Emm over at CheesyCam has a great intro on using LED car lights for accent light or background light using an under-the-car glow kit and an iPhone app.
Those kits are usually placed under the car so they are pretty well build with some water resistance and protection against an accidental "bump". This means that they are ideal as a portable kit. Click to continue ›
Hot shoe flashers don't have it easy when it comes to using bare bulb strobes. Generally speaking, it has not been trivial. You either have to hack the flash electronics (BTW, Lumopro, what about the promised LP180?) or eat a bunch of light using an Omnibouce or (DIY waxfen) or any other yogurt-cup-light-eating solution.
But if you wanted a good solid bare bulb strobe that you can use with your big gun light modifiers choices were limited. If you wanted bare bulb speed light, you could have looked at the Cheetah Light, but that ran off a dedicated battery pack, and not off standard AA batteries. (+ it is about $420).
Amazon is now selling a Polaroid PL-135 which has a Nikon Flavor and a Canon Flavor which have corresponding contacts on the hotshoe and TTL systems for about $110 a piece. Click to continue ›
Flickr user Raw Sniper (aka ak Photographie) just sent in this great tip on creating a quick and dirty battery pack using an empty battery case and a few pieces of metal.
This can come in handy if you want to power a strobe from external power (or if you just need a 6V pack). So if the strobe goes weak, you just replace the external pack without fiddling with batteries.
If you use this as a system, you can keep a few in the bag, and once a pack is drained remove the batteries from it so you get a nice system to tell charged packs from empty packs (which will literally be empty). Click to continue ›
One of the possible ways of handling unexpected and varying lighting conditions is to use a white balance lens cap to average the light temperature. Haje over at Photocritic makes a very valid point about white balance and white balance averaging lens caps.
Basically he says that if direct sun is hitting the lens cap while your subject is in the shade your reading is going to be off. Makes perfect sense to me.
Here is a typical situation Haje describes where this method will not work.
Here is a great "trick" if you want to shoot portraits on black in the outdoors. Photographer Glyn Dewis shows using a cheap brolli, a manual flash and the rules of physics to shut down ambient light and get a black background even if there is some light outside.
I guess none of you'd be surprised if we start this post by saying that location matters. In fact it is probably one of the more dominant elements of a photograph.
This is pretty much what most photographers gather after a few months of shooting. Actually, it is bigger than that, a location can make or break a photo, and if you have a "picture in your head" the further your location is from your vision, the more work (or compromises) you'll need to get to your final image.
So, why am I telling you what you already know? Because until recently (actually until I made this very photograph) I have always looked for a location that would match my vision and will need as little changes as possible to get to that final result. Click to continue ›
When it comes to how to pictorials I guess no one does it better than Maciej Pietuszynski. (If you don't think so, just check his Tilt-Shift Lens From A Shower Head, How To Instasuqare Your Camera's View Finder and How To Give An Old Nifty-Fifty A New Life pictorials) This time Maciej shares how Spring cleaning drove him into making an ice cream softbox that doubles as a camera case.
I am not really sure how this one went under the radar, but late is better than never. The fine folks over at Indy Mogul came up with a tutorial on building an 800 Watt video light that relies on our good old friend the Compact Florescent Lightbulb (A.K.A CFL).
The nice thing about this light is that it does not really get warm. And if you ever tried lighting a video with an 750 Watts worth of halogen lighting, you know how hard it is to manage. Click to continue ›
Hypersync is a mechanism that allows shooting at a high shutter speed while still using a strobe.
Photographer Chris Garrison, who shoots for Red Bull has a great interview where he explains the concept along with several setups for water based action photography. Click to continue ›
While we have featured quite a few home made gridspot before I don't believe I have ever seen a gridspot based on a Quaker Can. This is a fairly easy build, You will need an empty can (preferably Quaker oats) with a plastic cap and some black straws. Click to continue ›
