Three years after making its first entrance into the compact system camera arena with the PEN E-P1, Olympus has gone back to its roots again to produce the OM-D, with its retro styling owed to its analogue predecessor.
Inside the camera are an all new 16 million pixel Live MOS Four Thirds sensor and TruePic VI image processor, which Olympus says is designed to give better low light performance and higher dynamic range than previous Micro Four Thirds cameras in its line-up.
Find out inside what score it got from our testing team.
Hand-colouring of photographs first became popular in the 20th century, as a means of adding realism to black-and-white photos. Different types of paint were applied using fingers, brushes and swabs.
However, we can now achieve a similar effect in Photoshop and add colour to a black and white photo using the Brush tool. Whereas the traditional hand-painters only got one attempt, we can use layers to keep each colour separate and delete any hues we don’t like.
Portrait lighting is an area that even the most confident photographers struggle with, but using it to get professional-looking family portraits is much simpler than it may first appear. Like most areas of photography, it’s simply a case of taking it one step at a time.
In the following tutorial we will break the different areas of portrait lighting down and examine how each light affects the final result, as well as where to position them in your home photo studio. We start by shooting with a single light, before moving on to a fill light that softens the shadows, and then introduce a light to illuminate the background.
Believe it or not the bathroom can be a great place for creative photography. Here we’ve captured the magical quality of water ripples, and combined them into a contemporary grid.
We created the ripples by simply dripping water from a soaked cloth onto the surface of (clean) bath water. There’s plenty of other ways to make great ripples too, so it’s worth experimenting with different methods and heights.
Are you frustrated by the quality of your bird photos, or are you looking to try bird photography for the first time? Look no further than this latest infographic in our photography cheat sheet series.
With spring in full swing, now is the perfect time to get out into your garden or local park and start taking pictures of birds. But for your bird photos to be successful you need to first decide what sort of shot you’re after.
In the photography cheat sheet below we’ve picked four of the most common situations in which you might take pictures of birds. Within each scenario we’ve crafted a handy little flow chart to get you from start to finish of your shoot, whether you’re camped out in a hide, visiting your local zoo or shooting from your living room window. Inside are charts illustrating how to get great shots of captive birds, static birds, flying birds and flocks of birds.
In-camera effects may be seen as a bit of a marketing gimmick by some, but the ones offered by your EOS DSLR form a powerful and creative set of tools that has the potential to save you time and improve your photography.
Zoom lenses are undeniably great when it comes to convenience and versatility, delivering a wide range of focal lengths at the flick of a wrist. However, they demand a compromise in terms of outright image quality. With complex arrangements of large groups of lens elements moving back and forth to enable zoom, the optical purity suffers.
Sharpness is often the first casualty, and barrel and pin-cushion distortions often appear at the wide-angle and telephoto ends of the zoom range respectively.
The soft, flat light produced when the sky is overcast and cloudy may be frustrating when shooting outdoors, but it’s perfect for shooting still lifes at home. The trick to window light photography is to control where this light falls and, just as importantly, where it doesn’t.
In this tutorial we’ll show you how to take control of your window light photography using reflectors, diffusers and shade, and at the end we have another free photography cheat sheet illustrating the different types of effects you can get on a budget using window light and some simple tools. These skills will stand you in good stead whatever lighting you use – even a full studio flash set-up is based on the same principles.
Leica has ended weeks of speculation and confirmed the launch of its new black and white camera, the Leica M Monochrom
The new Leica camera features a monochrome CCD sensor with a native resolution of 18 million pixels, as well as programmable tones, the company says.
Are your photo editing skills a little on the slow side? Could your Photoshop knowledge be better? If so, you’re in the right place. Below we’ve culled from experts 101 of the best Photoshop tips and tricks you need to streamline your photo editing skills and start working faster and smarter.
We’ve broken our list down into categories of Quick tips, Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge tips, Tips for using Layers, Tips for using Photoshop’s many tools and, finally, Tips for using Brushes. We hope our round-up of cunning techniques, shortcuts and cool effects gives you the help you need, and if you have a suggestion for something we missed… let us know!
