For the folks who don’t have NASA on their RSS stream, this is a short announcement to remind about the upcoming Solar Eclipse on May 20.
I thought it would be a good opportunity to share some tips about solar eclipse photography.[Read More…]
Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
For the folks who don’t have NASA on their RSS stream, this is a short announcement to remind about the upcoming Solar Eclipse on May 20.
I thought it would be a good opportunity to share some tips about solar eclipse photography.[Read More…]
If you had a chance to shoot one of America great modern wonders, the Saturn V Rocket, what camera would you use. I mean, that is some respected rocket, being the one that landed me on the moon.
Our pal Destin (whom you may recall as the guy who shoots matches) met with Darren Samuelson, the maker of the Great Big Camera, at the US Space and Rocket Center to shoot the Saturn V with one of the biggest cameras I know.
The camera weighs about 70 pounds and takes in film sheets which are 504 sq inch big. This much films should allow it to photograph a huge amount of details.
The last thing that got my attention was the amount of time spent on measurements, with today’s digital meters, metering is becoming more rare, but I guess that if you are going to expose 504 sq inches, develop and then print it, you wanna make sure you are on the dot.
It would be very pretentious of me to declare that looking at the photographs and diagrams below will teach you how to light. That said, looking at the photographs and setups and trying to understand the motivation behind the lighting will give you a good start when dealing with similar lighting dilemmas.
You can always come back to this post to see how a particular image was lit to make a similar setup or to use it as a stepping stone for your own.[Read More…]
After seeing some very creative use of strip lighting here, on the Strobist site and Flickr, often as ‘rim’ lighting, I thought “If only I had that fancy gear, my stuff would look as good as Joel Grimes’ stuff!” I had visions of after-shoot champagne lunches with Heidi Klune and groups of graceful models in a spacious studio populated with Broncolor and Hasselblad stuff – RIGHT!
[Editors note: The excellent intro and tutorial were made by John Hagar (flickr), we are trying to keep it family friendly, so no beer by default…].[Read More…]
The following guest post and videos about astrophotography tips and building a DIY star tracker was submitted by Jason Anderson from Canon Blogger.
How many times have you looked at the nighttime sky, seen some amazing expanse of stars and just thought, “Hey, now that’d be a cool shot!”? From stars and nebula to comets and asteroids, then planets and galaxies, outer space is still a source of awe and wonder for so many of us it’s no doubt that when we capture images from this overly undiscovered frontier, it is surely to grab the viewers attention.
Well, if you want to retain that viewer attention (and who doesn’t…?) it can help to have images that pop! Astrophotography is a tough area to make images pop because we are dealing with something that we don’t have a lot of – light! Remember, photography by definition means “to write with light”. Yet stars in a more or less black sky can make this challenging. So, what can we do?[Read More…]
Are you an “I love to carry stuff with ease” (AKA comfort carry) kind of photographer or a “I love access to my lenses” (AKA easy access) kind of photographer?
The comfort carry kinda photographers tend to take backpacks that have back systems, while the easy access types go for pouches and sling bags.
When I got the Rotation360 for review I was happy to see that you can have both comfort and access in the same system. Read on for my full review.
So, you are here reading the second part of the Studio @ Home series. This is good; it means that you want to take better pictures. But have you stopped a minute to think why do I even need a studio? At Home? While most of us have a good intuition about it, and we feel that a studio will help us take better pictures (at least of some specific kinds), I would like to suggest several reasons to move from sporadic art driven shooting to studio environment. Still no DIY on this post, but I will lay the grounds for most ideas that will follow up on this series of articles.
I used to love a good what do you get when you cross jokes. I still do. What do you get when you cross a battery with a pure sine inverter? Read on to find out.
As you probably know, I am a big fan of small flashes. (*cough* Strobist *cough), but sometimes small flashes just don’t have the juice to light up a scene. It may be a big place that needs tons of power or a huge light sucking modifier that eats up all the light from your strobe. (Try using the SB 900 on the westcott 2.15 meters octabank, that would be an interesting strobe challenge). So I do have one big 400WS flash. (Ok, just before you hit me with the “you call 400WS big?? ppffffhhh!”, I’d say that it was big enough for me when I bought it, and it was I could afford.
So anyway, if you are in a studio this is no biggy. Plug the flash to the wall socket, dial up the power and you are good to go. But what if you are outside the studio. On the beach, park, moon? [Image by andyarmstrong]
One of the more popular posts here at DIYP is Create your own Bokeh. It shows you how to add hearts or stars (or skulls) shapes to your picture. I can totally understand it. It is a quick project, it’s fun and it takes nothing more than a piece of black paper and a puncher, or scissors.
I have to say, though, that making a few of those fun widgets takes time. It also eats space in the camera bag. If you are ready to take it to the next step, take a look at Ron Rademacher‘s Bokeh Shape-O-Mat.
Welcome to this multi-part series of articles on Exploring Small Strobes by Yanik Chauvin from Yanik’s Photo School.
In part 1 on Exploring Small strobes, I looked at why using flash guns instead of the built-in flash and studio strobes. Today, I’ll be going through the importance of using your speedlight off camera.
So, we already know that direct flash from your built-in flash gives unflattering results, to say the least. Using your speedlight in the same way won’t change much. I did mention that you can redirect the light by rotating the head of your flash gun and bouncing the light off ceilings and walls but you’re still very limited in your creativity. So what’s a photographer to do? I’ll tell you. Get that speedlight off your camera to unleash its full potential!
Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.
John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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