Single-Serving Photo

I’ve posted about this before, but there is something so romantic about being able to do professional-looking product photography right in your kitchen and sharing the images with the Internet at large and watching them fumble all over themselves to figure out which studio you hired.

This is essentially the culmination of the progressively tumbling costs of photography equipment and exploding mindshare of innovators on the Internet. There are now low-cost solutions to problems that were insurmountable to the layman until only a few years ago and we have not only the actual photographic technology to thank for that, but also sites like handmade spark, who provide marketing advice to Etsy sellers.

I won’t delve too deeply into what Etsy is for anyone who may not know because it’s a bit beyond the reach of my topic here, but it is a marketplace of sorts, and thus it benefits greatly from well-executed product photography.

In any case, handmade spark posted an article about how to set up a really simple aluminum foil reflector setup that uses natural light to illuminate your (small) product subject and when I saw it I immediately thought (I’m really not kidding), This is exactly the kind of stuff my SSP audience would love to see.

This is miles beyond the whole Strobist crowd with their SB800s and their watt-seconds and their multiple white balances. There is a time and a place for off-camera flash, but check this out… We are lighting a product on our kitchen tables with aluminum foil-wrapped cardboard and we are getting sweet results.

Alright, I feel as though I’ve gushed about this enough. Read it for yourself: Studio Quality Product Photography with a $12 Set Up

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…)

Remember when I told you about that crazy remote-controlled robot carting a DSLR that these two British brothers would drive around Africa, taking up-close-and-personal photos of wild animals? It was called the BeetleCam, and it was the brainchild of William and Matthew Burrard-Lucas, two swiftly burgeoning wildlife photographers from the UK.

Well, they’re at it again, only this time they’re not using a remote-controlled dune buggy and they’re not photographing lions or elephants. They’re using an ingenious tabletop lighting setup and capturing the births of mosquito larvae.

See all of the amazing macro photos and read about the brothers’ technical process on their guest post on Digital Photography School!

Via Digital Photography School, via Burrard-Lucas.com

To the right of your histogram that is. You do remember how to read one, yes? Slightly, ever so slightly exposing all of your photographs to the right of the histogram, which is to say slightly overexposing them, should be your goal, 100% of the time.

Why? Because there is more data in the brightest few stops of sensor attenuation than in the rest of the entire range, which is to say that there will be more detail, less banding, less noise, and so forth, within the brightest areas than there will be in the darkest ones. But you’ve observed that before, right? You’ve seen how terrible shadow areas can look when you try to brighten them up.

“It’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.“—Will Greenwald

Then there’s this guy Will Greenwald. He just posted a whole article about this in which he says “it’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” Awesome, I agree. But neither of us are saying you should “blow out” any of your image; definitely don’t do that.

Strangely, most of the people who commented on Will’s article disagreed with him. Those people are amateurs. (more…)