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Do a background check before shooting wildlife photos to get a variety of shots

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When photographing wildlife – much like hiring a new employee or going on a date with someone you met online – it’s essential to do a background check. What is behind the animal that you’re photographing?

The background can completely make or break an image. It’s essentially the canvas that you’re painting the rest of your picture on top of. By paying more attention to what’s going on back there you can vastly improve your images.

I’m going to show you four photos. They all feature the same Tenerife Lizard and were all taken a handful of seconds apart. The only thing I changed between each image was my physical position in relation to the lizard, giving me an entirely different background each time. Let’s have a look!

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Super Easy and Cheap DIY Product Photography Setup

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Everyone needs to photograph products once in a while.

Whether it’s for an etsy shop, ecommerce retail, eBay, a Shopify store or just for the occasional Craigslist sale; it’s really handy to be able to do your own high quality product photography.

In this article, I will show you a super easy, low cost, product photography setup that anyone can use to create very high-end looking DIY product photography.

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How to get colored background without a backdrop or Photoshop

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In his previous tutorial, Malaysian photographer Andrew Boey showed you why a white wall is the only backdrop you’ll ever need. After turning white to black, in his latest tutorial, he teaches you to get all kinds of vibrant colors from a plain white wall. You don’t need a backdrop or Photoshop, but some speedlights, light modifiers and color gels.

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How to make DIY “rusty wall” background out of plywood

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Guys at raw.exchange offer tons of great resources for photographers and retouchers. They are devoted and serious and put a lot of effort in their packages, and for this article, they shared with us how they built a “rusty wall” background – out of wood!

“Why would you make a DIY rusty wall” you may ask. Well, one of the very attractive packages is their Rusty Wall background textures. It features 82 hi-res background textures of a rusty way, taken from different perspectives. And although they are master retouchers, their background is a real deal. So, if you’re less into Photoshop and more into DIY and building, or just curious to see how raw.exchange background comes to life – carry on reading. The kind guys from raw.exchange shared with DIYP how to make the rusty wall background out of wood.

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How photographing background plates can help you in your work

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Do you have the habit of photographing plates? This doesn’t refer to food photography, but to the backgrounds you capture to give you more options when you get to the editing process. In this video, Jay P. Morgan shares some great advice why photographing plates is important and how they can be useful for your work. They can definitely save you sometimes and help you get the shot even when everything seems lost.

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How zooming with your lens and your feet changes relationship between foreground and background

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Before you raise your torches and pitchforks, this is not another post about how focal length affects your subject, or whether you should “zoom with your feet” or not. I’m sure you’ve already seen how changing focal length and/or distance changes perspective, but this video answers an important question – what can you do with this information?

Jay P. Morgan shows examples how changing your focal length and getting closer or further away from the subject affects the relationship between the foreground and the background. Knowing this helps you achieve different things in a shot, gives it different looks and meanings, or helps you avoid distracting elements.

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How I shot the Photoshoper’s wet dream: A PSD room where you can control 34 different lights

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(hit play on this movie to see what this article is about, this is not a computer generated image, it’s all done in camera – see the final product here)

As someone who deals with compositing on a daily basis, I foud myself in a restless state. And I don’t mean that restless state that all us creatives are in, I mean something that was extreme even for me. I am always struggling with backplates, so I started making a wish list of what the perfect backplate would be. What would it look like? Turns out it’s not an easy question, and it definitely does not have an easy answer. Making that backplate required a $50,000 camera and ended up as a 14 Gigabyte file. But I have finally found how I want my backplates to be. Here is the story of how I made it.

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How to easily use gels to create virtually any color background

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Here is a great tool to add to your lighting toolbox, controlling lights with gels. It’s not about making the light hard or soft, it’s different of control, one that allows playing with color relations. And While there is quite a bit you can do with gels in general, today I am going to focus on controlling backdrop color.

There is a way to get three looks using only two lights and a gray backdrop. If we take this concept and expand it, we can use gels to control the background. We can actually mimic quite an infinite number of backdrops. Instead of using two studio strobes like I did in the last tutorial, for this lesson I’m going to be using three speedlights. The reason I wanted to use speedlights rather than studio strobes is because I got a handful of questions about whether or not the 3 in1 headshot could be done with more basic gear. In order to lay those concerns to rest I wanted to get back to basics and use some of the least expensive gear on the market to prove that you can get some great images with very inexpensive gear.

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If you can only get one backdrop for your studio, grey is what you want and here’s why

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When setting up a studio, one of the more difficult decisions that a newer studio shooter must make is which backdrop to get.  More often than not, it’s which backdrops (plural) should they get?

Photographer Joe Edelman is going to make it a real easy decision for you with this very informative video.  You don’t need to get a whole bunch of backdrops, especially when you’re just starting out with studio work.  All you need is grey.

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