Photography Bay

Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips

Six Tips to Make your Holiday Pictures Sing

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6 Tips to Make Your Holiday Pictures Sing

As the well-known advertising jingle says, the holidays are coming. A time when families get together, eat, drink, be merry and generally have a whale of a time. So there’s no better time to whip out the phone and start capturing images of the frivolity.

If you want to get great pictures though, there are a couple of things you should think about first – just because your camera is a phone, doesn’t mean it can’t capture great images – far from it, you just need to start treating it like a camera. So here are six tips to take your phone pictures from bluegh to wow! [Read more…]

 

How to Shoot Dance with Motion Blur & Detail

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpDqh90NsKM&w=700&showinfo=0&rel=0]

In this video from Broncolor featuring Karl Taylor and Urs Recher, we learn how to combine two different kinds of lights in dance photography to capture motion blur and frozen detail. While they are using high-end Broncolor HMI lights with Broncolor Siros flashes, these concepts of working with flash and ambient light can work on any budget.

The key, of course, is setting your camera to rear curtain sync, so that the flash fires at the very end of the exposure, which gives you the detailed subject with the motion blur trailing.

A Beginner’s Guide to Histograms

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com?v=DfQM7nZ2IN4&w=700&showinfo=0&rel=0]

Histograms allow us to observe the graphical representation of our exposures. Most modern cameras are equipped with the ability to review the histogram and often place a live histogram on a camera’s display to help judge the exposure before we take a photo.

In this video from Karl Taylor, he walk through the basics of reading and using histograms to aid in exposure evaluation.

How to Do Milky Way Exposure Stacking When Auto-Alignment Fails in Photoshop

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzVSm64zq44&w=700]

Photoshop’s automated alignment tools are quite impressive; however, they aren’t perfect. When auto-alignment fails to work the way you need it to, sometimes it just means you have to do the work yourself.

In this video from Ian Norman, he walks us through the process of processing Milky Way astrophotography images by manually aligning them in Photoshop in order to reduce noise and bring out more detail in the images.

If you are looking to improve your astrophotography images, Ian’s videos are worth a watch. Even if you are doing other types of image stacking, you can probably learn a thing or two from Ian’s workflow.

How to Fix Too Much Red on Faces Using Only Lightroom

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Here’s a quick video in which I walk through a very simple technique for correcting too much red in faces using just Lightroom.

I picked this tip up from Aaron Nace’s tutorial on a similar technique in Photoshop. I generally try to avoid going to Photoshop if it is something I can deal with in Lightroom. It’s just faster and a preferred piece of software for me.

If you need to do this in Photoshop, check out this Phlearn video for an explanation of how to accomplish this inside Photoshop, where you’ll have much more control in isolating colors.

How to Shoot Engraved Glass in Studio with Strobes

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDs2GoTjkeE&w=700&showinfo=0&rel=0]

In this video, Karl Taylor and Urs Recher walk us through shooting a glass with a design engraved on it. They mix soft and hard light to illuminate the glass and the engraving separately.

The main light was simply a softbox, but the light used to bring out the engraving was a Broncolor Picolite and a projection attachment.

Split Toning Effect with Lightroom

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Lightroom, being the versatile software it is, has several creative effect options available for us to test. Perhaps one of the easiest effects to accomplish – and the most stunning in appearance – is the Split Toning effect, which consists of an image in which the tonal values on Highlights and Shadows are replaced by tints selected by the user. [Read more…]