Interested in experimenting with long exposure photography and painting with light? This tutorial shows some tips and examples of what you can do with your DSLR, a tripod, and a few light sources.
Tags: light art, long exposures, painting with light, Photography
Not ready for criminal behavior, but still really into street art. Light writing, shown in this how-to video, is an urban art that doesn’t damage public (or private) property, so it’s totally legal. Learn how to do a new form of art called light writing or light graffiti by watching this instructional video. Using a camera set to a low shutter speed you can write graffiti in the air using streaks of light.
Tags: abstract art, dark, fine art, graffiti, light painting, light writing, lightwriting, long exposure, night, Photography
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
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
A free Photoshop action that softens skin tones while retaining important skin details.
Instructions to install and use found here.
Tags: Action, Photography, Photoshop, portraits, retouching
Renown photographer W. Brandon Voges has put together an amazing video showing how he created this composite photograph using Adobe Photoshop.
Tags: Adobe, Composite, Paintball, Photo, Photography, Photoshop