Single-Serving Photo

Photography is awesome and I love it, but it’s super expensive sometimes. Photographers often commiserate with one another about the high price tags on tripods and ball heads (or sometimes they gloat, but the nice ones commiserate), and if you get into studio photography you are often getting into a whole new world of expenses from strobes and stands to backdrops and gels.

Now, it definitely pays off to have the right tools for the job, and that starts to become glaringly apparent when you’re doing work with people, but for so-called tabletop product photography you can often get by with some home improvement supplies and a little ingenuity and patience.

After the break, the resident product photographer and editor at Handmadeology shares a $12 product studio setup that yielded the image on the right. (more…)

And by “strike” I definitely don’t mean in the “strike out” sense, but in the “I just struck gold” sense. The other day I posted Tricks for Shooting High-Key Macro wherein I link to a cool in-studio tutorial by Atlanta photographer Alex Koloskov. Alex and his wife run AKELstudio in Atlanta, Georgia and are now literally brain-dumping all of these great tutorials and behind-the-scenes views onto the Internet and I’m loving every minute of it.

Genia, AKELstudio's Photoshop Mastermind

Anyway, I really enjoyed Alex’s high-key macro behind-the-scenes and some of his in-studio video tutorials on shooting products under water (if you want to check that out you can read it here), and then I found out that his wife, Genia, is actually the Photoshop mastermind behind all of AKELstudio’s post-production and has her own blog, too!

You may not know this about me, but my first contact with Photoshop was in my middle school’s computer lab. They had version 2.5, which was the first version that shipped for Windows and also the last version that didn’t have layers. Version 3 was shipped in 1994 and introduced layers for the first time. I have been using Photoshop on and off since then, and almost on a daily basis since version 5 or so. Needless to say, I’m sort of a Photoshop junkie. To say that I “like” Photoshop would be an understatement.

Another thing that has really excited me lately is HDR (or compressed dynamic range, as it should properly be called, but that’s a discussion for another time). I just caught wind of this article Genia posted back in June of outdoor HDR images that Alex photographed and she put together using Photomatrix Pro (my favorite HDR program, by the way, you should buy it from Amazon right now) and Photoshop.

Go and check out this HDR images. I really appreciate HDR that you can’t quite tell is HDR, though Genia does enjoy the more exaggerated HDR effects as well, which is cool, I’m into that. You can hover your mouse over each image to see one of the exposures from the “before” that contributed to the final version.

You can do so much with Photomatix, I would highly recommend giving it a try. You can download a trial version from HDRsoft and if you like it, please please please buy it from Amazon so I can keep paying my web hosting bills.

High Dynamic Range Images Before and After via The Perfect Photo Blog

I know that I’m like a broken record when I talk about B&H, always rambling on and on about their impressive mid-town Manhattan superstore and how great their customer service is, how I’ve always felt like I was treated well by their floor staff and telephone sales folks, but you know I wouldn’t say any of these things if they weren’t true. B&H is the kind of company that inspires flattery because you just want everyone else to know how great they are.

On top of all that, their prices are always fair, and they make no exception with software. You’ve probably heard me babble on more than one occasion about how awesome Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is and how it changed my photography from the moment I tried the early beta versions. I’ve purchased every upgrade to Lightroom since version 1 and it still kicks ass. Anyway, getting back to the point, B&H is having a little promotion where you can get $100 off a copy of Lightroom when you buy practically any camera from them, including point-and-shoots.

If you haven’t tried Lightroom yet, try it. You can download a free trial right now if you want to give it a spin. When you decide you want to own it, just click the attractive banner below to see the list of products that get you the discount and click the “Buy Together & Save” link below your choice.

Buy a new pocket-size Canon PowerShot for your girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband and get $100 off Lightroom for yourself! That’s what I would do at least.

Buy something in this list and get $100 off Lightroom 3.0!

Oh. My. Good. Gosh. I don’t normally head over to Earth Science Picture of the Day but am I glad I did today! Chris Kotsiopoulos has created just about the most amazing panorama I have ever seen, though to call it a “panorama” is almost a disservice to what is really going on within this image.

This is a compilation of images made throughout an entire day (more than a day, actually), including the full path of the sun in 15-minute steps and one magnificent 11-hour star trail opposite the Temple of Poseidon (Chris lives and photographs in Athens, Greece).

Now, peel your eyes off of this beauty for a second and keep reading. Not only did Chris sit out in the winter cold for 30 hours to capture all of these images, he also spent another 12 hours compiling it all together using a combination of Panotools (PTGui actually) and Photoshop, and then, as though this wasn’t enough, he explained it step-by-step on his forum!

Take one more good look at that fabulous panorama up there and then head over to the Greek Sky forum and learn how it was done.

Edit: Photojojo reported on this image as well!

camera dial by Lee Reynolds

Being an excellent photographer is 50% vision and 50% technical prowess. Seeing the art all around you is only useful for the photographer who can capture it, and perfectly executing that capture means wrangling the piece of hardware you love so much, the camera.

These days, most photographers are shooting digital. Digital photography is freeing in a lot of ways, but it is also more complicated. Camera manufacturers have sought to close the gap between the pro and the semi-pro by providing all of these different shooting modes, and even though I still believe you only need three, it’s not unusual to see mode dials with 11 or 12 settings on them! You don’t need all those settings to get full control! Haje Jan Kamps helps me explain after the break. (more…)