a super simple trick for adding a hazy, ethereal effect to your photographs: wrap a plastic sandwich bag around your lens. It sounds ridiculous and silly, but the results you get are actually quite nice!

Remember that slow-motion wildlife footage that consisted entirely of still photos animated with parallax? French photographer Sebastien Laban does the same thing, except with his wedding photographs.

In the video above, all the apparently 3D scenes you see are actually the result of using some After Effects magic on ordinary 2D photographs.

Have you ever considered adding a prism to your camera bag? Washington DC-based wedding photographer Sam Hurd has done quite a bit of experimentation using an equilateral prism -- the kind used in schools to teach properties of light -- to add special effects to his photographs. The results are pretty interesting.

Back in July, we shared a series of creative animated GIFs and a music video that show space-lapses over great distances in San Francisco. The creators Kevin Parry and Andrea Nesbitt have just published the video above that teaches how you can do the same thing with your camera.

Looking for a photo project to play around with this weekend? Try exploring a technique known as the Harris Shutter. Invented in the days of film photography by Robert Harris of Kodak, it involves capturing three sequential exposures of a scene through red, green, and blue filters, and then stacking the images into a single frame. This causes all the static elements within the scene to appear as they ordinarily would in a color photo, while all the moving elements in the shot show up in one of the three RGB colors.

Here's an old-ish video that's been making the rounds again lately (viral videos are like viruses -- they don't go away very easily). Titled "Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade frequency," it shows what can happen when your camera is synchronized with the RPM of a helicopter's rotor blades. The resulting footage makes the helicopter look as though it's just floating in the air!

You can light up particles in the air for a snazzy effect. The photos in this post were done by shining a powerful focused light into the air in various weather conditions during a long exposure. You need a light source that outputs some major power to pull off the effect. I used a Coast HP21 and a 3000 lumen Stanley spotlight for these shots. The photo above was shot while it was snowing.