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Vlad Moldovean

If you use vintage lenses, you need to make custom lens profiles

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I’ll start this article by saying I love shooting vintage glass for the character it can imprint on my images. I love the swirly bokeh, the bloom, and the flares and color rendition, but I don’t always want the lens distortion, the chromatic aberration, or the vignette that these lenses naturally have.

Recently I picked up a Nikon 20mm AFD lens from the local second-hand market, which, to be honest, is not even that vintage, as production started in 1989. But being a wide-angle lens, it has quite a significant barrel distortion and heavy vignetting. I do suspect that the one I got might be a bit damaged as it blooms more than any of the really vintage lenses in my collection, so maybe it has been tinkered with.

Adding realistic film grain In Lightroom just got a whole lot better

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I will preface this by saying that I am not an Adobe fanboy, and if this is not clear, I am not paid to praise the Lightroom Classic team in this post. In the last year or so, they have taken this software that seemed to be fading away in favor of the mobile-oriented Lightroom (that still lacks the calibration panel in the develop module) and transformed it into a powerhouse. And in the last version, they added an absolutely amazing new feature that makes film emulation a lot easier to the newest version of Lightroom. And nobody’s talking about it. So let me be the one.

I am a studio photographer and I don’t want to use flash anymore

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As a passionate photographer, I started my journey years ago by transforming my bedroom into a DIY studio. With nothing but a bucket of paint and a wall, I created a simple yet effective backdrop for my shoots. Due to financial constraints, I began with speedlights. But as I grew in skill and experience, I added three studio 100w heads to my arsenal.

While I was always fascinated by complex lighting setups, for some inexplicable reason, I never found studio heads to be my favorite. Nevertheless, since they added up as more lights, I kept using them. As time went on, I became more interested in the cinematic aspect of photography. I began experimenting with various light fixtures to use as practicals in my shots. It was during this period that I discovered LED lights, and my interest in them was sparked.

Adding realistic grain to digital photos is a deeper rabbit hole than you think

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For months now I’ve been obsessed with emulating the film look into my digital photos. It all started with me exploring the panoramic aspect ratio of 65×24 and other wide aspect ratios and trying to understand what makes a photo cinematic. As part of this journey I’ve also started to research grain, how is it formed, and how it looks on different film stocks and, truth be told, I was not ready for how deep this rabbit hole is.

In order to recreate grain well in our digital photos we first have to understand what grain is. On film, the images are composed of grain. Be it silver halides or dye granules, they are organic shapes that are distributed unevenly in an emulsion and when exposed to light they create the image you finally see.

Use Lightroom? Here’s a better way to use presets for a professional workflow

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Lightroom presets are all around us, you might love them as a 1 click solution to your batch editing needs or you might think that they are useless and all the photos where one was used look the same.

Still, the truth is they are here to stay and maybe we should start thinking of how to integrate them into our professional workflows as more than crutches for the following Instagram post.

I started shooting with gaffer tape on my LCD to force myself to think differently

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I’m sure over the last few years all of us photographers have heard the word CINEMATIC so much that in the end, it lost all meaning. Is every photo with crushed backs and a cyan-orange color grade cinematic? I’d say NO! So today I’ll try to explore what are the factors that add up for an image to be cinematic and what can make or break the cinematic vibe of a shot.

It all started while I was watching a video from Grainydays on YouTube where Jason was using a panoramic camera, the Fujifilm TX-1. A vintage camera that creates panoramic images by exposing 2 shots on film at the same time to get an image that has an aspect ratio of 65×25. The entire concept caught my interest, but since I don’t have ~$6000 lying around to spend on a vintage camera and I don’t shoot film either, I went the DIY route and taped 2 strips of gaffers tape to the LCD of my camera and took it out for a test.

How I shoot 200-megapixel 360° panoramic images with the DJI Mini 2

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In this article, I am planning to discuss the way I use my DJI Mini 2, a cheap drone that many people dismiss as being a toy for beginners in order to get photos and animations that stand out. While spreading my belief that with great knowledge you can overcome the limitations of your gear & budget.

I don’t know if this ever happens to someone else, but sometimes I leave home thinking that I would go in one place and end up in an entirely different one. This is what happened to me on the 5’th of March. The universe was calling, I responded and ended up on a hill near Brasov, Romania looking at one of the most amazing sunsets I have ever witnessed.

How to shoot infrared photography with a smartphone

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I will start with a warning: Digital Infrared Photography it’s not easy & this will get technical fast.

Backstory

It all started when I saw some awesome Instagram photos in infrared and I ordered an IR filter (an 88mm ice 760nm from B&H to be more precise) not knowing much about infrared. Filters usually range from 590 to 8-900 nm and usually, this kind of colored infrared shots are obtained with 590nm on a modded camera because it lets some visible light pass as well as infrared. But I had no modded camera and the wrong filter so I decided to try regardless and soon found out that my trusty DSLRs have well-made hot mirrors (the part of the DLSR that normally blocks IR from hitting the sensor) but later discovered that my phone’s sensor is quite sensitive to infrared and this is how my journey started.

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