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.
One of the biggest problems photographers encounter when using flash are harsh shadows in the background. In particular, harsh flash shadows are the bane of anyone who shoots portrait photography.
In the tutorial below we show you how you can eliminate shadows from your pictures so you can start taking flawless portraits.
Shooting indoor sports action using a fast shutter speed, old, gloomy churches without flash or bright landscapes where you want to slow down the shutter speed to capture movement are just some of the many situations where you will need an extreme ISO to get better results.
ISO denotes how sensitive an image sensor is. Any change from the manufacturer’s native ISO (the lowest default, which produces the optimum image quality) will have some form of electrical signal modification that results in noise.
Most DSLRs have a native ISO of around 100 or 200; beyond that, at the extreme low end of the range, quality isn’t improved. However, some manufacturers offer lower ISO values in the menu, such as ISO50. Others use a decimalised f-stop value to indicate when it falls below the native ISO. Both are great for using wide apertures or long shutter speeds in bright lighting conditions.
Your DSLR has comes with a highly advanced autofocus system, so why on earth would you want to use manual focus? Actually there are some very good reasons – various subjects and environmental conditions either fool the camera, or make it considerably harder to get a good shot in autofocus mode.
In this tutorial we will show you everything you need to know about how to use manual focus effectively to start getting sharp images everytime.
Pale skies are usually much brighter than the land, so if the ground is correctly exposed the sky will wash out. You can use an ND grad filter, but they’re quite fiddly.
Another workaround is your SLR’s facility for compressing tonal range, such as Nikon’s Active D-Lighting or Canon’s Auto Lighting Optimizer. A better solution, though, is to use a tripod and take two shots; one exposed for the sky, the other for the ground.
You can then merge them together using an image-editing program such as Photoshop Elements to get detail back in your skies. Even then, branches and leaves that move between shots can cause problems. The answer is to take a single shot in raw and ensure the exposure is sufficiently dark. You can then process this raw file twice to create two images to merge together. Here’s how to do it…
Capturing a decent family portrait can be a major challenge – particularly if it’s a group photo. For starters, you may not be able to fit everyone into the shot, and even if you can, someone will usually have their eyes closed or be pulling a less than flattering face! By shooting an empty sofa, you can extend it by learning how to stitch photos together in Photoshop to fit in as many people as required, without being limited by your lens or location. In our Photoshop tutorial below we’ll show you how to select a sofa’s sections, move them onto separate layers and transform their position to extend the sofa’s width.
You can then shoot your friends and family one by one in the same spot. This helps you to ensure that everyone is looking their best. By capturing each one under the same lighting conditions they will look like they were all sitting together on the digitally extended sofa.
