Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
In this article, you will learn what different types of natural lights are available and how to use them to create stunning images of wildlife and nature.
Why my wildlife images look boring and dull? I don’t find the “WOW” factor in my pictures.
My images are sharp, and exposure is ok, but I don’t find them interesting, what’s the reason?
Does this sound familiar to you? Do you have these types of questions?
Well, it’s time to look for the most essential element in your images – light!
When we’re kids, in school, we’re taught that the primary colours are red, yellow and blue. But this isn’t entirely accurate when it comes to light. Pure white sunlight is made up of a whole spectrum of colours, with the primaries actually being red, green and blue. Our cameras with Bayer filter arrays on the sensor see RGB. Our monitors also display RGB.
But have you ever wondered how we’re able to get so many different colours from just three? And why just blasting red, green and blue LEDs at an object doesn’t always give you true white light? This fascinating video from Technology Connections isn’t really specific to photography, but light in general, and how red, green and blue affects our (and our camera’s) perception of colour.
Weird cameras are just the best, aren’t they? And they don’t get much weirder than this. Researchers at Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have published a paper detailing a tiny camera that sees the world the way a shrimp and some insects see it. That is, in polarised light.
Polarisation is essentially the directions in which light waves travel. And this polarisation camera shows us those directions in a rainbow of colours, with the visible light removed. The technology’s been around for a while, although not at this sort of small scale. It opens up a lot of new applications for using such cameras.
This article aims to look at how we as photographers ‘understand’ light. It may seem obvious to many of you, but to a vast majority of us, it’s simply not quite that easy. But what does it truly mean to understand light? Do we really need to understand light to take great photos? The simple answer is no…. but I guarantee it will help.
A little while ago I was teaching one of my lighting workshops and one of the attendees was looking to implement some of the set-ups I was sharing into his workflow. Seems simple enough right? Well it turns out this photographer was a Formula 1 trackside shooter that needed to get portraits of drivers and crew. As you may well imagine, there is limited time to setup a photoshoot in a busy pit-lane on race-day, so he was after lighting modifiers that would be suitable for his slightly more ‘run-and-gun’ portraits.
Every new Slow Mo Guys video just makes me go “wow!”. Seething every day things shot at tens or hundreds of thousand frames per second and then massively slowed down just reveals such amazing things. It might be something incredibly beautiful, or funny, or just plain fascinating to watch.
One thing they get asked about regularly, though, is to film light itself. A seemingly impossible task, but now they’ve done it, using a camera that shoots at an extremely crazy 10,000,000,000,000 frames per second.
Well, even though Light’s L16 wasn’t the critically acclaimed success that the hype hoped it would be, it looks like Light’s technology is definitely being taken seriously by the smartphone world. After some heavy investment from Leica, a partnership with Sony, and the new Nokia 9 PureView containing Light tech, Light has now announced a new partnership with Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi.
Light, the company behind the Light L16 camera which contains 16 sensors and lenses, has announced that they’ve teamed up with Sony to create the next generation of multi-camera smartphones. Well, we knew Light was working on something to do with phones, and now it looks like it’s official.
The system began a few years ago when I needed more light stands and, like most DIY types, didn’t want to pay a lot for them. I happened to have a lot of 3/4″ PVC and 1/2″ metal conduit laying around so I started experimenting. My goal was to come as close as I could to the functions of a retail light stand. The basic stand fits the bill except for the fact that the legs don’t collapse. Since this was a DIY project I wasn’t limited to manufacturer’s accessories. I could dream up as many different add-ons as I wanted. The simple stand soon grew into a complete light support system.
If you’re a photographer, chances are that someone has bought you a lens mug so far. Or maybe you already have a few of those (I know I do). We all know more than one lens mug is just too much – so why not repurpose it? In this video, Dave Knop a.k.a. Knoptop will show you how to turn a lens mug into a desk lamp. It’s simple to make and it looks pretty neat!
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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