The use of strong and complementary colors is an ever-growing trend in photography. Many modern advertising campaigns feature bold and contrasting colors in order to draw your focus to the product or message they are trying to sell. One way to create such vibrant color in your own images is by using colored gels (also known as color filters, filter gels, lighting gels, or simply gels).
At first glance, it seems like an easy thing to achieve: how hard can it be to get a great looking gelled background in your portrait?
More and more cameras are being launched with touchscreen interfaces these days, especially as mobile operating systems are starting to appear in point-and-shoots and turn them into smartphone look-alikes. For those of you who live in a colder environment and often find yourself wearing gloves that aren't compatible with touchscreen cameras, there's now a way to make those gloves touchscreen compatible that doesn't involve sewing conductive thread into them.
It's called AnyGlove, and is a special capacitive gel that can be applied to -- as the name implies -- any glove or clothing item.
Fungus is one of the banes of a camera lens' existence. In humid environments, nasty things can begin to happen if some fungus spore-laden dust particles make their way into your lens. To prevent fungus from growing inside a lens, photographers often silica gel packets to control the amount of moisture in and around their glass.
People who spend a lot of time on their feet have products like Dr. Scholl's gel inserts to help cushion their feet and absorb the shock of walking. Likewise, photographers who press the shutter button so much that they fatigue their index finger now have a similar product as well: the Custom SLR ProDot. It's a patent-pending dot add-on for your camera's shutter button that supposedly helps reduce camera shake and finger fatigue.
Dissatisfied with the way your smartphone photographs are turning out when the built-in flash is fired? When desperate times call for desperate measures, you can make your flash match the ambient light around you with the help of a colored gel. The flash is often just a tiny LED, though, so how do you comfortably "mount" the gel to your smartphone? Reader Todd Glidden has an answer: use an index card.