Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
A few months ago, I gave a masterclass about how to create colorful portraits. One of the setups was a unique portrait with a model “trapped” inside a light-painted circle. I wanted to share how I created that portrait using a drill, a found garden hose, and a couple of KYU-6 LED lights.
You may hear me saying “don’t try this at home” a couple of times. If you do decide to defy me, please use soft materials like a garden hose and soft KYU-6 lights. (vs., say, a broomstick).
Light painting can be a lot of fun, and it’s even more fun when you combine it with regular old flash to create dynamic and interesting images. Portraits, particularly of athletes or dancers can provide the perfect subject for experimenting with this technique as it appears to show movement in a still image, which is what sport and dance are all about really.
In the video below, photographer Bee Trofort shows us how she captured these intriguing images of an athlete using a combination of Spiffy Gear’s innovative wrist wrap light bracelets, the KYU-6.
Yes, you read the title correctly. Well, almost. If I’m being completely honest actually I used four small wearable LED lights, and admittedly it was a fairly small castle. But you’d be surprised how little light you need with modern mirrorless cameras, a long exposure and a fairly high ISO. These little LED lights really can pack a punch in certain situations (mainly in complete darkness!).
The season of giving is upon us – which becomes immediately obvious whenever you walk into a store and you’re overwhelmed by Whamageddon. If you want to avoid the Christmas music and prefer to do your shopping online, then have no fear, DIYP’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guides are here to rescue you with some of our favourite new releases of the year, as well as a few old favourites that always seem to find a place in our gear bags.
In this post, we’re going to be taking a look at lighting, but keep an eye out for upcoming guides featuring Tripods, Sliders & Gimbals, and other accessories and gadgets and be sure to check out our previous guide going over the best of this year’s new Cameras and lenses.
Do you like scary movies? If so, here’s a light painting tutorial for you just in time for Hallowe’en, by Jason Page. You might want to sleep with the lights on after watching this!
Color. Such an important tool to help bring a time, place, or even emotions into an image. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something that makes working with color easier? Inside this little package is a new tool by Rosco called “Mixbook“. To help creators pre-visualize gel and LED colors.
Essentially Rosco has digitized the old gel swatch books, as you can see in my reenactment of a Rosco scientist at work. Note the old gels from my swatch book flying around as the new Mixbook arises from the smokey pot.
I put off getting a 3D printer for the longest time. I didn’t want to get one just for the sake of having a new toy that I’d get bored with, so I held off getting one until I felt I had a genuine need for one. Now, I have five – the most recent of which are the Snapmaker 2.0 A350 and its predecessor, the Snapmaker Original, and I find them absolutely invaluable.
I’ve been using them recently to print a bunch of tools and accessories to help me with my photography and filmmaking. Some of them are workflow and organisation accessories while others are actual tools used to create content. So, here, I’m going to talk about some of the most useful things I’ve printed lately.
Light is something that plagues us all, whether we’re photographers or filmmakers. There’s either never enough, or it’s coming from the wrong direction, or it’s too hard or soft for what we need. So, we often need to add our own to get that look that we really want. So, with cameras and lenses out of the way, that’s what we’re going to be covering in our lighting gift guide.
Lighting products is a lot of fun, but it can be quite tricky. Most lights we use in the studio for shooting products are huge. They’re often big strobes or LED panels, but sometimes you just need something small. Something you can fit into a small space and light up just a small section of a product, or indeed the whole of a small product.
In this video, photographer Mark Duffy shows us how he uses Spiffy Gear’s new KYU-6 LED lights to light up an Xbox controller for a little bit of small product photography.
Product photography can be a lot of fun, especially when you start to experiment with light painting. In this video, photographer Mark Duffy shows us how he does his long exposure product photography using the new KYU 6 LED lights and Godox MS300 strobes in the studio on a pair of trainers (or “sneakers”, for those of you in the US).
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