- Recommendation 1: You can ask your traveling companion who is holding the camera to capture your turning around moment with a big smile and looking straight at the camera. Capturing the exactly turning moment is the key to make this pose successful, which requires privity between you and the photographer.
- Recommendation 2: Back facing the camera, you can fondle your hair with your left hand and take your large brim hat with the right hand. Your should face towards the direction of the wind at beach, so your hair and brim hat will sway like dancing along with the wind. What a beautiful moment that would be!
- Recommendation 3: When the sunshine become soft at dusk, you can capture the scene when the sun is sitting in the horizon of the sea. Stand on your toes and ask your partner to squat, with the sunset ornament your body, you would become part of the beautiful sight.
- Recommendation 4: You can make a good use of the sands. Sands can be the easiest tool for taking beach photos. Actually it can be very useful for many poses. Today I recommend you this simple one: just fiddle up the sands and shoot the exact moment when they are spreading down, PS with a nostalgic grounding color, your eyes won’t want to leave such a picture in the photo albums.
- Recommendation 5: You can also lie down at the beach to let your companion take the photo from your head side. With both of your hands at the wide brim beach hat and kneels stay higher than your head, you can make a lovely photo pose. The hat is better being white, the same color with the clouds, or blue, the same color with the sky and the sea.
Month: October 2019
Creative Photography
Don’t Be Afraid To Break The Boundaries
One of the most common mistakes amongst beginner photographers (and not only!) is that they are afraid of breaking the patterns, of trying something new and revolutionary, something no other photographer has tried in the past. It is OK to be different, and remember the thumb rule when it comes to photography: you can break all the rules of photography, as long as the final result is outstanding!
Use Tricks In Your Best Interest
Every photographer, regardless of how good he is uses tricks and photo editing programs to enhance the quality of his images. Trick photography is a great way to take pictures on a budget, as you do not need to invest in heavy equipment nor do you need a certain environment to take a unique shot that can make history. Photo editing programs, on the other hand, are widely used all over the world – from correcting skin flaws to adding a touch of color to clouds or a lightning, these programs are truly amazing and they can help you.
Become Familiar With Shutter Speeds
In a nutshell, there are two types of exposure: long exposure and short exposure. This refers to the amount of time the camera’s shutter is open. The shutter speed coupled with the aperture of the lens determine the amount of light that reaches the film. A slower shutter speed is recommended if you want to introduce an element of blur, while a very fast shutter speed can make a moving object to appear frozen.
Macro Photography
The world is amazing in all its beauty, so why not take photos of the small elements of nature that we often ignore? A bug, a butterfly or a caterpillar – they can all be great elements for creative photography. This is where macro photography steps in and allows you to zoom very much without distorting the quality of the image in any way. Up-close shots require the macro technique, otherwise the object in the picture will be blurry and your effort is in vain.
Think Outside The Box!
In the end, this is the purpose of creative photography – it aims to teach both photographers and their subjects how to think outside the box. Do you have an outrageous idea that you want to use in your future shootings? If so, then go for it! Dress up as your favorite character, wear your high school’s mascot costume or add some homemade items and crafts – whichever suits you best!
Shutter Speed and Exposure in DSLR
It is indicated by some numbers like 1/10, 1/200, 1/4000, 1/2 etc. Basically it is always calculated by the fraction of a second, which means, 1/2000 shutter speed indicates the single unit of the time which we will get if we break 1 second into 2000 equal units.
- Faster the speed of shutter, the sensor will be less exposed to the light. Faster shutter speeds are often required to capture very fast moving subjects like a panther chasing a deer or a formula one car at its top speed.
- Fast shutter speed is one of the key things to freeze a subject which is a quintessential part of Sports Photography or Wildlife Photography.
- Typically, a highest shutter speed in an entry level to mid-level DSLR camera is 1/4000 which extends to 1/8000 in the professional DSLR bodies.
- A slow speed is also a very much handy tool for creative photography. When you are at a place with low light, it is necessary that the image sensor is exposed for a long time to capture your picture perfect image. Suppose you are eager to capture the Taj Mahal on a moonlit night, then the slow speed is the main thing which is going to help you to get your dream image.
