Single-Serving Photo

Have you heard of the fabled “neutral density” filter before? Whether or not you know what one is, I’m about to blow the lid off this mysterious piece of kit, totally demystify the nineteen (well, four…) ways their strengths are measured, and give you some awesome tips for using them effectively in the field.

Starting from the top, what exactly is an ND filter, anyway? (more…)

In a previous article, Shooting Modes Explained, I went into some of the details of the major shooting modes (aperture priority, shutter priority, manual) and the program modes (what Canon calls “PictureStyles” and Nikon calls “Digital Vari-Programs”).

All of that information is still very important, but I wanted to mention that a good fellow by the name of Adam Parker posted a comment there with a useful link to an article of his where he demonstrates the major shooting modes using… Gasp… Pictures!

You can read his article, Canon Shooting Modes – What Are the Differences? at that link. Bear in mind that it is a very Canon-centric article, and therefore I fully support it!

If you have a Nikon or one of those… Other cameras… This information may still apply, though the names of the modes will probably be different, or you may have more or fewer of them.

How many times have you held up one of your photographic prints in the light of day—actual, real day—and thought That’s not at all what I bargained for? Never? Well that’s good. You must be one of the lucky ones, or one of the blind ones.

Even with the best equipment that money can buy, ICC profiles, spectrophotometers, an iron-clad color management workflow, and a high-end monitor, your eyes are the ultimate judges of your work. But eyes, they don’t work alone; you can’t see anything without light, and the quality of the light will have as much an effect on what you see as the color of the print itself.

I got onto this topic after reading Michael Johnston’s overview of his Viewing Station. All these years I’ve been experimenting with lights in my studio space, let’s call it Single-Serving Photo HQ—or, as my friends call it, my bedroom—and I never once thought to write about it.

After the jump I’ll tell you how to dramatically increase your viewing conditions for about $15. (more…)

If you have, let’s just say, a trunk-full of strange and wondrous objects fresh off the barge and out of the splintered shipping crate from lands afar, chances are good you’re either the kingpin of an international smuggling ring or you’re going into business for yourself. If you’re my friend Eli, you’re the owner and operator of Old Man Hodapp’s Worldly Treasures, peddling only the finest of… Completely weird stuff from all over the globe.

After you’ve come to terms with the concept of selling parts of animals you can’t readily identify, you will surely need to take some pretty pictures to entice the prospective customers who crawl through your website, and that means you’re going to want to build a low-cost lightbox (or cloudbox or cloud dome or… diffuse light chamber) to get that snappy catalog look.

I got together with Eli and got him to explain how he constructed a very serviceable lightbox for less than $20. We also talked a bit about post-processing and how to streamline the task of readying hundreds of product shots for the web without going insane. (more…)

It’s not so much that flash photography is actually complex, but more that the available information tends to skip the fundamentals. In short, I love Strobist very much (and I’m not alone), but I felt left in the dark (pun intended) about a couple of small items after reading a recent post and I felt I should share the answers I came up with. (more…)