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I Took Headshots Of 80 People In One Day. It Hurt

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You know that moment when you agree to do a favor for a friend and it turns into something a bit… well, more? This weekend I ended up taking headshots of 80 people during six non-stop hours of shooting. Here is the story, what I learned, and some random thoughts on the experience.

I’m not a professional photographer (I don’t accept payment for my work), but I do enjoy it and spend quite a bit of time on it. A few months ago a friend planning a single day DC area startup networking event asked if I’d be willing to spend two hours doing simple headshots of people who wanted updated pictures to use on their Linkedin profiles or bio pages.[Read More…]

Photographs Of Little People Show An Alternate World Hidden In The Streets

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London based artist, Slinkachu, uses model humans and everyday objects to create and photographs alternate happenings that may have been in your everyday-normal street.

In his project titled Little People, Slinkachu creates tiny installations of small people and leaves them on the street (as his clever tag line goes – Abandoning little people since 2006).

While the installations are an art by themselves, the photos of those installations are an important part of the art.

Each project is accompanied by a set of images (usually 3 ) showing the world (1) as seen by a fellow little person, (2) as seen by us humans, and (3) something in between. Here are the ones that go with the title image:[Read More…]

Cera Hensley Creates Fantasy Worlds On A 3 By 3 Feet Table

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Cera Hensley, recreates fantasy worlds from everyday objects, and she does it all on a 3×3 feet table.

Cera photographs custom crafted landscapes, and completes them with miniature photos of models separately taken in front of a white backdrop. Playing with perspective and angles, the worlds are mischievous, annoying or surreal yet completely believable.

The process involves pre-visualizing the scene, building the landscape and posing the models to fit. Here are some more samples of her work along with some behind the scenes of their creations taken from two f her projects: Here Nor There and Mime Adventures.[Read More…]

Liftoff 360º Shows Si-Fi 3D Light Paintings

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Today on the blog we are hosting master light painter Patrick Rochon who collaborated with Eric Pare on a 360 light painting project. That means that unlike “regular” light painting which are 2D, the 360 light paintings can be rotated and viewed from any angle.

This part of the project is called Liftoff Liftoff 360º and is summed in the video below. More info, awesome light painting and gear satisfaction after the jump.[Read More…]

The Comprehensive Tech Guide To Pinhole Photography

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If you’re somebody who likes to take film photographs, you know the satisfaction you get from a film photo that you just don’t feel when you use digital. Just imagine seeing the first photo you get out of a camera you designed and built yourself!

The process of designing and building a camera may seem daunting, but with a little patience and the help of this guide and some further reading, you’ll be able to do it. You can use this information to figure out what you want to build, gather some simple materials and tools, and build it!

I want it to be clear that building a pinhole camera relies on your abilities, available materials, and your desired outcome. As a result, this guide is less of a step-by-step and more of a lesson on how pinhole cameras work, the physics and math involved, and some practical knowledge I gained while researching and building my own cameras. [Read More…]

Watching The Exposure Cycle In Slow Mo Reveals Some Impressive Engineering

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Watching a camera shutter go in slow motion is both educating and amazing. The exposure cycle is well known:

  1. Mirror goes up
  2. front curtain moves down, exposing the CCD
  3. back curtain slides down blocking the CCD from further exposure
  4. front curtain moves back into upwards “ready” position
  5. mirror goes back down.

Actually there is a 1.5 step where the back curtain moves up, getting ready to go down later, but this step is hidden from us as it happens behind the (still closed) front curtain.

This cycle can go as fast as 1/8000 of a second on some of the more professional camera bodies.

I thought it would be fun to watch different cameras go at the shutter sequence in slow mo. Note that some of the clips were not taken with a pro camera but rather with the $450 Nikon V1. Personally I was surprised at the backlash the mirror goes through on the rerun step.

[Read More…]

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!)

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Understanding Metering, Part Two: What To Use, When By Ming Thein

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This is part two of Ming Thein‘s series on Understanding Metering.

In part one we examined why metering is important, and how the basics of how meters work. In today’s article, I’lltake a closer look at the different types of metering, how they differ, and under what situations they should be deployed.

A sample viewfinder – in this case, a rough representation of the Nikon D2H/ D2X finder.

With that background out of the way, let’s look at how the various metering options work, and what typical situations they might best be deployed under. Cameras typically have three options, or some variation upon that. Within these options, it’s also usually possible to fine tune various aspects of the meter’s operation. I’m going to leave out handheld meter operation since this is something that’s almost never encountered today. An important point to note is that all meters can be fooled by situations of uniform luminance, so don’t trust the readout blindly. Remember, meters function by averaging the entire evaluated area out to middle gray; this means if your evaluated area is meant to be black or white, you’re going to need to add or subtract some exposure compensation. For predominantly light/ white scenes, you need to add; for dark scenes, subtract. This holds true for every one of the different metering methods detailed below.[Read More…]

Build A Mega 50MP+ Wide Angle Digital Pinhole Lens

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I thought I’ve seen it all with pinholes. From getting them in walnuts to making a run on three 35mm films. David O’Sullivan proved me wrong with his submission to our How I Took It. David created a 50MP pinhole camera by cleverly using a body cap. Definitely not how I’ve seen body cap/pinhole combos done before.

Like many people with a DSLR I have experimented on and off with the ubiquitous pinhole lens made out of a body cap and some aluminium cans. I have always been disappointed with the results as they end up just being blurry photographs and don’t have any of the magic a ‘real’ pinhole does. Real pinhole photographs are often very wide angle and have characteristic vignetting around the edges. This imparts a dreamy or other-worldly feeling to the image.

I set out to improve on the idea and build my own.

[Read More…]

How To Capture Motion Trails While Freezing Subjects Using Shutter Drag

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I love how Benjamin Von Wong approaches each of his projects with a loads of creativity and enthusiasm. You just know that he’s always trying something new and in his latest project – The Red Mistress, he proves it yet again! Some of the more outstanding photographs from this project are a combination of capturing frozen motions with a combination of continuous light and strobes.

In the following post Ben shares the motivation and technical steps neede to create this kind of photograph. Check it out after the jump!

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