- It is treated as a slow one when it became 1/10 or slower than that though there is no hard and fast rule for defining slow ones.
- Main obstacle often photographers face while handling a low light environment with a slow speed is the blurred effect in image known as motion blur and camera shake.
- The motion blur is caused by anything (a car or a person) which was in motion during the exposure time. A slightest movement in someone’s body can also cause a motion blur when you are capturing images in slow shutter speeds. So, be aware of movement during shooting. But this motion blur could be interesting and an effective tool for creativity if you can handle it efficiently and intelligently.
- The camera shake is caused by the movement of body or parts of the body of the photographer. Though you might think that it is very little and nominal, but your high precision DSLR treats it huge like you treat the earthquake. To eliminate this problem, a sturdy tripod must be used.
- A remote shutter release cable with a sturdy tripod is the best combination when you are planning to capture photographs at night with slow and long shutter speeds.
- The slowest one in almost every DSLR camera is 30secs, after which it gives an option known as “BULB”, in which the shutter remains open as long as the shutter release button is pressed.
Pick the Ideal Digital Camera
If you’re an amateur photographer, keep to the low-end of cameras, one that you can afford. Then teach yourself about composing photos, exposure, along with other techniques.
Once you determine that you enjoy photography as a hobby and you would prefer some advanced functions, then you can sell your old equipment and graduate to higher-end models.
If you figure out that you’ve got a secret gift in taking great pictures and you’re thinking that you may genuinely wish to make some money from your talent, then you can spend more money on fancy equipment.
But your cash goes furthest if you get quality lenses. This will make a bigger impact than buying a costly camera body.
The biggest misconception when picking a camera is that the megapixels make a big difference in the quality of your images.
Unless your image is going to be plastered on a billboard, every camera presently on the market should be perfectly sufficient to satisfy your MP needs.
Instead, think about these distinctions between high-end DSLR vs. low-end DSLR vs. point-and- shoots.
- Price (the difference between the top and bottom could be a few thousand dollars)
- Response time (the time it will take the camera to take the photo after you hit the shutter)
- Auto-focus
- Functionality in low-light conditions
- Video functionality
- Weather-proof bodies
So here’s how to tell if you are a true photography buff: if you’re always snapping pics with your camera, particularly of things that many people probably would not consider photogenic, then you can consider yourself a real aficionado. In this case, you’re probably a person who would take advantage of the extra features of a DSLR.
Make The Most Out Of Photo Editing Software
Resizing Your Photos
Aside from editing flaws, you can also use online image editing software to help to resize your images. Sometimes when a photo had been snapped, there is a lot of unnecessary scenery in the background. By resizing the image you can simply remove this. Also, of course there are strict size regulations in place for some profile pictures on the internet, and banners and images for promotional items require that a document is printed at a certain size. By using software to change the size, you can easily make sure that your photos comply with the regulations that are in place.
Image Rotation
Sometimes you may have taken a great photo, but have captured it upside down, or in a manner where it would look better if it was rotated. Software on the internet will allow you to be able to rotate the image, turning it around to blend in with your requirements. Photo editing software will help you to be able to do just this.
The examples in this article where photo editing software can be used to your advantage are just a few. The list is really endless and could go on and on. Technology is developing each and every day and we are now able to turn the worst photos, into the best ones with the simple use of online tools. This is great news for people that want to be freelance photographers and have a dream to work from home and make a career out of freelance photography.
Improve Your DSLR Photography Skills
Find out how to play with the shutter speed. You may choose to snap a quick picture or choose a slower exposure to capture a flow or movement in its entirety. You’ll have to experiment with this and discover what type of speed matches specific situations. This is a question of personal style instead of a general rule to follow.
It is possible to allow the camera pick the proper white balance for any particular environment, but sometimes the camera will get it wrong and the photo will look washed out.
If you’re having difficulty holding your camera straight, purchase a tripod. A tripod will go a long way in helping to keep your camera in position, so that you can focus on other variables aside from balance. Tripods work great if you’re in the wilderness or in an irregular terrain.
