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.
As part of a new series to help you get more creative with your digital camera, each month we’ll be publishing some fun photo ideas to inspire your imagination. Below are our 9 top photo ideas to shoot in May, which range from familiar territory like child portraits and coastal landscapes to the downright bizarre (but fun!) worlds of underground mines and recreating famous explosions with food! Bon appetit…
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.
Johannes is an architectural photographer based in Germany. Through his photography he is able to draw the viewers’ attention to the curves and lines of modern architecture, forcing people to view these buildings from a unique perspective.
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.
We’re offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shoot Digital Camera’s cover image with the Fujifilm X-Pro 1! One lucky reader will have the chance to shoot the cover of issue 128, which goes on sale 20 July 2012. Here’s the deal. The winner of this once-in-a-lifetime competition will be invited to shoot the image for our [...]
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.
