The Essential Guide To Landscape Photography P2 – Camera Exposure
Christopher Burkett - Fir, Snow & Mountainside, Wyoming 1989 Exposure is one of the most important aspects of photography and yet to many it is a complex art that is often overlooked. Image exposure is based on science yet is still open to artistic interpretation. Whilst one photographer may think an image has an accurate exposure, in that it captures the mood or essence of a scene, another may decide it inaccurate if it fails to conform to technical rules. This is especially... Read More
Studio Ninja Cheat Sheets – Part 2 : Colour Correction Filters for Film
Shooting under warm indoor lighting with daylight film, a cooling filter must be used for a natural colour balance. Care must be taken not to overdo the effect though. Following on from the post on colour correction, we’ve put together a cheat sheet for warming and cooling corrective filters for daylight film. This is no substitute for a dedicated colour meter and full set of CC filters but can be used in most situations to get approximately the right balance. Read More Read More
Understanding Colour 3 – Colour Correction
In the first post in this series we looked briefly at colour balance and colour temperature and how varying ambient light conditions can affect the way our camera records the colours of the scene. This post is going to go into a little bit (ok, actually quite a lot..) more detail about these colour shifts and how to correct them. At high altitudes the proportion of skylight to sunlight is much higher giving the image on the left a blue colour cast. This can be corrected by... Read More
Top tips for Studio Photography – Using flash gels to colour the background
Usually with a traditional background support system like this one you have to change the whole roll in order to change the colour. If you’re already shooting in a studio, chances are that most of the time you’re using some sort of background – most likely a vinyl or paper roll on a support system. The clean seamless background has become the standard for model portfolios, fashion, portraiture and product photography to keep all the attention on the subject. ... Read More
Essential Guide To Landscape Photography – P1: Camera Equipment
Forest Giants by Kris Lamba So, the mail man’s just delivered your shiny new digital SLR camera and you’re eager to get started in the wilderness, or perhaps it’s still just a hobby you fantasise about whilst updating those spreadsheets in the office at work. Either way, landscape photography is one of the most rewarding things you can do with a camera and for those already keen on outdoors type activities it can add a whole new dimension to walking and hiking.... Read More
Top tips for studio photography – Using snoots, grids and barndoors
This is the second in a series of short articles on studio tricks and gear that pro photographers use to make their life easier and to get the shots they need. Todays tip is using snoots, grids and barndoors to get creative lighting effects from your studio strobes or flash lighting. Clockwise from top: Barndoor; Reflector; Snoot Read More Read More
Top tips for studio photography – Shooting tethered
Over the next few days I’ll be posting some short articles on studio tricks and gear that pro photographers often use to make their life easier and to get the shots they need. First up is shooting tethered. The Tether Table Aero - mount your laptop next to your camera for easy tethered shooting Read More Read More
Understanding Colour 2 – Converting Colour to Black and White Tutorial
In the previous post on understanding colour we talked briefly about how the light captured by our camera is separated into different colours as it reflects and refracts from various objects. We also mentioned that the camera sees this light as a combination of three monochrome images, one for each channel of the additive prime colours: red, green and blue. In this post we’re going to go on and look at one way to put this knowledge into practice – improving our black... Read More
HDR Photography Tutorial – 10 Crucial Do’s and Dont’s
Seven Sisters Canal by Kris Lamba HDR or High Dynamic Range photography has recently become a popular style of digital post processing and there are now many simple to use software packages and photoshop plugins available that make the HDR effect easier to achieve than ever before. Unfortunately HDR imagery if wrongly executed has the capacity to look garish, amateur and can (in my personal opinion) make a bad image worse (typing “HDR photography” into google will... Read More
Understanding Colour – RGB, CMYK and colour temperature explained
Basics of Colour Most experienced photographers will tell you that the art is all about the light. More specifically, it is about capturing light which has been reflected from the surface of your subject. Even more specifically it is about capturing the varying wavelengths (or hues) of light within the visible spectrum known to us as colour. In this short series of tutorials we’ll attempt to explain how colours interact with one another and how we can use this knowledge... Read More
