Digital Camera World » abstract photography

Refraction of light: capture amazing photography effects with a glass of water

jmeyer — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:37:11 +0000

The refraction of light is one of the most commonly observed phenomena and is a perennial favourite of photographers. While talk of bending light waves and the effects they produce may sound like complicated work, it’s actually a rather simple photography effect you can recreate anywhere.

Find out below how to capture the refraction of light using a glass of water and a cool background!

In this tutorial we’re going to use the refractive properties of glass and water to make a striking arty abstract. The chances are you witness this effect every day, and it can be clearly seen by simply looking through a glass of water.

But we’re going to take it one step further and control the effect for creative results.ding light

Using a background of diagonal black and white stripes, we’ll use the distorting properties of water and glass to bend, twist, rotate and skew the lines to form intriguing abstract shapes.

This is a relatively easy technique to get to grips with. Simply fill a glass container with water and look through it – you’ll instantly see the distorting effects of refraction in action.

Layer several glasses in front of one another and you’ll add layers of distortion to the overall effect.

The lighting is straightforward, and a regular camera mounted flashgun bounced off the ceiling will be more than adequate. You don’t need any fancy equipment or complicated camera techniques to achieve amazing results.
A simple table top is all you’ll need. So let’s get started and see how it’s done…

How to photograph the refraction of light

Get started
For this project you’ll need to make a simple background. We’ve created a diagonal black and white stripe in Photoshop and printed it out on a regular office laser printer. It doesn’t need to be too fancy. It’s worth experimenting with different designs, or you could even introduce some colour.

Perfect your settings
Position super-clean drinking glasses in front of the backdrop, and fill them with water to varying levels. Use a small aperture such as f/16 to maximise the depth of field and ensure everything’s sharp. Use a tripod, as small changes in camera angle will affect how the glass and water refracts the pattern.

Prepare the lighting
Daylight can work perfectly, but we’ll be using a flashgun here as we’re shooting in lowlight conditions. Ideally you want to avoid any unsightly reflections on the glass – you can easily achieve this by bouncing the light off the ceiling. To do that, simply point the flashgun in the up position.

Creative Photography: 10 tips for getting out of your comfort zone

jmeyer — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 01:00:22 +0000

One of our goals as photographers – after we overcome the common photography problems and improve our skills – is to make original work. But avoid the traps (and tripod holes) of cliched compositions can be incredibly difficult. To help you along we’ve polled our experts and put together 10 of our best creative photography tips.

While these tips won’t necessarily guarantee success, or even creative photography, they will however help get you out of your comfort zone. Start ditching your usual routines, and then you’ll be in the place where original and creative photography is more likely to happen!

10 quick creative photography tips, 1-5

01 Break the rules
Some of the most creative images arise when you throw away the rule book for photo composition. Of course, you still need to understand the fundamentals of how to create a photographic image, but try disobeying a few rules if you want to push your creativity further. Why not place a horizon right in the middle of the frame?

It might not adhere to the ‘rule of thirds’, but there are some fantastic and successful images that do just that. Ditch the tripod and try hand-holding your camera for a one-second exposure. The results might not be pin sharp, but they will have a wonderful sense of motion or artistic blur.

02 Colour
Colour presents fabulous opportunities for the creative photographer. Look for colour combinations that work. Whether you’re mixing complementary colours to create a visual harmony or clashing colours to create a sense of tension, you’ll find colour a great tool in your creative armoury.

Experiment with your camera’s white balance settings. Sometimes the “wrong” setting can add mood to a scene, so switch from auto mode, take control and try using the Fluorescent setting in daylight, or the Daylight light setting under indoor tungsten light.

03 Celebrate blur
Use blur as a creative tool and you can get some fantastic impressionist or semi-abstract results. However, there is an art to getting it right and it’s not simply a case of twisting your lens barrel so everything’s out of focus.

Your choice of lens and aperture will affect the characteristics, as will your subject matter. Use your camera’s screen to monitor the effects and experiment.

Colour and tone combinations become more emphasised when working with blurred images, so you’ll need to be more aware of the elements in the composition.

04 Shutter speeds
As a general rule of thumb, photographers want crisp photos that don’t display any signs of motion blur or camera movement, and using a tripod or a fast shutter speed will pretty much guarantee this.

However, adding a bit of movement can add a fascinating dimension to your work. Try jogging your tripod during a long exposure or even hand-holding your camera for a second or two. Remember that you’ll need to adjust your aperture accordingly so your shot isn’t over-exposed.

