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Expose Right

Expose Right
On my recent workshop in Iceland (July, 2003) I had a fascinating chat with Thomas Knoll about signal to noise ratios in digital photography. You may recognize Thomas' name — he is the original author of Adobe Photoshop, and also the author of Camera RAW. (A discussion with Thomas is featured in The Luminous Landscape Video Journal, Issue #6, from the Fall of 2002 when I was reviewing a pre-production Canon EOS-1Ds). But I digress. We spent a lot of time chatting about digital topics during our 3,000 km drive around Iceland, and Thomas elaborated on one that had not occurred to me before, though once I started thinking about it makes perfect sense. Clouds and V Formation. Canon 1Ds with 70-200mm f/2/8L IS lens at ISO 400 Home on The Dynamic Range Let's assume for the purposes of illustration that a digital SLR has a dynamic range of 5 stops (it's usually closer to 6 stops, but let's not quibble). A 12 bit image is capable of recording 4,096 (2^12) discrete tonal values. Why? The Lesson

Cambridge in Colour - Digital Photography Tutorials Learn how to take and edit digital photographs using visual tutorials that emphasize concept over procedure, independent of specific digital camera or lens. This is a complete listing of all tutorials on this site; click the drop-down links in the top menu to see particular topics. Photography is going through an exciting transition period as many film photographers are beginning to explore the new capabilities of digital cameras. While the fundamentals have remained similar, other aspects are markedly different. This is a great time to get involved with digital photography. These tutorials are rarely influenced by changes in image editing software and camera equipment — due to their unique concept-based approach. View in other languages: Português Русский Deutsch Français Italiano

Photo album - HDR Photoshop The most important is first step, it is a base of HDR Photoshop effect. Use command image > adjustment > shadow/highlight and set up values: shadows amount: 50%, tonal width 45%, radius 41 px; High-light amount 83%, tonal width 76%, radius 1120px; Duplicate layer "base" and set up its layer blending to Color Dodge. This blending gives picture strong colors and cause that light areas turn into pure white. Do the same thing as in the second step, but layer blending is set up to Linear Burn now. Fourth step is easy, it profits from third step. Now it's time to adjust picture look, try to experiment with layer opacity. Set up foreground color to white and use command select > color range with fuzziness set up around 100. The last step colorize picture into red tones. I use some other adjustmenst to achieve HDR look. You needn't do manually all this steps again and again, much easier is to use HDR Photoshop action, which do the all work for you.

Optimizing Exposure (pour aller + loin, article 2011) Why Do Camera Makers Give Us19th Century Exposures With Our 21st Century Cameras? Lace and Forest. Clearview, Ontario. July, 2011 Fuji X100 @ ISO 400 A Bit of Background Information In 2003 I wrote a tutorial titled Expose Right. The main points of that essay, summarized and updated, are as follows..... A cameras sensor is an analogue device. So What? OK. Cloud Painting. Fuji X100 @ ISO 200 Black Cats and White Cats Let's imagine two cats. What do these look like? Why? Take a picture of a typical scene, one with light tones, dark tones and medium tones, and a light meter or even the nifty 500 segment super-meter in your DSLR will do a pretty good job. The Clever Photographer But, of course we're more clever than our dumb cameras. Right? But – Not For Digital! In the case of the white cat and snow – yes – you would do the same as for film – increase the exposure so that it looked correct. Why? Well, there is the story of Willy Sutton the famous American bank robber. Some Caveats Early Corn. Easy.

Articles - Lighting iStockphoto Photography Standards: Lighting Lighting is probably the single most important aspect of photography, and is a huge topic. Every picture you take depends on good light. Mastering the basics of photographing a well-lit subject will help make your images useful for designers in everyday applications. Understanding light is a lifelong project. Proper exposureUsing and adapting to different light sources (natural and artificial)White balanceUnexpected problems: Lens flares, reflections, and chromatic abberation Let's explore these topics by looking at a few examples that aren't acceptable for our standards: shots that cannot find their warm home at iStock and need more technical improvement before being accepted into collection. Exposure Exposure is the amount of light that you allow into your camera when you take a picture. A properly exposed image has the right mix of shadows, highlights, and middle ranges. Exposure is controlled by 3 variables: Aperture Priority Set your ISO.

35 Beautiful Examples Of Rain Photography | Monday Inspiration Advertisement Most photographers do not feel comfortable in taking photographs in bad weather. Yet bad weather sometimes presents the perfect opportunity to get most out of our skills. In particular, in the beginning of autumn rain can provide the perfect opportunity to capture wonderful photos. Shooting in rain produces dramatic atmosphere and soft romantic scenes. Whether you are after lightning strikes or water drops, alone the incredible cloud formations can produce quite exciting and impressive photos. Below we present over 35 beautiful examples of rain photography. All photos are linked and lead to the sources from which they were taken. You may want to take a look at the following related posts: Rain Photography Marcel Germain Maria Sauh vijayal Tim Hearud muha Dreamer-Soul Cody26 Muha J Rutledge black&white Victor Eredel Ben Visbeek Agnieszka Borkowska unknown Artem Tschaikowsky unknown Cody26 Time Magazine Curtis Forrester Zasu Yauheni Attsetski Séverine Cousot aka Sey DeDaniel Ahmed Zahid 3amfromkyoto

How to Read and Use Histograms The histogram is a useful but often misunderstood tool that your camera provides to help you get the correct exposure on your images. In this article we’re going to look at how to read it and use it to your advantage to help you do just that. Getting the best exposure (there is not such thing as the “correct” exposure, as it’s all subjective) in camera should be your goal every time you click the shutter. Using these tips should help you increase your success rate. What is a histogram? Dictionary definition: A bar graph of a frequency distribution in which the widths of the bars are proportional to the classes into which the variable has been divided and the heights of the bars are proportional to the class frequencies. HUH?! How to read the Histogram A histogram is a graphical representation of the pixels exposed in your image. What can we learn from this histogram? There are many things we can learn about an image just by looking at the histogram. This one shows the opposite. Is it wrong?

