Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I’ve been using projectors in my photoshoots for many, many years now and I’ve been writing about how to utilise the power of projectors in your shoots for nearly as long too.
As I’ve always said, I believe projectors to be one of the most versatile and creative tools we have at our disposal today and they’re becoming more and more accessible as each year passes. So why don’t we see more of them in photoshoots?
TV isn’t only for spending countless hours in front of it when you don’t feel like doing anything. Instead, you can turn it into a creative prop, and a pretty awesome one.
Caleb Pike of DSLR Video Shooter will show you how to turn a TV, a monitor, or even a projector into a fantastic background for all sorts of product shots. He guides you through the process step by step, helping you build a setup for some neat stills and videos.
Many of us have been there. You get a call to go and photograph or film some people in an office somewhere. You prepare with all sorts of cool ideas, maybe we could shoot in the lobby, or the roof garden you think. But no, when you arrive you’re shown to a smallish conference room with a massive table in the middle and beige walls. How are you going to make this look cool?
Well don’t worry, there are a few tricks you can use to pimp up even the blandest of offices. In this video from Epic Light Media you’ll discover how.
Projectors have been a part of photography for a very long time. Originally, they were designed for boring your friends and family members with slides of your holiday snaps. Since then, though, projectors have become much more useful and now regularly play a creative or practical role in our photography and filmmaking needs.
We’ve shown how you might be able to incorporate projectors into your workflow before, using one as a full-screen preview monitor for video editing. This time, we’re going to take a look at the Wemax Nova 4K ultra-short-throw (UST) ALDP Laser projector with an Ambient Light Rejecting (ALR) screen as a sort of “virtual set” background projection system in the studio.
Today I will discuss the importance of background in photography composition illustrated with some examples of mine.
Part of a larger series covering elements of composition in photography for which you’ll find links at the end of this article.
I taught myself photography in quite a specific order, I navigated / progressed through various urban photography genres:
Graffiti Photography > Urban Landscape Photography > Street Photography
It’s the reason I realised early how important an image’s background really is, allow me to explain:
I have been looking to increase my image sales from my headshot sessions. I decided before the COVID-19 crisis that I wanted to develop a portfolio of headshots with colorful backdrops, instead of my standard white and gray. I wanted to have quick access to all my seamless backdrops, so I could transition to new colors and give my clients different looks.
The challenge I faced was that swapping out rolls felt too slow, and I was going to have more than three colors, and my green backdrop is wider than the others. The standard three-roll holders wouldn’t work for me.
When shooting portraits, the background is one of the things you need to be mindful about. And if you shoot outdoors, you don’t have so much control over it as you do in the studio. In this video, photographer David Bergman will give you a few quick tips for choosing the perfect background and improve your outdoor portraits in an instant.
I have no idea where I first heard this, but it’s extremely true: “the main difference between painting and photography is that the painters need to work hard to put things into their images, whereas photographers have to work hard to take things out of their images.” Painters start with a blank canvas, and every single thing that ends up in the final piece of art is a result of careful craftsmanship, years of hard-earned skill, and raw intention. The photographer’s canvas, on the other hand, is all of the world’s visual chaos, and he or she must deploy an equivalent amount of craftsmanship, skill, and intention to weed out all the fluff.
Portrait photographers pay a lot of attention to their subjects, but sometimes they don’t pay so much attention to the background. In this video, Jeff Rojas will show you three key ways to make the best out of your studio background and make your photos even better.
Sometimes, you aren’t able to get access to the types of real locations you need in order to photograph somebody. Sometimes the location might have a fee to rent it, there might not be enough time to arrange it, or it may simply be out of bounds. But there are other ways around the problem. Like reconstructing it in your own studio space.
When the background is thrown out of focus, it’s easy to fake all kinds of looks. That’s what Jeff Carpenter of Readylight Media explores in this video, where he creates a fake recording studio out of pegboard and a cardboard box for the background of a client headshot.
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