Role of Light and Illumination in Photography |  |
- Role of Light and Illumination in Photography
- 2 Year Timelapse Photo Project from a Shanghai Apartment (Video)
- How to do High-Speed Colored Powder Effects Photography (Video)
| Role of Light and Illumination in Photography Posted: 13 Nov 2013 04:13 PM PST Light and illumination are the basics of photography. The very word “photography” comes from two Greek words, phos meaning light, and graphis meaning drawing. Hence, photography can be described as “drawing with light”. As we start the lesson, I want to wish you a pleasant and illuminating session!  Photo captured by Franz Veilhart (Click Image to See More From Franz Veilhart) If you ask me to name the most important thing in photography, I would say light. Without light, there is no illumination. In a room without illumination, everything is pitch black. You can’t see a thing. Taking a shot – assuming your camera allows you to – produces a solid black photograph. You switch on a lamp, and you send light across the room, and everything is illuminated. Now you can take a photograph and show something in the picture. You realize that your eye and the camera both need light and illumination to work. Photography is about capturing light and recording it, whether on paper, or more frequently now, in a digital format. As a photographer, you control the amount, intensity and duration of light required to create the picture. The apparatus used to draw with light is called the camera, which comes from camera obscura, a box with a hole for light to pass through and strike the backwall of it. The name “camera obscura” actually means dark chamber, and indeed, the word “camera” is still used in some languages such as Italian to mean “room” or “chamber”. There is a saying that the camera never lies. Actually, the camera is rarely capable of telling the whole truth. Without even going to what the camera shows, it often cannot even get the brightness right. Have you ever taken a photograph, and the shot seems brighter or darker than what you remember the scene to be? With a digital camera, you can even see then and there how distant the difference between what you see in front of you and what the camera recorded. Why is that so? The camera and our eyes work in pretty much the same way. The difference between the two is that our eyes are better able to handle wide differences in light intensity. For example, if you take a photograph from inside a room with an open window, you may get the room properly exposed but the window is too bright, or the window looks right but the room too dark. Yet our eyes don’t have such a problem: they can see everything inside the room and outside the window properly exposed. The reason is, our eyes can compensate for the wide difference in light whereas the camera cannot.  “Evening Reflection” captured by Ævar Guðmundsson (Click Image to See More From Ævar Guðmundsson) Secondly, our eye is more sensitive to light than most of the amateur/prosumer cameras. In a dark environment, such as inside a movie theatre, our eyes can still adjust to the lack of light and allow us to see the rows of chairs and people. Most cameras would have difficulty focusing under such a demanding condition. So are we saying that the eye shows reality but the camera doesn’t? Neither is capable of showing us reality all the time. What our eye and the camera do is that they provide their interpretation of reality. What we see with our eye and what we see with the camera are what they are capable of showing us. As an example: Switch on a fan. You see the blades start to turn. Soon the blades become a blur. Now aim a camera at the fan, set it to the highest shutter speed and take a shot of the fan. The picture comes out showing the blades seemingly motionless. Why is it that our eyes show the blades blur while the camera shows them still? On the other hand, have you seen photographs taken in crowded public places such as railway stations or airports, where the people seem to be blur? Your eyes never show you people as a motion blur, and yet that’s how they look like in the photo. How is that possible? Our eyes are capable of showing a moving object as sharp, up to a certain speed. Beyond that, it becomes a blur. The camera, on the other hand, will record the object as sharp or blur, depending on the shutter speed that we set. Our eyes and the camera both provide an interpretation of reality, but they interpret reality in their own way. Moreover, our eyes see things in continuous motion while the camera captures a moment. Have you seen a photo where people appear as motion blur? Have you seen a photo where the subject is sharp but the background of off-focus? Or a photo of a stream where the water become a milky blur? Or an ocean where the rolling waves are frozen? These are all possible with a camera, even though reality doesn’t look like that at all. And yet, often such pictures are regarding as being very well taken. That takes us back to the art of photography. It is after all, an art form. Art doesn’t have to look like reality. Art can be very unreal as still look pleasing. As a photographer, your goal is to create photographs that are pleasing to the eye. The next time someone tells you, “Oh, your photo looks so real!” thank them, but be mindful that none of your photograph – not a single one – is 100% the real thing, but only an interpretation on it.  “Life is to Dance” captured by Katelyn Wall (Click Image to See More From Katelyn Wall) What we’ve learned in this article:
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| 2 Year Timelapse Photo Project from a Shanghai Apartment (Video) Posted: 13 Nov 2013 02:48 PM PST What’s the longest you’ve ever shot for a project – a week? a month? How about 2 years? Photographer Joe Nafis has recently created a 3 1/2 minute video containing timelapses of Shanghai over the past 24 months. All the footage is taken from his apartment on the 23rd floor, yet it shows a great amount of detail about the city and its life. Through sunrises and sunsets, join the people of Shainghai as they wake up and fall asleep to the largest city in the world: Tips and Tricks You Can Take Away From This Timelapse:
 All photos were taken from Nafis’ 23rd floor apartment The great thing about timelapse videos is you don’t need a lot of time to shoot them. Once you’ve got your camera set up and made sure there’s plenty of battery life, you can walk away for a few hours and let your camera do all the work. For Further Training on Timelapse Photography:There is a COMPLETE guide (146 pages) to shooting, processing and rendering time-lapses using a dslr camera. It can be found here: The Timelapse Photography Guide Go to full article: 2 Year Timelapse Photo Project from a Shanghai Apartment (Video) |
| How to do High-Speed Colored Powder Effects Photography (Video) Posted: 13 Nov 2013 11:06 AM PST Seeing as our brains can only process images so quickly, we often find high-speed photography to be very intriguing because it captures something that our eyes and brain cannot process fast enough. High-speed photography freezes actions and movements, allowing you to view a single moment in time for as long as you wish. The more movement and actions you add, the more intriguing it becomes. In this video, photographer Evan Sharboneau shows you how to create high-speed powder photography using some easy-to-find products and a little creativity: For this shoot, Sharboneau used two bags of cheap flour, colored Holi powder, a dustpan, a Nikon D800, an Einstein E640 strobe with a beauty dish, and two additional strobes for backlight. Tips For Creating Your Own High-Speed Powder Photography:
 Always throw the powder behind or to the side of your model, never straight towards their face Feel free to experiment and add your own variations to this idea. Maybe drop a load of powder from above, or use a slow shutter speed to allow the powder to blur across the frame. For Further Training from Evan:Check out Trick Photography and Special Effects by Evan Sharboneau; a very popular instructional eBook that explains how to do most of the trick photos that often capture attention and amazement from viewers. It also teaches the basics that are essential before moving onto advanced techniques. With 300+ pages of information and 9 hours of video tutorials, it is very detailed and includes extensive explanations of many complicated methods that are very fun to learn. It can be found here: Trick Photography and Special Effects 2.0 Go to full article: How to do High-Speed Colored Powder Effects Photography (Video) |
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