DIYPhotography.net

This time of the year is gift time all around and it is not just gifts under the Christmas tree. There's Hanukkah for and Eid El Adha and Ōmisoka and the list goes on.

Yep, it is gift time. I tried to make the list as frugal as possible, this is a DIY centric blog after all...

As for the image at the beginning of the post, I really didn't want to put any specific holiday picture, so I am declaring my own holiday - the R2D2 day of glory, celebrated by geeks, me included, all over the world. It is a tradition of this holiday to buy photography related gifts.

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How did I manage not to burn the house down??

Well, first, my wife was not at home, LOL... and second, with the remote trigger in one hand, and an extinguisher in the other... just in case!! ;O))

This is what Filipe Batista had to say when I wondered how he took that shot. The extinguisher bit is enough to hint that no Photoshop was used to create the fire and as they say it the magic industry. Don't worry, that fire is harmless. Unless you touch it.

Filipe was kind enough to share the secretes behind this fire spectacle with DIYP readers:

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I had the honor and the pleasure to give a talk at my daughter's kindergarten on Friday. We recently moved to a new place and once the kindergarten teacher heard I was a photographer, she asked me to come down and talk a bit with the kids about what I do.

Of course I said yes. I also offered to take some portraits of the kids and stuff - just for funzees. I asked the teacher to tell the kids to bring a favorite toy or set of clothes. It was amazing to hear what 5 year-olds think about photography and I am going to share some of this discussion here.

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Mrs. H. should have known better than to push Steve Hermitage (Flickr) into doing the dishes.

What started out as an innocent dish washing exercise ended as a lab for shooting tiny worlds of soap, and revenge taken against a Tia Maria glass.

This is just too good of a project not to share. It is a ton of fun and the setup is very simple as Steve explains in his setup shot (after the jump).

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Over the past year I've been involved with a great project - it is about to launch soon. If you are a regular reader here, you may recognize the effect.

We're gonna launch in about two weeks, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, here are some sample shot that may (or may not) be related to this awesomeness.

Sorry for exposing those. I had no choice. They have my kids.

Hit the jump for some images. Stay tuned. More to come...

Visit this set for more bokeh secret images. Tag a Paw to send your love.

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It might be just me, but I love fire. I did a little survey and 5 out of 5 photogs I checked with are little pyros too. Maybe it is part of the requirements of the trade. And maybe we're all still small kids who get a buzz from a little fire.

This is why I decided to create a small startup guide for shooting matches - feel free to add/comment and improve. The more ideas we throw into this, the better this guide will be.

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Yea I know, Halloween is almost a month away, but if you're gonna do something fancy, you'd better start preparing.

Here are three completely safe Halloween photography Hacks.

Between making your own pumpkin, cutting a hole in your body and bringing a full Paparazzi band to the party there is no way you'll get tricked. But, you have to start preparing.

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Yesterday I posted a cheat sheet that tried to question the applicability of the Inverse Square Law (ISL) on the way we use portable flashes I called this post The Inverse Square Law Cheat Sheet - Myth Busted.

The post stirred up a great conversation from which I learned about Light, some physics and some in camera processing facts. But mostly I learned that it is great fun to experiment and to share your findings. It definitely helped me get my knowledge to a higher level (at the small price of throwing a way my totally wrong fringy and conventions breaking experiment.

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UPDATE: This Experiment is all Wrong. I should hit my head on the same wall I used to measure reflected light off. Some great comments about what went wrong, and great discussion going on - I posted the main points here.

Have you heard about the Inverse Square Law? It's the law that says that light intensity falls the farther you move your light from your subject. It also tells you that if you move your light to be twice as far it will fall by 4 (the square of 2). if you move the light three times as far, it will fall by 9.

We all swear by that law. The only thing is this law does not apply to the way most of us use flashes.

I'm gonna explain this in a beat, but first here is my newest cheat sheet. (I love cheat sheets. If you are as senile as me, you can print them and then pop them up later and look really smart).

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Panning is a photographic technique that provides great separation of subject from background.

The technique is very simple in theory, but takes some practice to perfect.

Here is how it works, you set your camera to a relatively low shutter speed.  Say 1/80 or 1/40 of a second. Next you find a subject that is moving from one side of the frame to the other. Here comes the tricky part. While keeping the subject in a fixed part of the frame (and you do that by panning the lens from side to side) click the shutter.

If you did every thing correctly, you'll end up with a sharp subject and blurred background. This technique takes a lot of practice with the following focus:

1. Finding the exact correct moment to click the shutter is not always trivial.
2. You'll need to avoid any vertical movement - this will create blur in the subject as well. 
3.  You'll have to be in precise sync with the moving speed of your subject, to keep it sharp while blurring the background.

This is why DIYP labs developed several techniques to get panning pictures without ever moving your camera.

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