Butterfly lighting is one of the oldest techniques for lighting a subject. Named for the butterfly-shaped shadow that forms underneath the subject’s nose, this setup is a proven method to ensure your subject is well-lit in a pleasing manner.
We heard how dangerous it could get outdoors with all of the traffic-crossings, pollen, UV rays and so on, and so we decided to stay inside and paint our walls with a live stream of the outside world...
I first heard about 5 Pointz in a Wall Street Journal article in the summer of 2011. The article detailed the recent attempts by the owner to knock what had become an internationally-reknown street art mecca down, and build high-rise condominiums.
As a photographer, there is nothing more intriguing to me than the unknown. What’s out there and where will it lead me on my next adventure under the stars?
Upon taking my first photo of the stars, I came to realize it wasn’t even close to replicating what was in the skies above me. Nothing man-made will ever be perfect. There are always improvements to be made in the never-ending journey to replicate what nature has been producing for billions of years.
With practice, however, I was able to break down the physics behind capturing high quality star shots and start to produce some nice results. Over time, I’ve been able to perfect this recipe with actions and inputs in my camera; and, with words and knowledge, teaching others to capture this beauty on their own. With that in mind, here is my tutorial that will teach you how to take some awesome shots of the Milky Way and night sky.
Without a makeup artist at your disposal, even a great portrait can be ruined by shiny skin. So if you're looking through the results of your most recent portrait shoot and there's a lot of shine there, here's a fantastic tutorial that shows you how to get rid of it without making the photo look like it's been doctored.
When I first heard of the CamRanger in October of 2012 in New York City at PhotoPlus Expo I was immediately intrigued.
I don’t actually own a laptop, so tethering to an iPad tablet has been a long awaited process with trial and error. My first experience was with the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card; a memory card you place in your camera, the card transmits a wireless signal and supposedly you connect to that signal source, boom, you're tethered. Except it didn’t really work.
In this tutorial I’d like to demonstrate that you don’t need expensive studio flashes to create a complex scene with subtle lighting. I haven’t yet seen anyone else do this quite the same way and there doesn’t seem to be a name for it, so I named the process “zone lighting”, a form of exposure blending by dividing the scene in different zones. But let’s start with a little bit of background about the project and its concept.
With the college football season winding down, I had the assignment of covering the last Texas A&M home game. The last game I was available to shoot was the second to last home game against Sam Houston State University. This game was just a week after A&M upset the Alabama Roll Tide in Alabama, and Johnny Manziel was instantly catapulted into the rare position of becoming a freshman Heisman finalist.
Check out this portrait of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse by photographer Paul Mobley and digital artist Mike Campau. Can you tell how it was created?
I had the opportunity to photograph the newest dormitory on the Florida International University campus a couple of nights ago and I thought I would share a little insight on the process of lighting such a large structure.
I did my first surreal photoshoot with a model this past weekend. Here's a breakdown of the process from start to finish.
It’s fun to print big, but when a client recently asked me to create an image more than four stories tall I have to admit it was really outside of my usual perspective.
My friend Gustaf Drevin and I are the Editor and Creative Director (respectively) of Medicor, the student union magazine of the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet. Long before we even got involved with the publication, we had dreamed up this ‘fantasy’ issue where we would have a huge cover story featuring Hans Rosling, the founder of Gapminder and one of TIME's 100 most influential people in 2012.
We would have a minimalistic design, and we would have great photos; we even wanted to have a launch party with Bill Gates, but that’s a story for another time. After Gustaf became the editor for Medicor, we finally got the chance to realise our fantasy. This is the story of how we got Hans Rosling on the cover of Medicor.
Photographer Jeff Cable has come a long way from his first few gigs shooting Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in San Francisco. Mostly sports-related, his résumé now includes images from the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, a stint as the official Team USA Hockey photographer during the 2010 games in Vancouver and the Team USA Water Polo photographer during the 2012 games in London.
In this B&H Event Space seminar, however, he's not going to just scroll through a bunch of pictures and talk about how he composed or shot them. Instead, he's sharing some thoughts on post-processing: specifically, the 15 features in Photoshop that he believes every photographer should know.
Given the recent leaps Magic Lantern has been making regarding mind-blowing RAW video capabilities for both old and new Canon cameras, there are probably a lot of Canon owners out there who are thinking of giving the custom firmware a try for the first time.
