Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I’ve lost track of the number of people who’ve asked me how to shoot this type of photo over the years. The basic concept is quite simple, although it can be difficult to wrap your head around if you’ve not used flash in such conditions before.
In this video, photographer Eric Floberg talks about how you can achieve this effect in-camera. While the principle is pretty straightforward, it’ll definitely take some practice.
A few days ago we showed you a way to freeze subjects in ice in Photoshop. Now it’s time to freeze their motion in front of the camera, with the assistance of a little flash. And, of course, a little help from Jay P Morgan of The Slanted Lens. In this video, he shows us how we can freeze the motion of a dancer with strobes.
Portraying things in photographs that shouldn’t be physically possible fascinates a lot of photographers. They love to smile proudly when they see people post “Photoshopped, lol!” in Facebook groups in response to their work. Defying gravity is always a hot topic for this kind of thing, particularly levitation.
But in this mind bending shoot, there’s no Photoshop trickery, no erased wires or cloned out supports. Just good old fashioned ingenuity and photography. Created by photographer Daniel DeArco with the assistance of a rather talented dancer and crew, these images and video are just fantastic.
One of the many types of people photography that I love to do is anything involving dance. I love the motion, the grace, and the positions dancers are capable of. I try whenever I can to do something a little different with dancers. Something where they are out of their normal dance studio surroundings. There are so many different things you can do. One thing that can be a lot of fun and really make your dance images stand out is to photograph dancers along with some form of flying powder. Dance is so dynamic and adding flour, talcum powder, powdered paints, water and things like that can really add to an image and make it really vibrant.
I’ve done these sort of dance images a number of times and have used various powders. My favorite is plain old flour because you can buy so much of it so cheaply. Talcum powder just seems too fine and is more expensive. Tempera paints are a lot of fun and add a lot of color to your images. Just be aware that these powdered paints can get all over and into everything and can be hard to remove. Some of my lights are still covered with yellow from years ago! For any images using powders you will want a lot of room and be in a space that you are not afraid of getting covered with the powder. Clean up can be a nightmare! Outside in the dark would be a good option if it’s not windy if you can find a place.
These sorts of images are not very difficult to do (except for the cleanup!) I will describe what I have found to work for me and talk about one of my more recent powder images, Dark Angel. This is a concept I had tried years before but was unable to get the wings to shape properly and was more fortunate a couple weeks ago when I tried again.
A few days ago, Benjamin Von Wong (flickr) posted a photograph called rejection to his photostream. It was quite an extra ordinary piece of work in my mind.
There was a small bit of info in the captions that caught my eyes: “The Behind the Scenes is actually ready… Eva is just waiting for me to finish up the edits”
I guess Eva is done waiting, because f-stoppers just posted the very cool behind the scenes on this one. [Read More…]
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