Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
If you love IKEA for their cheap furniture, you’d probably love them even more after discovering the huge possibilities they provide for creating lighting modifiers. (Beauty Dish, Ring Light and even a DSLR shoulder rig are some of the projects we covered so far).
In this project Andy Kubbat takes us through the process of building an overhead bare bulb light fixture using a strobe and an IKEA Regolit Floor Lamp priced at $49.99.[Read More…]
I know you love continuous light ring lights, both for stills and video, however, one of the most common responses is that it is too complex to build and the need for woodmanship.
Well, aside from providing paper furniture and raw beauty dishes, IKEA seems to have solved the ring light issues as well. With the (sadly discontinued) Kvartil Chandelier. Sadly IKEA, not realizing the product potential for photographers, has discontinued the product. The concept however is too good not to be featured in the hopes that IKEA or some other chandelier manufacturer will make it right.
If you got more photography IKEA hacks I would love to hear them, share in the comments.[Read More…]
We featured a few beauty dishes before, one made from a turkey pan, and one made from soup bowls. (Even when it seems like DIY, it is actually about food).
With a recent mention about the connection between DIYP and IKEA, I thought that it would be fun to feature a beauty dish made with the very appropriate named IKEA FOTO.
It is a simple build, the smarts here are in the bracket that takes the load of the strobe head and allows for easy mounting on a lightstand or a boom.[Read More…]
With the blast of HDSLR comes the need to create a more comfortable way of shooting video with SLR shaped bodies. You can get one for about $2000 or make your own for about 7$.
All you would need for that is a IKEA cutting boards, a stove, and some pipes.
Yes, I did say IKEA cutting board.[Read More…]
As the name suggests, a studio cart (a.k.a video cart or tethering cart) is a cart for your studio. Duh. As your studio grows and you need to move things around, a studio cart can really help your workflow. Obviously, it can help when you move things around. But there are more benefits. For example, you can mount a laptop, a camera, or a monitor on the cart, making it a portable shooting setup.
The only issue is that those film carts don’t come cheap. Even the most basic cart from brands like Inovativ or Proaim can set you back a good amount. And to be honest, those are incredible carts with lots of features. For example, they fold down for travel and have a massive set of wheels. But for studio use, where you don’t really need to break anything down or have massive wheels, you can save quite a bit, while having a super-sturdy, super-functional cart.
Creating a commercial shoot from scratch is somewhere between business and art. On the art side, you want to make sure you are proud of what you have created, and on the business side, you have to meet a deadline, keep a budget and deal with a client.
There is a lot to be said on how to manage the business side of such a shoot, but today I want to focus on the artistic side. Specifically, I want to talk about creating a winning frame while keeping budget in mind
There seems to be a weird obsession with super slow movie players lately. I’ve seen a few of them come scroll up my screen lately, but this one’s… Well, it kinda takes the cake, with a new frame being rendered about every half an hour. And it uses virtually no power in order to be able to do it, too. It’s based off an ESP32 in “Deep Sleep” mode and draws about 12uA (that’s 0.000012 Amps!). It’s projected that its 2,000mAh battery should last… oh, about 1.2 years.
It’s an interesting way to have a kind of constantly changing photo frame, that progresses one frame through a video sequence at a time in extremely slow fashion. One frame every 30 minutes would means that a movie like The Matrix (just the first one, not the whole trilogy) would take just over eleven years to watch in its entirety. In real-time, the duration of The Matrix is about 2 hours and 16 minutes.
Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska has sparked an online trend of women sitting in a traditionally masculine pose. The trend is hashtagged “Sit like a girl” after Zelenska was featured sitting in this position on the cover of Vogue.
The image was shot by Annie Leibovitz and shows her seated on some steps, front facing the camera, legs apart, elbows resting on knees. The stance apparently provoked a wave of criticism that it wasn’t ladylike enough for a leader’s wife. However, Zelenska is no ordinary woman.
Technology has really evolved in a way that has made it possible for people to work more efficiently on the go. I used to remember when laptops were barely able to keep up with Photoshop and working on the road was a huge pain. Now it’s changed drastically!
I am a working and traveling retoucher, photographer, and co-founder of Infinite Tools. This year alone I’ve had the pleasure of traveling and working in places like Cape Town, Iceland, and Namibia! Whether it’s going abroad or locally, I always need to be able to retouch client work and I wanted a setup that could adapt to home and travel life. After all, sometimes I am only home for a bit and even when I’m home, I like to work in different locations to change things up.
One of the above images was created using a camera and modern commercial lighting with familiar retouching techniques using software such as Photoshop. The other image was rendered using CGI using software such as Blender. They are both top-notch product images, but can you tell which is which?
I won’t tell you the answer just yet (sorry, I know you’re just dying to find out!), however, the use of CGI in product photography is becoming ever more prevalent as technology improves, making the 3D rendering more photo-realistic, faster and subsequently cheaper than traditional commercial photography.
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