Use a fantastic lens to have a better image quality. It is possible to make artistic pictures with any sort of equipment if you work hard and adapt your style to your gear. But getting a fantastic lens opens up more possibilities.
Make use of lines to draw the viewer’s eye to the photograph. If done properly, the lines themselves may even be an interesting subject themselves. The use of lines in photography is a complex topic, but the most important issue to consider is they should draw you in, not push you apart.
You can do a lot to change the quality of your pictures by adjusting the focus of this shot. This doesn’t always need to be in the middle of the photo. Getting your subject in the lower right hand or left hand corner, as an instance, can increase dramatic aspects of your picture.
You may move the subject around so you can get a shot you find interesting. Depending upon the impression you wish to convey, try shooting your subject from different sides or from above and below.
Patterns can be an excellent design motif if you use them properly. You will find patterns on almost anything. You can locate them on lots of clothes, in design, and even in character.
Photograph Interiors
Decide on camera position.
When photographing an interior, do you do that with the eyes of the visitor or user of a space or the designer? A designer may want you to give an overview of the interior to enable him to explain the layout of the place. The camera standpoint is that much higher than that of a visitor. For a good coverage you may want to do both.
When positioning the camera, use a sturdy tripod with good leveling possibilities. You will find that the so called ‘ball-head’ tripods used for flexible positioning are far from ideal for this type of work. Better is to use a tripod head where you can adjust every dimension independently. The build-in leveling device will give you a good starting point. Look for walking patterns and view lines in the interior. Make sure that the vertical lines remain vertical, in a way that walls don’t fall and furniture doesn’t look pear shaped. Try to realise that when transforming a 3-dimensional space into a flat 2 dimensional image, the picture needs to be pleasing to the eye. So look for classic diagonal view lines and try to implement the rule of thirds. Subsequently look for horizontal lines in relation to the frame of the picture. If the horizontal lines are level with the picture frame than this would be perfect. Don’t forget that any correction of vertical and horizontal perspective in post-processing will eat into the overall resolution of your image. The use of wide angle tilt-shift lenses will make live easier and gives you more flexibility in choosing your position. Also live view is a very necessary feature of your camera with this type of photography attached to a laptop or tablet computer. In the olden days, analogue photographers took these images with large bulky technical view camera’s and had to judge the ‘preview’ upside down covered with a black sheet… Although I am not that old I used to work with them when I studied photography that the Academy of Art in Groningen.
Exposure and contrast
The wide angle lens and tripod enables for great depth of focus by using small apertures. For a 17-24mm lens for a full-frame camera, use f8-f16 for the sharpest images at iso 50-200. Use a remote control or the timer to avoid any camera shake.
You will find huge differences between the lighter and darker area’s of an interior, especially when bright daylight is coming in. If you use the centre weighted average or evaluative exposure mode of the camera the white walls and ceilings will look dull and grey and the shadow area’s will lose detail and colour. A simple way to overcome this is over-exposing the image and darken certain area’s in post processing by ways of dodging and burning. The success rate of this way will depend on the contrast, exposure and the dynamic range of your sensor. Better is to use a combination of analogue techniques and digital contrast enhancement in post-processing.
By adding light to the darker area’s the overall contrast will decrease and colour and clarity will return in the shadow area’s. Obviously, this needs to be done in a subtle way so that the natural atmosphere of the space is not changed.
Another way is combining multiple exposures in Photoshop. Do this by adjusting the exposure time and take 3-6 exposures depending of the overall contrast. Make sure that the camera doesn’t change position during the exposures and that there are no moving subjects in the image. There are various automated ‘HDR’ type software methods to combine these images automatically, but I find that the end result tends to look very artificial. I use a manual method called DRI, or Dynamic Range Increase in Photoshop. I start with the one or two stops over exposed image and then put the darker ones in layers over each other, by selecting the highlights and masking them. This will take a bit of practice, but you will get very natural results!
Obviously in some situations you can combine the two above described methods.
