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Photography is all about light. But just as much as that, it’s also about a lack of it. Shadows are just as important to your scene as the well lit areas, and they can really help to sell your story and add a lot of drama.
In this video, the guys of Aputure’s A Team walk us through using negative fill to help create that contrast and drama in your scene. And while they’re primarily talking about video, the same principle applies for stills, too.
Fill light is probably one of the first things you learn when shooting in a studio or taking outdoor portraits, but many people aren’t aware of the reversed method – negative lighting.
As the name suggests, this method is used to subtract unwanted light and increase contrast.
In this 6-minute tutorial, Indie Cinema Academy explains what negative fill light is, how you go about using this method and why you’d even want to. The video provides examples of using negative fill and offers side-by-side comparisons, making it very useful and a great way to learn.
We all assume that Photoshop and the art of retouching is a fairly new phenomenon. When you think of image retouching you automatically think of celebrities made to look taller and slimmer, of blemish removal to the point of obliterating skin texture, and head swapping those pesky people that always blink in group portraits. But did you know that image retouching has been around nearly as long as photography, it was just done in a different way. This fascinating book (now in the public domain), tells you exactly how to get started if you want to retouch your images directly onto the negative.
Many years ago, Joan Tortorici Ruppert’s mother handed her a box full of negatives. You see, Joan’s father was an avid photographer, and Joan began to be interested in it too. So, her mom wanted her to have these photos that he’d taken and developed back in the late 1930s.
Joan took this “time capsule” and carefully scanned all the photos. She did it all without a lightbox, enlarger or a scanner, but she came up with a DIY approach that let her quickly cull through hundreds of negatives. And finally, she ended up with an admirable collection of black and white photos that show life as it was in pre-war Chicago.
Looking back through my archives, I realized that I’ve covered topics like film selections and scanning film but to date I’ve skipped one really important part: metering and exposing color film. This is something I get quite a few questions about so bear with me while I try to be very thorough and cover topics from different lighting conditions and how I would meter with the various film types, both color negatives and slides. While graduated neutral density (GND) filters deserve an entire post for themselves, I’m going to have to touch on that topic as well since they are a critical part of my film exposures.
As a disclaimer, I’m going to be covering my methods for metering. These may not be the methods you’ll read about in most books but I’ve found them to be both effective and extremely quick which is crucial when the light is changing dramatically. It’s come to a point where metering is mostly second-nature to me and takes up a very small portion of my workflow.
Stalking garage sales, flea markets and estate auctions looking for long forgotten rolls of film seems to have become a very popular hobby in the past few years. It brought us the work of Vivian Maier, led to the discovery of previously unknown Ansel Adams glass plates, and showed us some amazing photographs shot during World War II.
Most recently, thanks to photographers Matthew Salacuse, Henry Leutwyler and Stephane Sednaoui, lost negatives from a shoot with a young Leonardo DiCaprio were returned to very grateful filmmaker Alexi Tan after going missing for over five years.
Negative space in photography, design, sculpture or any other creative pursuit is equally as important as is positive space in overall composition.
It’s all about finding the right balance.
Simply put, positive space is the actual subject while negative space (also called white space) is the area surrounding the subject.
The latter acts as breathing room for your eyes. Too little negative space results in cluttered and busy photographs with every element in the photo screaming for the viewer’s attention.
Have you ever scanned film negatives on your own? If so, you know it can be a time-consuming process. To help make sure you don’t waste time scanning unwanted negatives, YouTuber Adam of Ekenstam has shared a clever way to preview your negatives using an iPad.[Read More…]
Well, lets just say I’ve gotten better at this over the last couple of years. The left image was one of the first I’ve “scanned” with my DSLR, and the one on the right I’ve just rescanned using the techniques described below (higher resolution available here). Right now I can get higher resolution and better image quality that what street labs give you on CD.
I’ve seen many articles on the web explaining the basics of digitising film negative or transparencies with a digital camera. The basics are quite simple: you take a photo of a negative into a light source and invert. That’s it. But that alone led me to scan negatives that looked like the one on the left, above. Because I’ve never seen one tutorial that told me “the whole story” of how to do it properly, I’ve decided to put together what I’ve learnt during the last two or three of years of scanning film with my DSLR.[Read More…]
When you start publishing your creative work online, you need to be prepared for all kinds of comments, both positive and negative. While the praise feels good and constructive criticism helps us grow – what are we gonna do with “haters?” Simon Cade of DSLRguide gives you some tips how to deal with hateful comments. You should leave them alone, but not ignore them completely. You should also change your attitude, and Simon shares some very helpful tips how to find the balance and turn even hateful feedback into fuel for your future growth.
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