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Devin Graham Speaks About Fighting For Your Passion

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Devin Graham who some of you may know as Devin Supertramp from his youtube channel is one of those things that could never exist before the internet.

What does he do? He makes videos. Awesome, wonderful, inspiring, breathtaking videos. Devin is one of those things (sorry for calling you a thing, Devin) that could have never existed before the nets and social media rose.

A huge amount of effort goes into each of his videos and it shows. A few years back he could have done those very same videos, but no one will may have noticed. But as the way with the nets, Devin’s effort slowly paid off with over 269,258 youtube subscribers contributing a staggering 20 million or so views.

Kinda like those internet meme‘s or the study by ISPWP which shows how much works goes into photography which is not partying with models, Devin breaks down the effort of what it takes to release an awesome video after awesome video.

On Becoming A Photgrapher – Communicating With Your Subject

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So, you’ve got the shoot planned to perfection, you’re all good to go and the subject walks in the door. But how do you make someone smile, and how do you dig out those genuine expressions? That is what we’re going to be talking about today. Well, what I’m going to be writing about anyway. From the pre-shoot planning and meeting, to how you act on set, and a few stern words on not being a damn creep. So let’s get on with Communicating with your subject

A Striking Timelapse From One Of The Darkest Places On Earth

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While traveling to Namibia is long and expensive it pays off in glorious nightscapes. The dry air and atmosphere conditions in Namibia earned it one of the dark sky reserve in 2012.

So it is not surprising that Namibia can produce some of the most beautiful night-time time lapses.

Namibian Nights is the work of Marsel van Oosten – a photographer and a tour guide from Amsterdam. It showcase some of the most popular sites in Namibia, like the quiver trees and the misty trees in Deadvlei.

How To Make A Cone Softbox For Your Speedlight

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If you are doing portraiture with speedlight, you know that to get soft flattering light, you need to increase the size of the light source. We have featured a few hot shoe softboxes before. In fact the first ever post on DIYP was a small hot shoe strobe’s softbox tutorial. And we also had a poorman’s octabank. But this is the first time we are sharing a cone shaped one by Peter Beckerman. (Sewing skills for the win!)

The Winner Of Our How I Took It Contest Is….

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So, new year is just around the corner and I am in a debt for announcing our How I Took It contest winners. A debt that I am about to clear today.

Whichever way I look at it, it was an awesome ride, starting with a killer team of sponsors which contributed over $6300 in prizes through the on going buzz, and most importantly the submissions made to the contest by you.

I got a few questions about how the judging process went, so I thought I will clarify about that before listing the winners. basically it all came down to a huge excel sheet containing over 100 submissions. Each submission was rated by the amount of likes, retweets and G+ mentions that it got and fed into a formula Score=(3xTweets)+(2xLikes)+(6xG+). The highest scores won the contest.

Creatively Editing an Ordinary Landscape Image in LR4

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A while back I shared that fact that I was enjoying SLR Lounge’s A-Z Lightroom video tutorials. One of the chapters I liked most is dealt with tweaking and adjusting an image which was hard to expose, turning it into a great landscape image. I asked Post Production Pye and the team over at SLRL for a tutorial on that technique which they gladly shared.

In this tutorial, I want to take an image that was shot several years ago on a Canon 40D in RAW, and show you just what we can do to artistically edit this very plain “walk-up” shot.

Capturing Colored Salt Thrown By Speaker Sound

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Photographer Fabian Oefner creates amazing sculptures of pigment colored salt by placing it on a thin plastic foil stretched on a speaker. He calls them Dancing Colors.

The shutter is opened for a few seconds in a darkened room, and once the speaker starts vibrating the pigmented salt rises to the air, a microphone picks up the noise and triggers the flashes. This is a pretty typical setup for high speed photography. Low power is used for capturing sharp images, 4 strobes are used as key and another 2 as fill.

AimishBoy In Wonder Land (Interview)

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In the following post, Tomer Jacobson interviews AimishBoy (aka Nadav Bagim).

Every once in a while a photographer comes along and makes you drop your jaw. You stare flabbergasted at the screen and for long minutes try to understand how the hell did they accomplish this shot. How he had you stop and marvel a new thing after you think you’ve seen it all.

This is exactly what happened to me (Tomer Jacobson) when I saw the amazing pictures of AimishBoy for the first time.

So, Lets Talk Negotiating With Clients

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I don’t usually shoot for the corporate market. I mainly shoot family portraits so I don’t negotiate a lot. There is a fixed price per session and that’s about it. Very simple. Sometimes, someone will ask for a discount, and I either give it or not.

But a few days ago I got a call from a corporation who wanted a set of head shots. We estimated the work at about 5-6 hours of shooting as folk will trickle in as time goes by. The other technical details are really not that crucial this discussion.

I got neck deep in negotiating. It was not a pleasant experience and I had just about every cliche thrown at me. I wanted to share their comments, my answers and what went through my mind as we were talking. Of course, this is totally me, so other, more corporation-savvy photographers may have dealt with this whole situation way better. Still I think there is a good deal of info, and even if you don’t like my answers if a good thing to know the comments so you can prepare your own answers.

We went a few time back and forward with mails, sending a brief, some questions and finally a quote. (I did some research and between that research and my estimation of the work, the quote was kinda in the middle range. Not too high, not too low) Then they asked to call to finalize the shoot.

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