Colour temperature differences
An interior will have a wide variety of light sources. Fluorescent will generate a green-ish image, whereas tungsten will make the surrounding area of the light source brown-red. Incoming daylight contains a lot of blue light and the flash light as well. It is therefore crucial that you adjust the whitebalance of your camera as accurate as possible using live view and some careful interpretation as it is impossible to remember how it was when you are sitting behind your monitor.
Usually the colour balance will lean towards tungsten and the camera should be set somewhere in the region of 3000 – 4000 Kelvin. Some partial editing will be needed to certain area’s to bring these within an acceptable level. Usually the blue effect of daylight is accepted and very much liked in the interiors industry because of the high tech stage light effect.
Handy Tricks to Master Google Photos
Turn off cellular data
This is essential for smartphone users that don’t have unlimited data. Many users use Google Photos to not only back up existing photos on their cameras but also automatically back up images that were taken on their smartphones. For this reason, it is crucial to turn off back up over mobile data and also allow the Google Photos app to only back up when you are charging your phone to protect your battery life.
Upload old photos
For you to save more storage it is important to upload your old photos to the Google Photos Library. This is a simple process that only involves dragging and dropping the photos from your external storage. In the library, the photos will appear based on the date they were taken hence, making it easier for you to locate them when you need to. Your connectivity will determine how long the uploading process will take.
Free up more space on your phone
For a user without an SD card or a phone with unlimited storage, it is important to regularly free up space on your device. Google Photos does this really well by just tapping at free up device storage in the settings menu. This is a safe process because although the backed up photos will be deleted you can always access them when you are connected to the internet.
Label your photos
Labeling the people in your photos comes in handy in the future. This is because you can easily identify them by searching by their name in Google Photos. This makes it easier to find every picture of the person you are looking for. It also saves time especially when you are in a hurry.
Get free unlimited storage
Google Photos offers unlimited storage with a minor caveat. It only offers a maximum of 16MP resolution. This can be tricky while saving videos and photos at their original quality because they will eat up into all the space that there is. To solve this it is crucial saving your photos and videos at high-quality resolution. This majorly helps you free up some space.
Edit and save your photos
Google Photos has an option to edit your photos to the desired look you’re after. This feature allows you to add a background color, crop among others. You can easily remove what you don’t want on your videos or images. It is, however, important to save the images once you edit them.
Remove geolocation
Images and videos were taken by your phone nowadays have a lot of location details on them. This is good for your storage because you would want to remember all about the details. However, Google Photos uses such information to actively map out where your pictures were taken. This is not good because you do not want people viewing or receiving these photos knowing exactly where they were taken, especially when you share via emails. For this reason, it is best to remove geolocation.
Ultimate Camera Controls
Practice, practice, practice
This is by far the most important, but it must be done consistently and with a concentrated effort. It took me a long time to understand the relationship between each of the crucial settings on my first camera, but the more I practiced and experimented, the quicker I understood, and then once it just clicked and I no longer had to think about it.
Practice costs nothing other than time, especially now that we are in a digital age with a delete button, to erase our mistakes!
Simplify the scene
Including too much in your scene is often too much to view, hence why one of the most effective techniques is to lessen what’s in your shot. Keeping a single subject, complemented by a plain simple background or surroundings will make all the difference.
Line edges up
Using the edge of something in your scene to interact with another edge creates a visual pathway. The shoreline of a beach leading out to a headland can create the impression of a continual line. Use these to your advantage, line up as many things as possible to lead to your subject.
Tell a story
I am always looking for a way to convey a message in my photography, and it can often mean finding a bizarre angle, a lower vantage pint or simply getting closer. But all in all, every photograph is about telling a story and to do so, you need a connection. The stronger the connection between your subject and its surrounds/environment, the stronger the message, therefore the stronger the appeal of the image. Look to include items/things/views etc that compliment the subject or challenge it, either way, questions drawn from your image, all lead to building a story.
Experiment with colour
A colour photograph isn’t the aim for every photograph. Experimenting with different colour hues, such as converting to black and white or sepia, or some other monotone, or even just desaturating (removing some intensity) the colour a little can help be less distracting. Too much colour, can sometimes distract the viewer from the subject, because they wow over the colour and then look for a subject. It’s all about experimenting.
