I have been using hardware store LED bulbs for both photography and video in the studio for a while (click here for a DIY three light studio setup) – but every time I pass the lighting aisle in my local big box hardware store I always take a look to see what’s new and improved. Well on a recent trip to Lowes I found some really cool LED strip lights that work quite well for both photography and video – continue reading for details…...
Adding coloured backgrounds to portraits is often done in camera at the time of shooting. It’s a quick and easy process that can be done either with the use of gels on your flashes, or by using a coloured backdrop. Sometimes, though, you’re shooting for a client, you don’t know what colour they ultimately want. Or, perhaps it’s for yourself, but you haven’t decided what colour you want the background to be....
There are some rather mad people on the Internet. And they don’t get much madder than the folks at Syrp Lab. But building a DaVinci Resolve style system of colour grading in Microsoft Excel isn’t quite as crazy as it might first appear. You see, under the hood, DaVinci Resolve is essentially just running some maths when it changes the colour of your images. Maths is all Excel does, too. The Excel work shown in the video essentially allows you to see what DaVinci Resolve, and similar grading apps are doing under the hood....
If you’d like to explore macro photography and you’re not willing to invest thousands of dollars in professional macro lenses, photographer Adam Kappa has quite an affordable solution. He shares the setup he uses for macro photography which all of us can use with minimum investment. It involves a kit lens, a cheap external flash, macro tubes and a DIY diffuser. So, with less than $100 of additional gear and some DIY magic, he achieves really great results....
When you photograph birds, their beauty really gets in focus against a clean and simple background. But when you’re out there with your camera, it can be pretty difficult to get a nice and clean background in bird photos. In this video, Jan Wegener shares a couple of simple tricks that will help you raise your photos to a whole new level. When you’re shooting birds out in the wild, there can be lots of distractions ruining the background....
