Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
We are always looking for interesting and inspiring tings to share. If you have a tip or a new bit, please share it with us in this link.
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This is Chiara Sciarone’s take on a DIY LCD Hood:
I was inspired by the previous LCD-hood with camcorder eye-piece. But I didn’t have an eye-piece. Nor I liked the fact that it stayed on the camera. (I always lose my gear that way). So I made me one from a foamy![Read More…]
The above image is a long exposure shot as JPG by Dennis Calvert and is straight from the camera. Here’s a walkthrough of how it was made.[Read More…]
Donald Giannatti shares his views aobut Value and The Cost Of Doing Business.
Recently a photographer shared a little CODB calculator created for other photographers. It was based on time and materials and an hourly rate for the shooter.
I thought it was terrible, and tried to explain why. I thought I was pretty good, but so many folks thought I was saying NOT to have any idea of what your business is costing you that I am taking this opportunity to explain.
CODB (Cost of Doing Business) calculations are a good idea to find out what you need to make per month to break even or make a profit. They suck at helping photographers determine their rate. Let me share why.[Read More…]
Not a long way back we shared a cool tutorial on a homemade Travel Jib (kinda like this Portable Mini Jib). But for those times that you need to carry heavier cameras and you want to trade portability for stability you may want to use a crane.
Charlie Mac created this wonderful tutorial for building a the Travel Jib big brother – a camera crane. It is not as portable, but way sturdier and can handle bigger loads.
A little while back we shared a nifty tutorial on making an LCD hood from a set of hotel keys. Today we are taking it up a notch with a follow up pictorial on making it a fully fledged LCD Lope[Read More…]
This post by Andreas Bergmann explores some of the business aspects of being a photographer. Mainly, Should you work for free, and should you accept under paid jobs
One of the hardest lessons to learn, and not only learn but accept and incorporate into your way of doing things, is that sometimes you just need to say no to jobs. For your own sake, for your client’s sake, and for your career’s sake. I think this is proportionally harder the earlier you are in your career as a photographer, and making these decisions can feel like walking a tightrope, but I sure would have benefited from someone sitting me down and telling me this a looooong time ago. So today we’re going to talk about saying no to jobs, and getting paid.[Read More…]
Hey all, Benjamin “Von Wong” Montreal Based photographer here.
As a photographer who does creative collaborations and who freely invites fans he has never met before to attend shoots, I often end up with large sets of people to manage. Many photographers I know prefer to keep groups small and tight knit because they find that things can quickly get out of control but I have found that with a little careful management you can keep things fun for everyone AND deliver awesome imagery at the end of it.
I think one of the things that became a signature for me is that attending one of my shoots if fun. In this post, I’ll share my thoughts on what makes the shoot fun, while keeping it productive. Bare in mind that this article is written specifically for creative collaborations, not for professional work. While it’s a good idea to keep always keep shoots fun getting the image becomes the first priority when it is a paid job.[Read More…]
In 2006 the Beatles released a new album – Love. It was pretty weird considering John was long dead, but after some googlling I realized that it was a new reworked version of some of the songs made by the band’s original producer, Sir George Martin. It was based on the bands already exiting recordings, demo tracks and bits that never made it to any of their prior albums.
One of the songs (track #22) is an acoustic version of While my guitar gently weeps, written by George Harrison, where Eric Clapton joins the band (AFAIK the only time where anyone ever joined a recording by the Beatles). For me this song is even better than the original track (please no flame wars on this :). If you know the story of Harrison, Clapton and Patti Boyd you know how touching it is to hear those two guitar legends play together.
Back to now, I have 18 versions of this song. It is just one of these songs that everybody loves playing. I love it too. This is why I wanted to create an image for this song based on the immortal line “I look at the world and I notice it’s turning While my guitar gently weeps”.
The general idea was to shoot a Star Trail photograph with a guitar player in the foreground of the frame. This idea has been bouncing in my head till a sketch was entered into my sketch book. Well, it stayed in the book for a while till my exams were over, and then it was time to play.[Read More…]
Hey guys!
Today, I would like to introduce you to a very interesting product that costs less than a 100$ that will (maybe) change you’re shooting lives – the LensAlign MKII. If you guys are like me and own a body (or more) plus a couple lenses, chances are you’ve experienced focusing problems here and there. At first, you might wonder if you’re just focusing badly, or that something’s just wrong with your shooting technique but after enough repeats you start asking yourself… could it be something else?
If you’re lazy like me, you bring your camera to your nearest Nikon or Canon service center and get told that they don’t take care of lens calibration issues. Or they test it out on the spot and insist that your shot is properly focused or that the difference is negligible. Or perhaps, you’re slightly more independent and find out that most semi-pro bodies have a nifty little tool called MICRO-ADJUSTMENTS that allows you to force your camera to focus slightly forward or backwards through a little software tweak!
From there, you think EUREKA, and either tries building some sort of 45 degree ruler system to attempt and calibrate your system following some forum on the internet only to realize that your results are inconsistent and somewhat unpredictable. There are improvements, but you just can’t quite seem to get things right…
Now if you’re stuck at this step (which I was for the longest time) … read on for THE solution.[Read More…]
Alrighty so I just got my new camera (Kodak p850) and it is wicked rad and I’m having lots of fun figuring out all the buttons and whatnot but now that I have a real camera I need a real camera strap, the one that came with it is fairly comfortable but I never wear straps around my neck so I’ve been checking ebay and google for possible alternatives. Fortunately a product already exists that is exactly what I’m looking for, actually many many different variations of what I’m looking for exist and they all have one thing in common, they’re all ridiculously overpriced for the amount of material that your getting. I’m cheap crafty I think I can make my own for less and have just as good of a product. And so it begins.[Read More…]
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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