Andrew S Gibson is a freelance writer who writes about the technical and creative aspects of photography. He's the Technical Editor of EOS magazine and his photography eBooks are available now at Craft & Vision.
In this tutorial, we’ll be walking you through an explanation of exactly what an environmental portrait is, looking at how to approach different types of subject, plan for capturing a particular event or celebration, and the best equipment to use.
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Photoshop CS’s high pass filter is very versatile. There are three ways you can put it to use. One, it’s a great sharpening tool. Two, contradictory as it sounds, you can use it to soften portraits and other photos. Three, you can use it to create a high contrast portrait effect. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to do all three.
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New Year’s Eve has been and gone and we’re already well into 2010. Did you make any New Year’s resolutions? If you’re like me, they’ve already been forgotten. But a New Year is a great reason for undertaking a new photography project. It’s an opportunity to learn new skills and challenge yourself, and at the end of the year you can look back on what you’ve achieved with a sense of satisfaction.
One of my photographic goals this year is to go to a new country and photograph the people there. I’m already making plans for a trip to Romania in the summer and I’m looking forward to it. But sometimes the hardest thing about setting yourself a new challenge is coming up with the challenge itself. Here are eight ideas to get you going.
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Nearly every survey I’ve seen published in a photography magazine that asks readers their favourite subject has the same winner – landscapes. Why is this? I suspect it’s because landscape photography is seen as a relatively easy subject. Most people live within, or relatively close to, a landscape of some sort, and I’m sure that most photographers enjoy capturing the natural beauty around them.
Today we’ll be exploring the idea of landscape photography in a new direction – fine art, black and white images. Along with explaining the reason and thinking behind this technique, I’ll offer a few tips to get started.
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One of the first composition rules we learn in photography is the rule-of-thirds. But once you’ve understood this concept, what else can you do to improve the composition of your photos? It will get you started, but there’s more to composition than where you place your subject in the frame.
Today we’ll be exploring a few more aspects of photographic composition, to ensure you’re completely clued up on how to take brilliant shots!
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If you regularly shoot landscapes, you’ll soon make a discovery that seems obvious when you think about it – the sky is much brighter than the land. This is a real problem when you’re taking photos of sunsets, especially when the sun is still above the horizon. The sky is so bright that if you expose for sky, anything on land goes black. If you expose for the land, the sky is washed out and you lose the beautiful sunset that you set out to photograph.
This tutorial will introduce the idea of exposure blending, combining two versions of a RAW image to correctly adjust the exposure in different areas. We’ll be using two examples – a New Zealand sunset, and a stunning piece of Oxford architecture.
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Colour is everywhere. We’re surrounded by it, we can’t avoid it and therefore we tend to take it for granted when we take photos. But take it for granted, and you’re likely to end up with mediocre photos. Just because colour is everywhere doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to how it affects your images. We see so many average photos each day – in magazines, on the internet, in books – that sometimes it’s easy to forget that colour photography can be a magical, evocative medium.
We’ve put together seven tips to help you get the most out of colour. At the end of the article is a section of links to photographers who use colour to create powerful photos. With a little bit of thought, so can you.
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Are you looking for a quick and easy way to convert colour photos to black and white in Photoshop? Then plugins may be the answer. In an earlier article I looked at the most common ways to convert colour photos to black and white in Photoshop CS. The best methods are very effective and, if you don’t mind taking your time over each conversion, you won’t need anything else. But sometimes you want something that is quick, easy and that can be applied to any photo at the touch of a button. For that, you need a plugin.
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Every time that I look through the most recent photos posted by my Flickr contacts, I see the results of a popular post-processing technique: adding textures to your photos. It seems that almost no photo is complete until it has been post-processed and textured by the photographer. Done well, it works, which is one of the reasons the technique is so popular.
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Have you ever felt intimidated by the thought of taking photos of other people? Believe it or not, once you’re over your initial nerves, people are one of the easiest subjects to photograph. Why is this? Well, imagine that you’re taking landscape photos. Most of us don’t live in a spectacular landscape, which means we have to drive somewhere to take the photo. Once there, if the weather and light aren’t good, there’s not much we can do.
Photographing people, however, gives you complete control. All the elements of good photography are in your hands. You’re surrounded by potential subjects; friends, relatives and even strangers if you have the courage to ask. Every potential subject is unique. If the light isn’t great, you can do something about it, like move to another location or use flash. You can ask your subject to wear different clothes, or do something a little crazy – your only limit is your imagination.
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