05 Experiment with lenses
Try using specialist lenses in the wrong context to give your images an unusual twist. Experiment with a tilt-and-shift lens, which is typically used to correct converging angles in architectural shots.

In the “wrong” situation it can produce some interesting results and skew perceptions of depth, distance and scale. If you don’t have access to a tilt-and-shift lens, try using a more economical alternative, such as  a Lensbaby.

PAGE 1: 10 quick creative photography tips, 1-5
PAGE 2: 10 quick creative photography tips, 6-10

Abstract photo ideas: get creative with oil and water

jmeyer — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 11:30:07 +0000

Find out how to make stunning abstract photos at home by mixing oil and water with a simple, colourful backdrop.

Image by Ben Brain

If you look closely at the world around you, you’ll often find great ideas for photographs where you least expect them. Take this striking abstract image, for example, which was inspired by watching oil floating on the surface of water while preparing spaghetti one day.

The circles of oil formed attractive circular patterns and shapes in their own right, but here we’ve added some vibrant colour into the creative mix.

Exploiting the properties of refraction we took our oil and water off the hob and into a shallow glass dish suspended on two small boxes.

Underneath the glass we placed some coloured paper that we  lit with an off-camera flash (a simple table lamp will also work). The colours from the paper were picked up by the oily circles and created wonderful patterns, colours and shapes.

This is a great photography project at any time of the year, but now the days have become shorter, colder and darker you can easily set this up in the comfort of your home.

If you choose the right colours, the oily circles can take on a wonderfully festive appearance too, perfect for a seasonal screen saver or even a framed abstract to grace your walls. So read on to find out how it’s done…

01 Get ready to shoot
Fill a clean shallow glass dish with about 2-5cm of water. Support the dish so that it’s 10-20cm away from the coloured card – use small boxes to elevate it. Drop some cooking oil onto the water a few drops at a time and watch as the bubbles separate into attractive circles that refract the colours below.

02 Camera settings
To light the coloured paper on the table top, use an angle-poise lamp or a flashgun fired with a remote trigger. Support your camera so it’s close to the surface of the liquid. We reversed the central column of a tripod, so the camera ‘hung’ above the water. Use a macro lens and focus manually.

03 Multiple exposures
Experiment and move the oil around until you get the circles in the right position. Take lots of shots and try using different coloured backgrounds. We combined three of our shots into one image using layers  and Blending Modes in Photoshop, which enhanced the sense of depth.

Shape photography: how to balance your composition (and when to break the rules)

jmeyer — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:09:44 +0000

On a few occasions here at Digital Camera World we’ve mentioned the importance of balancing shapes and tones in your photo composition. This is a rather vague-sounding notion, in comparison to more scientific discussions about the Rule of Thirds and the impact of leading lines. This is something we’ll attempt to put right, because shape photography, though we shoot them so often, doesn’t seem to be mentioned very much in textbooks. But does have a real significance on the impact of your photographs.

Many pictures rely on balance – or at least they fall down through a lack of it. They may have an object near the edge of the frame on one side with nothing of interest on the other side to act as a counterweight.

It’s like a set of kitchen scales with a bag of sugar in the bowl and no weights on the other side. But it’s not as scientific as our example makes it sound.

You don’t necessarily need an object of the same size, tone or colour, and it doesn’t always have to be on the diametrically opposite side of the frame.

You may find the tiny silhouette of a park bench provides just the counterweight you need for the silhouette of a tree, for example, or that one figure you framed for foreground interest in your shot is perfectly balanced by a distant figure further away.

That doesn’t mean you have to go around looking for counterweights for your subjects, though this can be an effective compositional technique.

But what can often happen is that the scene you’re photographing contains more than one element and that you can’t (or don’t want to) exclude these additional elements.

That’s when you have to develop your sense of balance. Maybe looking at a couple of examples will help.

PAGE 1: Achieving balance in your shape photography
PAGE 2: Choose your own rules of shape photography
PAGE 3: How to manage silhouettes

Abstract Photoshop: recreate the Harris Shutter Effect in Elements

jmeyer — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 11:34:44 +0000

The Harris Shutter Effect is a process discovered in the days of film photography. It’s achieved by taking a sequence of three exposures on the same frame, with a red, green and blue filter used for each.

The resulting effect means static objects in the scene appear in full colour, whereas any elements that moved appear as the colour of the filter used while taking that exposure.

The ability to shoot multiple exposures on one frame is possible with some modern DSLR bodies, but not all, and the process itself can be tricky to get right.

However, with Photoshop Elements it’s possible to get the same results using three standard colour images shot in sequence. In our latest Photoshop Elements tutorial we’ll look at how to use Elements to apply colour fills and blending modes to filter the three shots into their component channels.

