How to Take Amazing Macro Flower Photos

How to Take Amazing Macro Flower Photos
Interesting Photo of the Day: Baby Sea Turtle’s First Swim
What Does a Google Business Photographer Do?
Photoshop King Erik Johansson Uses Photography to Capture Ideas, Not Moments

Posted: 04 Sep 2013 04:02 AM PDT

Flowers are one of my favorite photography subjects. They can’t complain if the photo doesn’t come out right. Flowers also look very different when shot from different angles and zoom levels. Explore the flower from these different angles to get completely new photos. While taking photos indoors, the two most important things to keep in mind are lighting and background.

“I’m Coming Out” captured by Anthony Zeder (Click image to see more from Zeder)

1) Choose a diffused light source, like a large window or multiple lamps to throw light on the flowers. Harsh lighting sources can cause the photograph to look washed out. 2) Pick an uncluttered background, such as a plain wall. You can even hang a cloth at a distance behind the flowers to get a plain, solid colored background. Make sure that the background is far away from the subject. This ensures that it’s out of focus and also makes sure that no shadows fall on the background. 3) Chose a narrow depth of field. Keeping the depth of field shallow will reduce the background clutter and draw attention to the flower. Shallow depth of field is achieved by opening up the lens wide.

“Orchid” captured by Eric R. (Click image to see more from Eric)

Outdoors, it’s Tougher to Control the Background

4) Moving around to change the angle of the shot can dramatically change the background. Choose an angle from which the background is far away from the flower itself. Many photographers carry a few plain cloth sheets with them to use as backgrounds. 5) Carry a macro lens or extension tubes. Macro lenses allow you to get closer to the subject and still focus on them. Extension tubes allow you to reuse your lenses and reduce the minimum focusing distance. Since they don’t have any optical components, they don’t harm the image quality in any way. 6) Add an insect to the photograph to make it more interesting. The best time to photograph is during early morning since the insects are still inactive due to the night’s cold and dew.

“Bluebottle” captured by Kevin Lovibond (Click image to see more from Lovibond)

7) Rain and dew make flower shots more interesting. Look for flowers with dew drops on them, or just spray some water on them yourself.

“Flower Droplets” captured by Tim Caldbeck (Click image to see more from Caldbeck)

Post Processing of Flower Photos

8) You can always post process the photo to enhance it. Some of the common post processing techniques used in flower photos are cropping the photograph, increasing saturation to give richer colors, increasing contrast and brightness, and adding vignetting effects. Vignetting is the dark shadows on the corners of a photograph’s frame, often caused by the lens. Adding vignetting moves the eye to the center of the photograph.

About the Author:
This articles was written by Tushit Jain from TwistedTripod. A place for learning photography and sharing your best photographs, travel stories, destinations and occasionally stuff from another life.

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Article from: PictureCorrect Photography Tips

Interesting Photo of the Day: Baby Sea Turtle’s First Swim

Posted: 03 Sep 2013 11:41 PM PDT

South Florida photographer, Ben Hicks, can consider himself fortunate after having been present for the hatching of a nest of Loggerhead sea turtles and subsequent adventure to make it to sea. Without overheating or becoming lost before they find water, just making it offshore is a dangerous chore for the hatchlings. They also risk becoming a meal for a variety of natural predators such as birds and crabs:

Underwater photo of baby sea turtle’s first swim (Via Imgur, click for larger size)

Once the young turtles make it to water they began what is commonly referred to as a swimming frenzy–a rush to swim away from the dangerous coastline where most of it’s natural predators live. Because the turtles are so vulnerable at this age, it is approximated that only 1 in 1000 turtles will actually survive into adulthood. Because so few of the turtles actually make it to the water from the nest, Hicks was able to photograph a relatively rare occasion.

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What Does a Google Business Photographer Do?

Posted: 03 Sep 2013 08:26 PM PDT

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a photographer for Google’s new street view ventures inside buildings? Photographers all over the world are working to create 360 degree imagery that allows anyone with an Internet connection to be an armchair traveler. Now expanding Street View to include the insides of business and monuments, Google is seeking out independent photographers to work with companies that want to show off their spaces.

Jeremy Powlus photographs the interiors of offices, retail establishments, and car dealerships for Google Business Photos. Learn more about what he does by watching the following video:

Though Google approves many different camera bodies, Powlus uses his Canon 7D for his shoots. The crop sensor produces just a small amount of vignetting, so he throws away less of the image than he would if he used a camera with a full frame sensor.

The camera is affixed to a regular tripod with a specialty mount that is centered on the focal point. This eliminates perspective shift between shots that would make post-process stitching more difficult. An extremely wide angle 8mm lens is used to provide a 180 degree field of view that creates the signature panoramas used by Google Maps.

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Powlus works with business owners and uses his own creativity to choose the points of interest within a business. For each point of interest, he takes 12 photos–three bracketed photos for each 90 degree increment. Software is then used to blend the images together with a semi-HDR effect. Each hour of shooting results in two to three hours of post-processing and uploading.

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Panoramic photography requires some special equipment and a lot of patience. It not only takes mastery of the camera but also a good understanding of post-processing methods. Powlus is just one of many Google Business Photographers using their technical and creative photography skills to make more of the world visible to everyone.

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Photoshop King Erik Johansson Uses Photography to Capture Ideas, Not Moments

Posted: 03 Sep 2013 05:20 PM PDT

Erik Johansson, a Swedish photographer and retouch artist, spends countless hours editing his images in Photoshop, adding layer upon layer mask, endlessly blending and adjusting until each of his surreal masterpieces is completed—but there's a reason why Johansson's fantastical images seem plausible and only modestly-edited. Johansson uses real photographs as the building blocks for creating each image that he dreams up. To help us better understand his process, Johansson filmed this behind-the-scenes video, which documents the process he followed to create one of his most recent images, "Drifting Away":

In his keynote lecture at the Adobe MAX creativity conference in May, Johansson revealed that he creates his images through a structured, three-step process: planning, taking photographs, and blending photos together with layer masks and adjustment tools in Photoshop.

Being self-taught in both photography and retouch, Johansson advises those who would use Photoshop to learn the tools through patience and practice, just as he did, and to remember that Photoshop can never replace good photographs.

"Photoshop isn't magic," Johansson said, "or at least not yet. It's all about material you have to work with, and getting good material is all about planning."

Ultimately, while extensive Photoshop skills and camera knowledge are necessary to produce high-quality work, planning—that is, detailed sketches, problem-solving, location scouting, and even clever inventions to accomplish just the right effect—is the most important stage of Johansson’s process, and the most important part of planning is imagination, of which Johansson is clearly king.

"It always starts with what you can imagine," he said. "To me, that is about trying to see the world differently—not trying to see the things that are not there, but rather trying to see the things in my daily life and how they can be combined into something new… I think that what you can imagine is what you can create."