Photography Bay

Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips

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.

How to Rim-Light and Light a Black Product Shot on Black Background

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykYlFfTY27E&w=700]

Shooting on a black background can create a great, contrasty image. Shooting a black product on a black background, however, can be tough to get right in camera.

This video from Karl Taylor and Broncolor shows us how to properly rim-light a product to create separation from a black background. The video goes on to show how to light from different angles to create or cancel reflections, as well as how to bring in LED lights from a product by extending an exposure time.