The first will display only the red colour information, the second green, and the third blue. After the three images have been filtered and prepared we’ll combine them into a new image.

As the layers are overlaid and combined using blending modes, the static objects, in this case the glass, will appear in full colour, while the water will display the colourful Harris Shutter Effect. So with your images ready, let’s give it a go.

Step-by-step how to recreate the Harris Shutter Effect

01 Create the red channel
Open your start image. Right-click the image layer and from the drop-down menu select Duplicate Layer. Click the half moon icon at the base of the Layers palette and create a new Solid Color layer. We want this first layer to be red so set the values of the layer to R: 255, G: 0 and B: 0.

02 Create green and blue layers
Change the blending mode of the layer to Multiply then select Layer>Merge Down. Duplicate the background layer copy, choose Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Hue/Saturation and increase the Hue to 120. Duplicate the green layer, open Hue/Saturation and increase to 120 to create a blue layer.

03 Remove green and blue
Change the blending modes of both the green and blue layers to Screen and then flatten the image. Click the half moon icon in the Layers palette and create a new Solid Colour Adjustment Layer. Set it to R: 255, G: 0 and B: 0. Choose Multiply from the Blending modes drop-down menu.

04 Create the other channels
From the Layers menu select Flatten Image. Repeat 1-3 with the other two images, replacing values of the Solid Color layer in steps 1 and 3 with R: 0, G: 255 and B:0 for the green channel and R:0, G: 0 and B: 255 for the blue. Press Ctrl A, Ctrl C and Ctrl V to paste the green and blue images into the red one.

05 Blend the images
Change the blending modes for the green and blue layers to Lighten then flatten the image. From Tools select the Burn tool. Select Shadows with exposure set to 50%; use this on the black background to remove any highlights. Reduce the Exposure to 5% and use on the glass to improve the contrast.

06 Apply finishing touches
Open Levels with Ctrl L. Move the Shadows and Highlight sliders to meet the edges of the histogram. From the Layer options, select Flatten Image. Open Hue/Saturation. Increase Saturation to +20. Choose Enhance>Smart Sharpen, increase the amount to 50%, set the radius to 1.6 and click OK.

How to get cool photos from uninspiring locations

jmeyer — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 10:44:39 +0000

There isn’t much that beats capturing the majesty of a spectacular landscape during the magic hours around dawn and dusk, but shooting landscapes within these strict time constraints is a luxury many of us can’t indulge in too often. However, if you look around, you’ll discover that there are visual possibilities and cool photos just about everywhere, even in the local supermarket’s car park.

Okay, it might not be Derwent Water, but it was only five minutes down the road and it made a shopping trip a bit more interesting.

Even on the most banal occasions, it’s a great idea to discipline your eye so that you’re on a constant lookout for potential photographs.

Get into the habit of keeping a basic SLR to hand – a body with a fixed 50mm lens will be more than adequate.

Keep your technique simple and look for patterns, textures, colours and shapes in road markings, signs and other everyday objects normally taken for granted that have the potential to make cool photos.

Here, we pre-visualised how a variety of shapes might look in a grid, and once assembled they’ve created a striking abstract montage.

Keep it simple
You won’t need tons of equipment to take cool photos in a car park. We used a standard 50mm lens on DSLR, as it’s light. In aperture priority mode, we exposed for 1/125 sec at f/8 using ISO 200.

Raw power
To maximise quality, especially if you plan to make large prints, shoot in raw and process in Adobe Camera Raw. Increase the Contrast and Vibrancy to give the images punch and make the shapes more defined.

Make a grid
Create a new document in Photoshop and place each image on its own layer. There may be a bit of trial and error in getting them in the right position – look for combinations that make an interesting whole.

Make an abstract landscape with a simple panning technique

jmeyer — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 11:26:05 +0000

Landscape photography doesn’t need to be all about magnificent vistas, foreground interest, leading lines and the rule of thirds. In fact, reduce a scene to the basics of colour and tone and you can create a stunning abstract landscape photo using a very simple technique.

We’re going to show you how to create a contemporary landscape with a simple but effective panning technique.

The basic idea is to move your DSLR in a horizontal pan during a long-ish exposure, somewhere between 1/4 sec and 4 secs. As the camera moves, the landscape is captured as stripy bands of cool colours that, once printed, wouldn’t look out of place in a contemporary gallery.