Show it off
Showing you work is one of the best ways to get feedback. Show your images to everyone you can, friends, family and little to their very first reaction… “wow” or “oh OK”, or “that’s nice”. The latter two is your first indicator that the image didn’t grab their attention immediately.
Look at what can be improved and get out there.
Defy Gravity With Awesome Moves
One of the simplest, yet most overwhelming and inspiring feeling is found in the types of photographs where the subject seems to levitate above the ground. Levitation photography is still one of the most eye-catching and spectacular types of photographic subjects. However, despite the seemingly complex nature of these photographs, many of them are simple to achieve either all “in-camera”, with the use of Photoshop technology or even using an application on your phone.
For most amateur or aspiring photographers, the ability to improve your picture-taking skills is actually easier than we might think. Presented in this article is an informative preview about levitation photography. The article also shows you how to incorporate this type of special effect into your repertoire. The following are tricks to aid you accomplish levitation photography.
Jumping Technique
The most spectacular effects are the simplest of all to photograph. The subject simply jumps in place, above the ground and then snaps the photograph. There are no post-production or editing effects required since everything takes place inside the camera. However, it does take more than just simple jumping to achieve the effect.
Stationary objects should also be included. In other words, the levitation effect is more pronounced when we see objects that are normally stationary in the frame of the picture, such as a house, vehicle, furniture or any type of stationary object in a levitated position.
The human subject must not look like he or she is jumping. You can achieve this stationary position with a calm expression on the face, slight bending of the knees so that the feet will appear to be floating effortlessly off the ground and some kind of rigidity on the clothing, which, does not give away that the subject, is in some type of motion.
If your subject has long hair, it would be important to press the shutter button during the middle of a jump, and not in the final phase while the subject is descending with their hair appearing to be hanging from the sky thus giving away clues of a poorly taken jump shot. You can also use hair styling product to minimize hair movement to make the shoot easier.
The shutter speed on your camera must be set fast enough so that there is no motion blur as motion blur occurs when someone is moving quickly. Such instances of motion blur happen while you are jumping. You can hire a skilled model, particularly a dancer or athlete who is accustomed to jumping to be the subject, making it a more realistic effect.
Double Exposures Technique
The next type of levitation trick is using objects for example stools and ladders to support the subject. After this, you should mask out the subject in post-production editing with the use of a photo editing software (e.g. Adobe Photoshop). This is perhaps the most common type of levitation photography.
This type of levitation photography can achieve some spectacular effects if done correctly. You should ensure that objects used to support the subject are easy to remove in post-production editing. To perform the post-production editing, you will require double exposures (i.e. shoot two images for post-processing).
Tips on how to capture images
- Use a sturdy tripod to hold your camera, and place the tripod at a fixed position for the entire shoot.
- Use manual mode on your camera to achieve your desired lighting exposure, and maintain the same setting for your entire shoot.
- Use manual focus-mode on the camera lens to achieve your desired focus point on your subject, and maintain the same focus point for your entire shoot.
- Consider using a remote shutter release or set your camera on self-timer mode. This is if you are modeling for your own shoot.
- While shooting double exposures, the first image should consist of only the background without the subject and supporting object. The second image should consist of the exact same background but with your subject and the required supporting object.
After capturing the images, you will need to use the Photoshop software to align the two images. You can then easily remove the supporting object by using the masking technique.
In essence, there needs to be a significant color difference between the supporting objects and the subject itself. This makes it easier to isolate and remove the supporting object while editing.
Tips on how to make your picture appear more realistic
- Try to include or create shadows of your levitating subject. You should shoot the picture under soft lighting to achieve soft shadows, as it will make your work easier during the post-production editing. When necessary, you can clone out the shadow of the supporting object and add in artificial shadows using the burn tool in Adobe Photoshop.
- The complex the background, the more believable is the levitation. Using a simple, solid color background makes it very easy to achieve levitation effects. However, the more complex and natural the background, the more believable is the image. Removing and replacing the support structure is more difficult to achieve.
If you apply the above tips and tricks on how to shoot levitation photography, you will definitely add wings to your existing portfolio and help you draw impressed audience at a quicker rate.