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The Editors of Popular Photography & Imaging have posted a tip a day, every weekday since April, on our blog PopPhoto Flash. Some tips came from our editors themselves, while others were pulled from books, blogs, websites, or donated from ingenious readers. Listed here are our favorites, the top 25 tips of 2007.
1) How to Hold Your Camera
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| © Adam Borkowski - Fotolia.com |
It might sound simple, but many photographers don't hold their cameras properly. Here's how to hold your camera to avoid camera shake:
1. Keep your elbows in.
2. Cup your left hand under the lens.
3. Breathe out just before you shoot.
Read more here
2) How to Improve on Postcard Shots
There are certain pictures that everyone takes when they travel: the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, Big Ben. Such well-known landmarks are irresistible, but even with perfect technical skills, the best you can hope for is a postcard-perfect shot -- a picture taken a millions times before.
To get a unique shot of an over-photographed place, shoot the landmark when something interesting is happening. Most major cities around the world hold many festivals, parades, races, etc. Plan your visit to coincide with the beer festival in Brussels, or the New York Marathon, for example, and not only will you have a lot more photo opportunities in general, but you can get shots of famous landmarks that tell a story.
Read more here
3) How to Remove Tourists From Your Photos
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| © Sascha Burkard - Fotolia.com |
It's not always possible to wait for tourists to leave to take your shot, so Photojojo found a few programs to remove tourists once you get home:
Microsoft Research's Group Shot allows you to choose the favorite parts of each image in a series of shots and composite them together to create a single shot.
Futurelabs Tourist Remover does something similar but in a more automated fashion, allowing you to choose as many images as you want to blend together. Its best for images with relatively sparse crowds as a significant portion of the background must be visible.
If you'd rather do the work yourself, DSPhotographic walks you through the process using the masking, layers, and eraser tool in Adobe Photoshop.
Read more here
4) How to Find Lighting Tips in Old Movies
Black-and-white movies from the 1930s and '40s are a great source of portrait techniques, and now that a lot of them are coming out on DVD, you can freeze frame them to study the lighting patterns at your leisure. When you start to watch old movies like Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart or The Third Man with Orson Welles, you'll notice that no matter what situation the characters are in the lighting fits the mood perfectly.
If it's a sultry scene with a starlet, the lighting moves to an overhead butterfly pattern with some diffusion to give her a soft dreamy look. When you want a man to have a rugged chiseled look, use hard edged short lighting. For a funnyman an even broad light makes him look brighter. Sometimes one simple scene between two lovers can almost be a master class in lighting for your mood.
Read more here
5) How to Light and Pose Anyone
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| © Philip Date - Fotolia.com |
Bambi Cantrell is an amazing wedding photographer who gave us great tips in our "Four Perfect Moments" article (April 2007). So, of course, we took detailed notes during her "Language of Lighting and Posing" seminar at the PhotoPlus conference in New York City in October. Here are just a few tips she offered:
• Have subjects separate their arms from their body to look thinner and give the body more shape.
• Using a higher light angle throws a shadow under the chin, which can minimize a double chin. Also when using a higher angle, have subjects look up with only their eyes -- not tilting the head -- to minimize the bags under the eyes.
• Turn bodies away from light to give them more shape.
• When lighting a long face, use broad light; otherwise, use short light.
• Have subjects lean forward from the chest to give them a more engaged, friendly look.
Read more here
6) How to Get Sharp Self-Portraits
The problem with self-portraits is that it's difficult to get your camera to focus properly on your eyes. So we were happy to find Meejahor.com's method of forcing the camera to focus right where you want it to.
Just darken the room and hold a small flashlight next to your eye. The camera then picks up the only area of contrast and locks on. Boom! Perfectly crisp focus right on the pupil, where you want it.
Read more here
7) How to Borrow from the Masters
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| Photo by Lori Fredrickson |
You've probably heard that studying the greats can help you improve your photography. But what about using studying the masters to help you improve your image editing? The blog Unfocused Brain posted a tutorial on how to perk up washed-out hues by using the palette of great painters.
Assistant Editor Lori Fredrickson tried out the technique with a washed-out image of a stuffed wookiee summering in Rockport, MA, and combined it with Edward Hopper's "Rooms by the Sea."
Read more here
8) How to Build a Texture Library
Sometimes in post processing, you notice that an image could use some additional texture. Here's a good way to get it:
Keep a compact camera with a decent resolution with you all the time. Any time you see an interesting texture, capture a quick macro shot of it and save it for a rainy day. You can import it later into a job and blend it into an image, giving it just the right smooth, pebbly, leafy, or any other kind of texture.
But if you don't have the time to go out and find the exact texture you need, try Texture King or Bashocorp (both are royalty-free). They have a nice variety of textures that you can use in any project personal or professional.
Read more here
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