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No, you don’t need 5 strobes to take a great portrait. Create beautiful cinematic lighting with just one light

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Sometimes I watch movies or TV shows, and I miss important plot points because I’m trying to figure out how they did the lighting. I just find cinemagraphic lighting incredibly inspiring, and it’s always something I’d like to strive for in my stills photography. But looking at lighting diagrams, it always seems so complicated.

I love to use just one light when I can, so you can imagine my delight when I spotted this excellent video tutorial from Armando Ferreira. He walks us through 4 different cinematic lighting effects that use just one light.

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Striking street shot from Iran wins top prize of 2022 ColorPro Award

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A striking minimal street shot with contrasting warm and cool tones has won the coveted 2022 ColorPro Award. The first prize photograph by Alireza Bagheri Sani from Iran is titled “No.3” and creates a serene and simple image. The image is carefully executed to highlight the different door colors and architectural nuances.

This year’s theme was “Breakthrough.” As the world seeks full recovery from the pandemic, “Breakthrough” represents overcoming an obstacle and permission for further progress, says the Award website. Two times more submissions and three times more countries participated in the contest over the previous year, with artists from 139 countries submitting 11,165 artworks. Take a look at the top 10 winning images below.[Read More…]

MyHeritage built an AI Time Machine that turns you into amazing historical figures

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Genealogy website MyHeritage has launched a brand new fun AI tool AI Time Machine which lets you try out looks from different historical eras. It’s as easy as uploading a variety of photographs, and the AI does the rest.

The feature is based on the image generator model Stable Diffusion and licensed by AI image generation company Astria. It’s not the first of its kind, but it’s simple and quick to try, and the results are both amusing and slightly uncanny in their execution. If you’ve ever wondered what you’d look like in the Viking era, then this app is perfect!

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Light show loses $100,000 because of rogue falling drones

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It’s every drone pilot’s worst nightmare. One moment you’re happily flying away, the next, your drone has gone out of control and is plummeting towards certain death, usually in a body of water, just to make things even more interesting. These things seem to have a nose for water. Take a drone to a desert, and it could save your life because you can almost guarantee that if there is water to be found, the drone will crash into it!

The Drone Light Show company had similar bad luck recently when not just one of its drones, but around 50 of them, got into difficulty during one of their shows in Perth, Australia. And, of course, these rogue drones decided to crash into the water, ultimately costing the company around $100,000 Australian dollars ($66,000 USD).

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This is why food ads cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce

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We’ve all seen them thousands of times, the ubiquitous fast food advertisement flickering across the screen for 30 seconds while we catch up with our favourite series. But we rarely put much thought into how they are made. Or how much effort and money is put into shooting them.

Or normal people don’t at least. If you’re like me, the ads often fascinate you as much as the programs do. Trying to reverse engineer the lighting or camera moves in our minds becomes irrestible. This excellent video from Business Insider takes you behind the scenes at a commercial food production video shoot at The Garage in Brooklyn, New York, and it’s fascinating.

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This is why you need an extra tall tripod in your equipment bag

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We all started out with a lightweight tripod as our very first tripod. Most likely, then, after several uses and budget allowing, you upgraded to a much sturdier tripod. If you’ve ever struggled with a lightweight tripod, you know exactly why. And then the occasion strikes where you realize, at times, you also need a really tall tripod.

Then the options become fewer. It’s that intersect between affordable, robust, easy to carry … and really tall. Nothing else will suffice. For this kind of situation, I got the Robus RC-0888 carbon fiber tripod.

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Do we even need Photoshop anymore? This is how powerful the new masks are in Lightroom

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Adobe Lightroom seems to get more and more useful every year. The most recent updates have made this a formidable piece of software. It used to be that I did a few small global adjustments in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw and then headed straight for Photoshop to do the majority of the retouching work.

These days, I feel that there is less demand for perfection in terms of skin and more demand for a realistic look. At least in the work that I’m doing here in Europe anyway. Less is definitely more. Of course, I will absolutely go in and dodge and burn to my heart’s content if the image needs it. However, as this excellent video by Anthony Morganti shows, the masks are now so powerful in Lightroom that you can do much of your editing without ever having to open up Photoshop. Let’s take a closer look.

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Urbex photographers find dead body in building, police say its homicide

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A group of urbex photographers made a grim discovery while exploring an abandoned building in Kansas City. Shortly after entering the building the men found a decomposing body and alerted the authorities. Police then called homicide detectives to the scene to further the investigation.

Urban explorers (or urbex as they are known) Michael Meredith and Aaron (family name not supplied) were out indulging in their hobby of exploring abandoned and derelict buildings. After doing extensive research, they told DIYP that they found what looked like a suitably interesting empty building. Upon close inspection, they noticed that the front door to the building was actually open.

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This photographer used AI to help create these exquisite Joan of Arc images

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been hitting the headlines a lot lately. According to popular opinion, it will likely destroy art, photography, and the creative industries as we know them. But is that the whole story? Perhaps we are missing something here. Surely there is a reverse side to all the doom-mongering?

Well, photographer and digital artist Chris Koeppen may actually have found that silver lining. Chris, who goes under the creative alias of An Ethereal Fire, has been using AI for good instead of, you know, evil. He has been using text prompt AI imaging to enhance his creative output and has recently created this series of extraordinary composite images based upon the legendary Joan of Arc. Chris took the time to chat to DIYP about how he made them and about where he sees the future of photography and AI.

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Baby elephant photobombs news by ‘kissing’ reporter live on air

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They do say never to work with animals. News reporter Alvin Patterson Kaunda was left collapsed in laughter when a baby elephant stole the show ‘kissing’ him on the lips live on camera.

Kaunda was recording for KBC Television in Kenya and standing close to a herd of elephants. As he spoke about orphaned elephants and the importance of wildlife protection, a young elephant named Kindani kept bumping into him. A true professional, however, Kaunda remained unfazed and continued to speak.

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