effect

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.