When shooting miniature buildings such as those on a train set, the camera’s close proximity to the subject can create a shallow depth of field. This makes some of the model buildings look sharp, while closer and distant ones are blurred; this narrow plane of focus reveals that the scene is a model. You can take inspiration from this focus effect and apply it to life-size scenes for creative results.
When you photograph most subjects, getting the colours 100% accurate isn’t usually critical, and if you shoot on Auto White Balance, nine times out ten your digital will do a pretty good job of getting the white balance roughly right, so that whites actually look white, blacks look black, and all the colours in between look how you’d expect.
But sometimes getting colours 100% accurate is critical – when you need to photograph a painting to be reproduced in a book, say. The only way to ensure accurate colours is to get your white balance spot on, and the best way to do this is to use a colour chart.
Hidden Photoshop tricks can easily be applied to images to enhance atmospheric effect.
The creative use of light can transform almost any photographic scene, helping to isolate detail, enhance colour and form a visual structure. In the quick Photoshop tutorial below, we’ll show you how to you can give new life to your images by emphasising light.
How many times has your travel photography been let down by tourists and other unwanted distractions spoiling your scenes?
No need to waste your pictures. Our simple 4-step tutorial below explains how you can remove people in Photoshop and rescue your images.
Flash can be essential in low light, particularly when you’re shooting living subjects. But it often ends up being a necessary evil, killing the atmosphere. Ironically, flash is often of more creative use in the hours of daylight.
Sometimes called ‘synchro sun’, and better known as ‘fill flash’, a burst of artificial light can be effective in practically any outdoor situation. What’s more, you don’t need any specialist kit – you can make do with the pop-up flash that comes built into most popular DSLRs.
Photographic styles and digital darkroom effects certainly aren’t immune to the whims of fashion and changing tastes. Whether it’s trendy cross-processing, HDR (High Dynamic Range) tweaks or shooting contre-jour (into the light), flick through the editorial and ad pages of any glossy magazine and you’ll see what’s currently in vogue. The muted colours, exaggerated contrast and super-detailed characteristics of what is known as the bleach bypass effect are very popular at the moment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