It’s not nearly as difficult as it sounds, so let’s see how it’s done…

01 Enable rotations
While this technique is all about camera movement, a tripod is essential as it ensures your horizontal stripes are level and helps create an even pan. Any location can work well, but look for a scene that has interesting colours and tones. This field works a treat.

02 Shoot and select
A shutter speed anywhere between 1/2 sec to 4 secs works best. If you can’t get this even with a low ISO and small aperture (such as f/16), a neutral density (ND) filter is the best solution. These filters block light passing through the lens, helping you to get slower shutter speeds.

03 Perfect the look
Be prepared to experiment and make sure you’ve got plenty of space on your memory card. To pan properly, you need a tripod with a three-way head or a video-panning head – it’s almost impossible to control a pan properly and keep the camera level when you’re using a ball-and-socket head.

How to make really cool double exposure portraits in Photoshop

jmeyer — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:30:36 +0000

Picasso took an unconventional approach to portrait painting. He evoked an impression of his subjects by rendering their face in profile while depicting features like the eyes and nose as if viewed from head on. We can apply this approach to portrait photography to create what are called double exposure portraits. The trick is to convert some standard shots into a creative composite that sums up our subject in an eye-catching way.

In this tutorial we’ll demonstrate how to use Photoshop’s tools to combine both a face-on and profile view of a subject in a single image so that we can summon up more about their identity than we could in a conventional portrait.

We’ll kick off by cropping the start images to make the subject’s key features look more prominent in the frame and then add them to a layered document.

You’ll then use Selection tools to remove unwanted background details before converting the selections into masks.

No selection is initially perfect, so we’ll demonstrate how to apply brush strokes to the Layer Masks to hide or reveal particular facial features.

We’ll also demonstrate how to use fill layers to add simplified washes of colour to the shot’s shadows and highlights to help push the end result in a more artistic direction.

Step-by-step how to make double exposure portraits

01 CROP THE FACE
Open your face-on portrait. Grab the Crop tool. Set it to Original Ratio. Drag a corner handle to crop out the edges of the frame and zoom in on the subject. Drag outside the crop box to rotate the shot by 12 degrees. Drag inside the box to position the face as shown. Hit Enter.

02 REMOVE BACKGROUND
Grab the Quick Selection tool. Spray over the beige background on the right to select it. Choose Select>Inverse. Click the Refine Edge option. Spray the Refine Radius tool over the spiky hairs to add them to the selection. Set Output to Layer Mask. Click OK.

03 ADD NEW PORTRAIT
Open your profile portrait. Choose Select>All and then Edit>Copy. Edit>Paste the shot into the main project. Set the pasted layer’s Blend Mode to Multiply. Press Cmd/Ctrl+T to activate the Free Transform tool. Rotate, scale and position the layer so key features overlap.

04 ADD A LAYER MASK
Cmd/Ctrl click on the ‘Layer 0’ mask to reactivate the selection. Click on ‘Layer 1’. Click the Add layer mask icon. Restore the ‘Layer 1’ Blend Mode to Normal. Click on the ‘Layer 1’ thumbnail. Use the Quick Selection tool to select the beige background. Click on the ‘Layer 1’ mask. Choose Edit>Fill. Set Contents to Black. Click OK.

05 EDIT THE MASK
Click on ‘Layer 0’ mask and fill the selection with black. Press Cmd/Ctrl+D to deselect the marquee. Set ‘Layer 1’ Blend Mode back to Multiply. Grab the Brush tool. Paint a black brush on the Layer Masks to remove any areas that aren’t overlapping. Reduce the Opacity to 50% and spray on the top layer’s eye.

06 COLOUR THE IMAGE
Click the Create new fill icon and choose Solid Color. Choose white and place the layer at the bottom of the stack. Add a Black & White Adjustment Layer. Use the High Contrast Red Filter preset. Set the Foreground colour to purple and background to orange. Add a Gradient Map and use the Foreground to Background preset.

Photoshop Tip
To give your surreal portrait more contrast, choose Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Curves. Place the Curves Adjustment Layer above the two image layers. You can start off by experimenting with Preset adjustments like Strong Contrast.

Alternatively, click to place a point near the bottom of the curve and drag downwards to create darker shadows. Place another point nearer the top and drag upwards to brighten the highlights. This will create an S-shaped curve.

Photo of the day: 1 August

samanthacliffe — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 09:00:33 +0000

Samurai by’johnnie2bad‘

This is a very creative image that was created taking a photograph of ferns, and applying a reflection effect in Photoshop. The highlights and deep blacks accentuate the shapes and curves on the ferns.