However, before you go installing one of the nightly builds (the unstable ones that can actually do RAW video), we would suggest installing the current stable build and getting to know the ins and outs of Magic Lantern first. With that in mind, here's a quick tutorial put together by Dave Dugdale from Learning DSLR Video that walks you through the steps of installing Magic Lantern for the first time.
Hey everyone! I’m really excited to share a personal story with you all. This past weekend I asked my partner to marry me. After weeks of planning, the time had come to decide how I was going to capture the moment.
Unfortunately some of my colleague photographers were unavailable and so the thought of doing it myself crossed my mind. I felt ready for the challenge: photographing my own proposal! (As if it wasn’t enough to plan for the actual proposal, I now had to plan on how to capture it.)
Earlier this week, Sony announced its new Xperia ZR waterproof smartphone that can double as an everyday underwater camera. After we reported on the story, we were contacted by reader Jeffery Richt, who shot the marketing photographs for Sony. The video above is a behind-the-scenes video showing how the underwater shoot went down.
You know that moment when you agree to do a favor for a friend, and it turns into something a bit... well... more? This past weekend I ended up taking headshots of 80 people during six non-stop hours of shooting. Here is the story of what happened, things I learned from it, and some random thoughts on the experience.
In this article, I will share a behind-the-scenes look at how I created photos of fried chicken for one of the world's most iconic brands: KFC.
My studio had already been shooting nearly all of KFC's print work for more than a year when their in-house creative group first contacted us. Turns out they found us through a Google search, and didn't even realize we had done work for KFC until they saw some of the images on our website.
In this post, I will share some of my techniques and experiences of backing up photos using a tablet while traveling.
Like most other landscape/nature/travel photographers, when I am on a multi-day or multi-week photo tour, I face the problem of backing up my photos from the memory cards. A laptop computer is a nature choice for most people. With a laptop, we can copy files between the memory cards, laptop disk drive, and external disks. We can even do some light editing.
Winter can be a dull season for macro photographers. Many of the usual subjects are desolate, lifeless or invisible. However, there is one subject that's often in abundance outdoors (depending on where you live): snowflakes. There have been many strategies for photographing these ice crystals over the past century, but the simple stage of an old mitten is ideal.
When I started planning a series titled DreamWorld, one of the first characters that came to me was a dryad: a nature spirit representing our connection with nature. I saw her as a strong, benevolent queen, keeping watch over the woodland creatures and protecting them. The first concept I came up with that made my heart pitter-patter with excitement was the idea of building a huge crown for her from sticks and branches. I had no idea how I was going to accomplish this, but I had a vision. And I have learned over the years that having a vision will pave the way to making it a reality, regardless of if I know how that will come about.
Adventure photographer and Nikon ambassador Kamil Tamiola of Alpine Photography recently shot a project titled "Cascades of Light." He traveled to the Cascate di Lillaz icefall in Cogne, Italy with professional ice climber Jeff Mercier.
His goal was to capture adventure images of ice climbing in a different light -- literally. Instead of shooting with natural light, he decided to light the scene artificially during both night and day.
Up. That’s all you need to say. Last November, we took on a project with Wired UK magazine to photograph Richard Branson’s latest venture in attempting to conquer the final frontier: space. We spent the good part of a week in the deserts of New Mexico and California, photographing the spaces and places, the infrastructure, the people, and ultimately Sir Richard himself.
Here's a video that may be very interesting to you if you've never tried your hand at creating a tintype with wet plate collodion photography. Oklahoma City-based photographer Mark Zimmerman recently strapped a GoPro Hero 3 to his head and went through the entire process of creating a wet-plate photo on aluminum, from flowing the collodion in the beginning, through exposing it using his large format camera, and ending with a finished tintype photo of a camera.
A number of years ago, England-based photographer Dave Miller wanted an at-home darkroom, but didn't have the luxury of converting a spare room in his house into one. He did, however, have a nice garden area that wasn't being used, so he decided to upgrade the grassy area with a shed -- a darkroom shed.
If you have your 35mm film processed and printed at your local lab, have you ever wondered how it's done? In this post, I'll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour on the entire process.
One of my favorite recent projects was a deceptively simple image of an ant on black. Black is easy enough to arrange for the upper portions of a photo. Just make sure foreground lighting is powerful enough to overwhelm the ambient light. Black all around is a challenge, however.
The photograph above is reportedly the world's largest piece of long-exposure light art. It was created by light painter Michael Bosanko in a 35,000-square-foot aircraft hangar in Coventry airport in October 2012.
French photographer Serge Ramelli made this short 30-minute tutorial that teaches the basics …