5 Incredible Photography Techniques and Photo Tutorials
Over the recent months we’ve been presenting various showcases of photography – while many readers hated the showcases, most readers found them inspirational and perfect for a lousy workday’s morning. However, what we should have done in the inspirational posts is not just provide you with some inspiration for your work, but also present useful photographic techniques which can help you to achieve optimal pictures for your designs. And as requested by many of you, now it’s time to correct our mistake.
Over the recent months we’ve been presenting various showcases of photography – while many readers hated the showcases, most readers found them inspirational and perfect for a lousy workday’s morning. However, what we should have done in the inspirational posts is not just provide you with some inspiration for your work, but also present useful photography techniques and photo tutorials which can help you to achieve optimal pictures for your designs. And as requested by many of you, now it’s time to correct our mistake.
In this post we present useful photographic techniques, tutorials and resources for various kinds of photography. You’ll learn how to set up the perfect environment and what techniques, principles and rules of thumbs you should consider when shooting your next perfect photo. This round-up isn’t supposed to be the ultimate one – please feel free to suggest more useful articles in the comments to this post.
Among other things, we cover high-speed photography, tilt-shift photography, black and white photography, motion blur, infrared, night, smoke photography, macro photography, HDR, panoramic photography, RAW processing and others. Hopefully, you’ll find many of the listed tutorials and how-tos useful for your regular work.
1. High Speed Photography
Celebration Of High-Speed Photography This post is supposed to provide you with some inspiration of what can be done with high-speed photography. It also showcases some truly stunning slow-motion videos.
Home-Made High Speed Photography (PDF) Pictures of high-speed events such as popping balloons, breaking glass, and splashing liquids reveal interesting structures not visible to the naked eye. With this guide you can take your own high-speed photos to captures these ephemeral events. A very detailed tutorial.
2. Tilt-Shift Photography
Tilt-shift photography refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras; it usually requires the use of special lenses.
Tilt-shift actually encompasses two different types of movements: rotation of the lens relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. Tilt is used to control the orientation of the plane of focus (PoF), and hence the part of an image that appears sharp; it makes use of the Scheimpflug principle. Shift is used to change the line of sight while avoiding the convergence of parallel lines, as when photographing tall buildings.
Another, less cost-intensive technique called tilt-shift miniature faking is a process in which a photograph of a life-sized location or object is manipulated so that it looks like a photograph of a miniature-scale model.
Tilt-Shift Photography Photoshop Tutorial This tutorial was produced using Photoshop CS2 on a PC.
3. Black And White Photography
Beautiful Black and White Photography One of the most beautiful inspirational posts on Smashing Magazine, featuring over 50 brilliant works from photographers across the globe.
5 Black and White Photography Tips A short, but useful article by by Darren Rowse, featuring shoot in RAW, low ISO and other techniques. You may also consider reading the articles Key Ingredients for Black and White Images
Black and White Photography Guide This photography technique starts before the shot is even taken. In this article you’ll find some quick tips on what to look for to ensure the perfect black and white landscape – e.g. camera settings for black and white photography and what filters are good for black and white landscapes.
Digital Black and White This site features professional photography articles written by Keith Cooper. It covers black/white-photography-techniques, image manipulation techniques, tools, articles and camera reviews.
The Top 5 Black & White Photography Tips Five handy tips to get you going in the right direction: practice, focus on contrast, focus on texture, use color filters and more. If you want to learn more about the actual black and white conversion process in Photoshop, see the article 12 Ways to Make a Black & White Photo as well.
4. Motion Blur Photography
45 Beautiful Motion Blur Photos A showcase of motion blur photos. Motion blur is frequently used to show a sense of speed. You can artificially achieve this effect in a usual scene using cameras with a slow shutter speed. Also Adobe Photoshop can be used for this purpose, though sometimes images may look unnatural and unprofessional.
How to Capture Motion Blur in Photography Capturing movement in images is something that many photographers only need to do when photographing sports or other fast-moving events.
Photoshop Tutorials: Create Silky Smooth Waterfalls In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to look at how to give waterfalls a silky smooth appearance, as if the photo were taken with a longer exposure, which would normally require the use of a neutral density filter.
Long Exposure Photos Long exposure can be used to create very interesting photographs. It can be used, for example, to create a bright photo in low-light conditions or to create motion blur for moving elements in a photograph.
5. Infrared Photography
40 Incredible Near-Infrared Photos A showcase of near-infrared photography. Near-infrared images straight out of the camera do not always look good and are usually not as dramatic and beautiful as normally captured images. Hence, a lot of post-processing is done to enhance these images.
Infrared Photography with a Digital Camera Thanks to digital photography, we can take infrared pictures whenever we please, mix them with “normal” ones and see the results on the spot, tweaking the settings to our heart’s desire.
Beyond Visible Website about IR, UV and luminescence photography. Here you can found plenty of theory and useful information about IR adaptors for flashlights. Among the resources is a huge collection of links related to invisible light photography.
Infrared photography Huge article with a number of useful links. Nearly complete list of IR filters and digital cameras that can be updated for IR shooting.
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