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How to photograph a clear liquid bottle using inexpensive gear and unusual modifiers

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Bottles are always a fun and challenging photography experiment, especially ones that contain crystal clear liquids like vodka. I don’t buy vodka often and when I do, it rarely tends to stay full long enough to have any time in front of the camera, but Dustin at Workphlo has definitely put some thought into photographing this one using some low budget kit and very interesting techniques.

If you’ve watched Dustin’s videos before, you’ll know he’s a fan of compositing when it comes to product photography. And this particular technique pretty much requires it as he cuts paper to act as reflectors on just small sections of the bottle’s label.

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Skylum shows off the new Luminar 4 Sky Replacement feature in action

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Sky replacements are fairly common in photography these days. Not everybody is shooting a camera with a wide enough dynamic range to always capture a well-exposed subject without a blown out sky. Or, perhaps the sky on the day you were shooting is just a bit boring. Typically, we take to Photoshop to do the sky replacement and blend it in with our foreground scene.

Luminar 4, though, is coming with a new AI Sky Replacement feature, first mentioned last month. Now, Skylum has released a video showing the sky replacement feature in action in the latest beta edition of Luminar 4.

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How to blend two landscape photographs together in Photoshop

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Part of the joy of landscape photography for me is standing around and waiting for the light to change. You put your camera on its tripod, compose a shot and wait, taking photos every few minutes, whenever the sky or light or whatever looks interesting.

I caught the tail end of a storm in Santorini, Greece, with heavy clouds blowing over right at sunset. An hour or so later and it was blue hour, with streetlights and buildings lit up. Both photos are below, after being edited in Lightroom using the Lightroom Develop System.

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How to create a festive wintery portrait in the studio with a little compositing

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Christmas has gone. We’re almost to the new year. In a few hours, we’ll be there. But it’s never too late for a festive wintery themed photo shoot. Winter’s still going to be here for a while yet. In this video, photographer and educator Gavin Hoey walks us through his process to create this festive fine art composite portrait in the studio.

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How we made this exploded view of a floating Sigma 105mm f/1.4 Art lens

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I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on the Sigma 105mm f/1.4 Art lens ever since it was announced. I got to have a brief look at one during The Photography Show back in March, but didn’t really have the chance to play with it properly.

Fortunately, one of my closest friends is Sigma UK Ambassador, Paul Monaghan. So, when they sent him one to play with, we decided to get together. We met up a couple of times to go out and take it for a spin and I’ve already posted my first impressions of using the lens. The second time, though, the weather didn’t cooperate, so we used the lens as the subject of a product shot.

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Shoot for better composites by choosing your background first

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As an artist who shoots mostly composites, more often than not I’m going to be cutting out my subject and placing them in a different scene. A lot of the time I only have a rough idea of what kind of a background I’ll be using, so I just shoot my subject as best as I can and figure out the backdrop later. Sometimes I have no idea what I’m going to do with my model, but a wise and incredibly good-looking man once said, “You don’t always need a plan.”

HOWEVER, if I do a shoot knowing full well what my background looks like before I even pick up my camera, it makes everything a million times easier.

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Here is an easy tip for compositing hair like a ninja

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I wanted to share one of the images created for a tutorial I made, and chat a bit about one of my greatest compositing tips – hair extraction. You’re welcome. But if you’re all, “Thanks for the great tip about compositing Robert!”  … But that’s just not enough. I want to know more!” Then you can go buy my tutorial and help pay off my epic student loan debt ….

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Wacom’s entry-level Intuos tablets just got a huge new upgrade

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A graphics tablet is one of the most essential pieces of kit one can own as a photographer or retoucher. Sure, you can edit with a mouse, but a tablet makes life so much easier, and faster, and more accurate. While you’re often good with pretty much anything that has the Wacom name stamped on it, the really good ones have traditionally been rather expensive.

The Intuos is the low budget entry into the world of Wacom tablets, but they’re quite basic. And small. Now, though, with the new 2018 range of Intuos tablets, they’ve seen some pretty significant upgrades in size, sensitivity and capability.

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