gobo

A photographer has shared a neat trick that gives photos a soft-focus look: placing ripped pantyhose over the lens.

Light shaping tools are very expensive. What if you could take any object and turn it into a modifier? That would save you a lot of money as well as give some unique results. In this article, I will share some everyday objects that you can turn into light modifiers to get different looks.

Sometimes all it takes to bring a shoot to the "next level" is a little DIY work and a couple of cheap accessories. In a recently published video, videographer Alex Perri goes over how he used an affordable light shaping modifier along with duct tape and cardboard to create some iconic film-noir looks for a short film he produced for fun at home.

With the current state of affairs, photographers have been coming up with unique ways to exercise their craft remotely. Photographer Markus Hofstaetter decided he wanted to make a portrait with a friend and came up with a way to do it despite the vast distance between them.

I wanted a device that can throw light patterns onto a wall or a model. There are some commercially available but they are quite expensive and I this was only for occasional use. I thought that this is something that can be 3D printed.

Light, shadow, and highlight -- this is always a great combination for creating portraits from a lighting point of view. This is the interesting part: changing the intensity of the highlight or the tone in the shadows while maintaining the exposure can produce a different feel to an image, from being dramatic to soft and subtle, and that is what is so intriguing about photography.

Here's a 5-minute video by photographer Bill Lawson that shares 7 different DIY gobos (go-betweens) that you can use to introduce creative shadows to your portrait photos.

This short 2-minute video from photographer Svitlana Vronska demonstrates some clever lighting tricks you can use to add some creative flair to your images with an otherwise uninteresting backdrop.

Typically, the term “gobo” is reserved for the lens filters and patterns that are affixed to theater lights. The terms “flag” or “cucloris/cookie” are actually more accurate for what we’re going to be using in this post, which is an object placed between the light and the subject, but not attached to it.

MagMod is back with another novel lighting product for photographers. Called the MagBeam, it's both a revolutionary flash extender and a gobo projector.

When working with rim lights, or shooting into a significant backlight, glare becomes a serious issue. The typical solution to this problem is setting up flags on either side of your subject, but who needs flags when you have a spare piece of Coroplast sitting around your studio?