You may also like:

How to make money from photography
5 things you need to know before shooting raw files
Or view more inspirational photography

Get a killer shot out of nothing

jmeyer — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 11:46:05 +0000

Creating a shot from nothing may sound like an impossible act, but training your eye to look for images in spots others ignore may be more rewarding than you could ever imagine.

Why not take time to look around your area and find interesting locations bursting with intricate details? You’ll be amazed at the potential for close-up abstracts in seemingly mundane settings.

Not only is the fine art world full of abstract images, it’s everywhere you look these days, from the walls of coffee shops and trendy wine bars to furniture stores and market stalls. So why not get involved? All you needs is your camera and a standard 18-55mm kit lens and you can get some great pictures, as we’ve done here.

What to look out for…

From decaying buildings that should have been knocked down years ago, to futuristic-looking architecture (check out our essential night photography tips for the architectural photographer) that would be more at home in a sci-fi film, finding locations and subjects for abstract images is easier than you may think.

You probably walk straight past a number of ideal possibilities every day on your way to work. Vibrant colour, texture, detail, patterns, lines – and a creative eye – are all you need to find that perfect abstract opportunity.

How to go and shoot it
The important thing is to not restrict yourself to constantly trying to find possible shots through your viewfinder. Instead, make sure you take the time to look around for possible areas where you might shoot and explore them to see if a more interesting image lies within that scene.

The best abstract images can often be found in seemingly the most mundane places. Using our 18-55mm kit lens, we captured what we feel is a really good selection of shots by concentrating on what was right in front of us to searching high and low for those more hidden abstracts.

Expose for impact
An underground car park was an ideal location for this abstract image – you can’t get more urban than this! We made use of the fantastic shaft of light that was coming down through the stairwell.

Taking a spot-meter reading of the bright light that was falling on the wall above (find out when to use spot metering), we were able to expose this perfectly and darken the rest of the scene, creating a shot with depth and mood. The exposure hasn’t made the detail completely disappear as the graffiti is still just about visible.

Creating images with lots of lines and shapes is great for keeping the viewer interested – here we’ve created an image with plenty of triangular shapes.

How to get the best quality
To really get the most from your camera and capture detail, tones and colours exactly how you see them, set your camera to shoot RAW images and at a low ISO rating. This gives you the ability to work on images shot at the highest quality.

When it comes to exposure, try working in Aperture Priority (Av) mode to give quick control over the aperture and depth of field in your shots – high f-stops in the region of f/11 and f/16 will give more front-to-back sharpness, while lower f-stops will allow you to isolate subjects between foreground and background blur (learn more about f stops and when to use a small or wide aperture).

Keep an eye on the shutter speed, though – it needs to be fast enough so that your images are pin-sharp (see our guide to common mistakes at every shutter speed – and the best settings to use). For maximum sharpness, use a tripod (find out how to use a tripod the right way), lock up the mirror and trigger the shutter with a remote release.

Most importantly, be ruthless when it comes to composition (see the 10 rules of photo composition – and why they work). Try and get the framing of the shot right in-camera, so you don’t sacrifice picture quality by cropping in software later.

Explore every angle, try all focal lengths and reduce the image down to its simplest form – if an element doesn’t add anything to the shot, leave it out.

Final tips for abstract photography

Shot at f/10

Shot at f/5

1 Create depth
We used these desolate locations to our advantage when we discovered this cracked parking sign. To create the different looks of the two images, we opened up the aperture from f/10 on the first shot to f/5 on the second, so that only the focal point at the centre of the image remained pin-sharp. By moving to shoot the sign from an angle in the second shot, we also created a greater sense of depth and a more artistic image.

Shot with no flash

Shot with fill flash

2 Add fill-in flash
By using your DSLR’s built-in pop-up flash to add a burst of light , you can make your aperture much smaller and produce a shot with more detail. This reflective metal arrow on a fence provided an ideal subject on which to try out this technique (find out how to master using fill flash in 4 easy steps).

Too far out

Get in close!

3 Use a macro lens
We spotted this drainpipe with its interesting peeling paint colours down an alleyway. Its blues and greens contrasted well with the red of the nearby railing and the worn brickwork. But we felt that by using a macro lens and concentrating solely on the pipe we could get a far more pleasing image.

Using a macro lens can maximise the detail in a scene. We shot this image at f/5.6 and focused on a piece of rust in the middle of the shot.

Macro lenses are very sensitive to focus, so be careful – the closer you get to your subject the more out of control the autofocus gets. Try manual focusing to ensure that the area you want to be pin-sharp is captured accurately (see our in-depth guide to Manual Focus: what you need to know to get sharp images).