I know that usually this site is about more gear, but this post is about less gear. Michael Sasser of Sasser Stills uses nothing but good directing an assistant and one 5-in-1 reflector to produce gorgeous results in a senior portrait session.
I know that I am totally stealing his cat walk move from 0:30
[via SLR Lounge | Fstoppers] Click to continue ›
Well, lets just say I've gotten better at this over the last couple of years. The left image was one of the first I've "scanned" with my DSLR, and the one on the right I've just rescanned using the techniques described below (higher resolution available here). Right now I can get higher resolution and better image quality that what street labs give you on CD.
I've seen many articles on the web explaining the basics of digitising film negative or transparencies online. The basics are quite simple: you take a photo of a negative into a light source and invert. That's it. But that alone led me to scan negatives that looked like the one on the left, above. Because I've never seen one tutorial that told me "the whole story" of how to do it properly, I've decided to put together what I've learnt during the last two or three of years of scanning film with my DSLR. Click to continue ›
If you are upset with the money it takes to buy new gear, the next 3 parts tutorial shows how to make a 1 Dollar camera.
It is a 3 part video tutorial and there are written instructions on Money Origami Things here.
Is it easy? heck no! rewarding? I guess. At least it only costs one dollar. Click to continue ›
I am not really sure what's going on in this video by Gramatik, but it seems that their bokeh experiment went out of control.
Director Brad Hasse & cinematographer Andrew David Watson teamed up with artist Gramatik and built a story about an old guy seeing goblins in cityscape light. Those goblins eventually take over the city.
Here is the nice part, Gramatik releases his music for free, which makes this project even cooler.
I could not figure out which city this tale is taking place. If you know, please share.
If you wanna know how it was made, check our Everything You Wanted To Know About The Magical Shaped Bokeh page. Click to continue ›
If you are doing any extensive light painting work, especially if you are doing it alone, you know that one of the more annoying things about it is triggering your camera.
You could always use the timer, or the intervalometer, but for more complex stuff timing of both the camera and starting the tools becomes harder and harder.
Some cameras have an infra red remote, but the distance is pretty limited.
Sawo of Enlightpaintment came up with a pretty neat solution, they use a garage door opener remote from eBay with Canon's 2.5 mm trigger jack to create a 150ft camera remote that is capable of both focusing and triggering. See the tutorial after the jump. Click to continue ›
For the folks who don't have NASA on their RSS stream, this is a short announcement to remind about the upcoming Solar Eclipse on May 20.
I thought it would be a good opportunity to share some tips about solar eclipse photography. Click to continue ›
I know the title says something about lighting modifiers, but after seeing the last installment of the slanted lens I figured I'd mess around with their timing and start the show where they make camera cookies. (did someone say mother's day?)
Of course, they also pixel peep the heck out of photoflex Octadomes, and showing how to build several simple lighting setups using them. I guess you are here for the lighting, right? so go the beginning of the vid for the octa lessons.
Alan Sailer likes to blow stuff up. And when I say blow stuff I mean the good old fashion way. With a canon, custom made air gap strobes and a dedicated controller. After spending a great deal of time on his flickr stream, I asked him a few questions.
It is amazing what you can do with a little vision, even if you are pretty tied by budgetary constraints. Nate Powers and his team of students pushed their budget, and skills to the edge to create a low end (though high value) dancers bullet time shots. The challenges and work frame on this project were quite different from the ones described on a previous crowdfunded bullet time shoot, so I asked Nate to share a bit about the project.
A few weeks back I wrote about what rapid prototyping is doing to the traditional photography industry (well, any industry for that matter).
So it was a nice surprise to see this printable micro 4/3 tilt shift lens project from Joe Murphy. It is based upon the popular plunger lenses from Bhautik Joshi but is more rigid and does not use a toilet accessory.
That specific lens fits the MTF system, but the tutorial explains how to make lenses for other types of mounts.
The only think lacking in this system is a good name, "Tilt-Shift Micro Four Thirds Lens Adapter" is not very catchy. I suggest "The Bender".
Below is a short tutorial on how to make this lens (or order one using its thingiverse object), and tweak it for others systems, followed by some sample shots. Click to continue ›
