Interested in seeing how an award winning ad was designed? BennyYarnell™ is a designer who has shared the elements that compose his ad for the DC10 Club, which won last year’s Punctum Day awards for Best Design of the Year. Hear in his own words how he addresses the client’s interests in the creation of this ad:
Tags: award winning, Graphic Design, iStockPhoto.com, Punctum Day 2007, stock photography
iStockPhoto.com awards $40,000 is cash/prizes next month for the second annual Worldwide Punctum Day. These awards go to the top voted stock files on iStockPhoto.com. To get a feel for what they are looking for, you can see last year’s winners online:
It’s not too late to upload and enter your files!
Tags: awards, Design, Flash, iStockPhoto.com, prizes, stock photography, vector, Video
Here are several Photoshop tutorials to produce some amazing effects. Enjoy!
Tags: Adobe Photoshop Tutorials, Digital Imaging, Effects, Photography, retouching
Are you an incoming first year or transfer student! Do you have an interest in filmmaking and/or photography? Don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity.
Registration is now open for the Filmmaking and Photography Pre-Orientation Session, but seats are limited to only 12 participants! Go to the Forms and Resoruces page, scroll down to Pre-Orientation Forms, print out the Pre-Orientation Registration form, and mail it in today!
Why should you attend this particular workshop?
Tags: Boot Camp, Filmmaking, Paul & Holly Fine, Photography, pre-orientation, workshop
If you are a Photoshop user, but like me often find yourself hopping on a public computer or at a friends house, and wishing you had Photoshop to make basic image edits, you’re in luck!
There are lots of free online image editors. Here are a couple I recommend:
Tags: free utilities, online image editing, Photoshop Alternatives
David Hobby, former staff photographer for the Baltimore Sun turned full-time blogger, runs a website called Strobist. David has taken countless hours of his life to develop several free off-camera lighting tutorials for photographers.
The first set that I’ll mention is Lighting 101. These tutorials get you started, understanding why you’d want to utilize off-camera lighting, what are some key components, and how to use a DIY approach to build lighting gear for cheap. In future posts I’ll dig deeper on the Strobist blog for more great content.
Strobist is an invaluable resource for digital photographers, one of the very best collections available on the web. …oh yeah, and everything is free!
Tags: , digital photography, DIY, education, off-camera lighting, strobist, Tutorial
Established only 4 months ago, This Week In Photography has quickly climbed to #4 for all Photography podcasts on iTunes. Pro photographers discuss the latest equipment and trends in digital photography. Get a behind the scenes look at the folks who develop the software you use and author the books you read.
Tags: Audio, Photo, Photography Podcast, TWIP
Chase Jarvis is an amazing Seattle based photographer who, in his mid thirties, is both a Nikon and Hasselblad Master Photographer. This short video “Frames” shows every frame of a 4-day photo shoot, pausing on a few featured images. Chase has several videos online that show a glimpse of the man behind the curtain, so to speak. These tutorials and demos have helped countless aspiring photographers advance their skill. I highly recommend checking out his website for inspiration, and his blog and videos for education.
Tags: Chase Jarvis, commercial, fine art, Hasselblad, Photo shoot, Photographer, Tutorial
You’ve probably seen some incredible photos of a landscape with an intense lightning bolts streaking through the sky and wondered, “How do they do that?” Some photographers use devices such as light or sound activated triggers to snap their photos. In the case of lightning, a light trigger will trip when a bolt suddenly lights up the sky. If you’ve ever seen the photos of a bullet bursting through an apple or something similar, then you’ve probably seen the work of a sound trigger.
But what if you don’t have one of these fancy triggers, and would still like to photograph the night sky during a light storm? There’s a few DIY tricks you can use that can give you the same resulting photos with no additional equipment other than a tripod.
Your first step would be to change your camera’s setting to manual if possible. We don’t want it to auto expose for the night sky, because the camera’s light meter works in real time. Ideally, we’d know right when the lightning would strike, and use an incident meter to read the brightness of a bolt. But even if we could, this still wouldn’t be entirely accurate, because one bolt may be brighter than the next, and some bolts remain lit longer than others. So set your camera manually to a medium aperture, maybe F8 or so, and then experiment with your shutter speed to balance for exposure. If you are in a city or some place with a lot of ambient light, you are going to have shorter exposures, and remote rural areas will be a longer exposure.
Now that your Aperture and Shutter Speed are set, (but don’t hesitate to fine tune them throughout the session), it’s time to adjust that third setting that controls your exposure, your ISO setting. Many people would read in their manual that in low light conditions, you’d want to use a high ISO speed. This may be the case when you are doing other kinds of photography, but with my method of photographing lightning, you’ll be taking longer exposures, possibly several seconds per shot. If you use the higher ISO, the exposures will be shorter, but you’ll get a lot more digital noise in the photo. I’ve found that you are much better off using your camera’s lowest ISO setting, as if it’s a bright daylight shot. After all, when the lightning actually strikes, it is very bright for that instant. Note that this is a place where higher end DSLRs really shine over point and shoot cameras. The larger sensor size tends to produce less noise for long exposures.
With your camera’s 3 exposure controls all set, mount your camera on a sturdy tripod. If you can photograph from under a cover (inside a house out a window, or under a porch, etc) then you are less likely to have to run for cover if the storm heads your way. Sometimes the best shots come from being out away from everything where you have an uninhibited view of the scene. I’ve used umbrellas to keep the gear dry, sometimes shot from inside a car with the window rolled down (when the wind is blowing and keeping the rain out of the car). Use your best judgment, and don’t be the person in the paper the next day for standing out in an open field with a metal umbrella in your hand during a storm.
The last step is to fire your camera. Again and again and again. You never know when and where it will strike, so you’ll be taking a lot of pictures that are dark, but if you are taking a series of 10 second exposure photos, for example, as long as lightning strikes during that 10 seconds, you are in good shape. So be prepared to throw out most of the images where mother nature didn’t cooperate. By the way, lightning often looks more impressive in a photo than in real life, because if the lightning does multiple strikes or branches out very far, the camera doesn’t discern the beginning of the strike form the end. In your photo of that 10 second glimpse of the night, you’ll see everywhere the lightning was during that time frame.
Another tip, if you have any bright lights in the foreground (a building or street light, etc), then you might find that simply pressing the button to fire your camera is inducing some camera shake, which is seen with streaks from those lights (from the camera shifting). If you set your self timer to the lowest setting, usually 2 seconds or so, then you can trigger the shot, take your hands away, and have 2 seconds for everything to settle down before the photo clicks off.
So get out there, be safe, and get some great photos!
Tags: DIY, DSLR, lightning, MPC, night, Photography, Tutorial
Photoshop Lady provides tutorials from all around the world in her blog, added daily.
