effect

How to Create the ‘Ring of Fire’ Effect for a Couples Portrait

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.

How to Use a Phone Screen for Magical Portraits

Wedding photographers are always looking to take creative, novel portraits and a quick, simple trick is often sitting right in their pocket. By using a phone screen as a reflective surface, it is possible to cover up unsightly elements, add intrigue, and make an image that much more interesting.

How to Create a Droste Effect Photo in a Photo in a Photo

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.

How to Create Long Exposure Light Trails in Video with After Effects

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.

How a Combat Photographer Named a Phenomenon to Honor Soldiers

While embedded with troops in Afghanistan in the late 2000s, war photographer and writer Michael Yon captured numerous photos of the sparkling halo that can appear when a helicopter's rotors hit sand and dust. Upon finding that the particular phenomenon didn't have a name, Yon gave it one that honors two fallen soldiers: the Kopp-Etchells Effect.

How to Create Water Illusions Using a Camera

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.

This Dramatic Shot Was Done with a 2000mm Lens

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.

How to Turn a Photo Into a Painting with Photoshop

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.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Just Keep on Shooting

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.

Tutorial: How to Quickly and Easily Create the Dolly/Hitchcock Zoom in Your Time-Lapses

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.

What a DSLR’s Rolling Shutter Does to a Speaker Playing a 61Hz Tone

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.

2D Wedding Photographs Converted into Gorgeous 3D Slow-Mo Zooms

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.

Using a Prism for Creative Photo Effects

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.

Weekend Project: Use the Harris Shutter Effect for Colorful Photos

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.

Camera Synchronized to Chopper Blades Creates Amazing Illusion

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!