DIYPhotography.net

For me, I've always used studio strobes as strobes, but Jaroslav Wieczorkiewicz over at AurumLight reminds us that if you have access to a studio strobe, you almost surely have instant access to another light source: the strobe modeling light.

Jaroslav uses three Einsteins heads to shoot this great portrait - Girl With The Broken Heart. This allows him to use a warm light coming from the modeling lamp, without gelling it. it also provides a different timing plane as continuous light has a lingering effect on the model rather than freezing it as a strobe. [Yup, so you get a whole new factor of creativity to play with]

The video below combined with Jaroslav's post is an excellent primer and a pretty thorough explanation on how gels work with both continuous lights and strobes. Click to continue ›

Our How I Took I contest is quickly gaining critical mass with all the great tutorials being submitted by you guys. Got some great news on that, the folks at Rosco just chipped in with a LitePad Loop kit.

Raj Khepar submitted a cool tutorial about how he built a rain machine for one of his shoots.

While we have had a rain machine before, this one is quite different in the way it was built and in the final effect it creates.

Click to continue ›

If you ever incorporate smoke in your photography, you know it is pretty hard to control. You can use a bit of dry ice for small dosage of smoke, or use flour if you are willing to pick up the cleaning tab, but large shoots require something different.

The folks over the slanted lens have a video where they show how to make a chill box, which is essentially a device that cools the smoke down so it heavier and sticks to the ground. (Interestingly, this mechanism is very similar to the one found in beer taps at your local pub). Click to continue ›

In this tutorial Andrea Cosentino shares his technique for getting a very distinct soft light look using a wall and one strobe. This is Andrea's submission for our How I Took It Contest, there are some awesome submissions so far, we'll keep sharing them, you keep 'em coming.

Click to continue ›

One of my favorite ways to shoot is with accented rim lights. And while I love the look this kind of light produces there is a bit of a trickery to setting those lights up.

The reason is that back lights create flare.

David Hobby came up with a pretty clever way to block flare generating lights using a frame made from coroplast (the same material used for DIY flags, and grids). Click to continue ›

We are big fans of lighting cheat sheets, ever since with pulled our first one, featuring my former boss, which shows 24 positions of lighting for portraits. (Which was later nuked with a software creating a similar chart with 72 lighting positions using a 3d head scan from Infinite Realities).

Interestingly enough, a similar scan by IR was used to create the Virtual Lighting Studio an interactive chart that you can plug lots of lights into and position them anywhere. So as long as you don't really care about expressions, hair or human interaction, you can light and shoot at the comfort of your living room. (Or make your mega lighting card cheat sheet)

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Happy Easter/Passover everyone! I thought that this little video is a good fit for today, as the main character here is the Egg (no offense, Joe).

In this short video Joe Edelman uses an egg to explain a bit about portraiture lighting by having a single source of light move over an egg. It is kinda like our portrait lighting cheat sheet card, only in video.

If you want to see more of Joe's great work, we have featured his excellent tutorials before. Click to continue ›

Polarizer filters can be used to enhance contrast and saturation in landscape photography and reduce reflections or glare on shiny surfaces such as water. The effect is maximized by aligning the polarizer on the camera so that the polarizing direction is perpendicular to that of the light you want to block.

On a bright day it works best if you are in a 90 degrees angle to the sun, but there will always be some light reflected by the surrounding or diffused by clouds which still reduce the effect. (See the differnce between the right and left sides of the image below)

This article shows how a polarizing filter for a flash allows to make use of the effect with artificial light. Some subjects will look gorgeous while others may be rendered in an odd way but it's certainly fun playing with the effect and you can still vary the level by turning your filter on the lens. In a nutshell, we are going to polerize the light coming from the strobe to better control its specular higlights.

Every lightsource could be modified to emmit polarized light. But some devices (such as displays and some lasers) already emmit polarized light. See the images below for examle images illuminated with an iPad.

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Most cameras are capable of creating 'acceptably good' white balance on your photos. And even if they're failing, you can make a pretty decent guess for what you think the white balance should have been in post production.

But what if you want to take the guesswork out of the equation, and get perfect white balance every time? The professionals use something called a 'gray card' (or 'grey card', depending on where in the world you learned to write English). The name says it all: it's a gray piece of card or plastic that you can use to balance your photographs. Click to continue ›

Interesting subjects make for great photographs, so are interesting backgrounds. Photographer Karl Zemlin has a great DIY for projecting strobe light to create interesting backgrounds. (He also has a nifty DIY section on his site)

All you would need is a box, a few Fresnel lenses and some textured glass. The main idea is that you could get the texture of the glass projected on a seamless white (or any other smooth) background.

What makes this design really rock is the little tripod socket at the bottom, so you can simply place this behind your subject on a light stand and have a symmetrical background. Click to continue ›