10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits How do you take Portraits that have the ‘Wow’ factor? Today and tomorrow I want to talk about taking Portraits that are a little out of the box. You see it’s all very well and good to have a portrait that follows all the rules – but it hit me as I was surfing on Flickr today that often the most striking portraits are those that break all the rules. I want to look at some ways to break out of the mold and take striking portraits by breaking (or at least bending) the rules and adding a little randomness into your portrait photography. I’ll share ten of these tips today and a further ten tomorrow (update: you can see the 2nd part here). 1. Most portraits are taken with the camera at (or around) the eye level of the subject. Get up high and shoot down on your subject or get as close to the ground as you can and shoot up. 2. It is amazing how much the direction of your subject’s eyes can impact an image. A. B. 3. 4. Using techniques like slow synch flash can create an impressive wow factor. 5.

11 Super Awesome Photoshop Movie Effects Tall glasses of lemonade, your legs sticking to the seat of your car, the days stretching languorously into the evening. What’s not to love about summer? Oh, right. The stifling heat. But that just brings us to another of summer’s joys: The cool comfort of the cinema. In honor of some of our favorite summer blockbusters (Harry Potter and Transformers), we bring you our 10 11 most-favorite movie-effect tutorials. p.s. Scarface You know you look good in black and white. It’s time to say hello to your inner Cuban drug lord with a Scarface poster spoof. Make a Scarface Poster from your Photos Pirates of the Caribbean You hardly ever get to pillage, your roomates hate it when you sing sea chanties and you don’t know where to find one of those awesome hats with the big feathers in ’em. To top it all off, you think you might be coming down with scurvy. Go have another orange, then sail the high seas in your very own Pirates poster, matey. Make your own Pirates of the Caribbean Poster Sin City Want more?

Fine Tune Your Exposures With Spot Metering The metering systems of today’s digital cameras are light years beyond cameras of just 10 to 15 years ago. What this means is that in many situations, the camera’s meter, left to its own devices, is going to do an excellent job at getting a good exposure. While evaluative (or matrix) metering and center-weighted average metering take into account the entire scene, albeit in different ways, spot metering mode provides a tool for metering only the part of the scene you as the photographer consider most important. I used spot metering on this image due to the sun setting over her shoulder, making the sun and sand exceptionally bright behind her. By metering on the model’s shoulder, I was able to maintain detail in the shadow areas, without hurting the drama of the lighting. Spot metering is especially helpful when the subject is much brighter or darker than the background, and the subject does not make up a majority of the image. When I saw this shot I immediately knew what I wanted.

25 Beautiful Macro Photography Shots | Monday Inspiration Advertisement Macro photography is the art of taking close-up pictures that reveal details which can’t be seen with the naked eye. For example, while we can see the fly on the wall, our eyes aren’t equipped to make out the fine details of the hairs on it’s face. This is where macro photography comes in. It gives us a glimpse into the world of the very small, which goes largely unnoticed by us as we hurriedly shuffle through our day. In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series we present 25 beautiful examples of macro photography. You may also be interested in the following related posts: 25 Beautiful Examples Of Macro Photography Eye of a Tokay Gecko“A close-up shot of a Tokay Gecko. La force et la passion“She felt her strength and passion back by 1 small drop of water.”. High-Tech Jumper“Jumping spider on a DVD reading my data! Bubble Magic“Close-up of a wet leaf … taken with a Canon Powershot A610 :)” The photo is taken by Sophie. Frog’s eyePhotos are taken by Justin Dotson. Resources

40 Photoshop Tutorials On Rain Showers and Water Drops | Tutorials Advertisement With fall just around the corner, designers are looking for ways to complement their work with fall imagery like water droplets, rain on leaves and fall rain showers. Including rain or water drops in a scene can be a nice effect because water is a very compelling element. Adding the illusion of water and rain to photographs using Photoshop can be a bit tricky. Here are other collections of Photoshop tutorials from Smashing Magazine: Water Drop Tutorials Basic water drops5 An excellent tutorial showing how to make artistic, realistic water drops. Designing a war movie poster6 A step-by-step tutorial that teaches how to design a dark movie poster with water drops. The Making Of “Our Future”7 It is not really a tutorial, but the designer’s description provides some insight into how this poster was designed. Artistic rain on an illustration8 Beautiful example of adding rain to a dark illustration. Artistic rain effect11 Create a complex composition with rain. Maple Water Drop26 (al)

Histograms: Your Guide To Proper Exposure A Post By: Rick Berk The finished image was a nice, high key portrait. See below for details on the histogram. To many newbie photographers, getting the proper exposure in camera is the biggest challenge they face. In this high key portrait, the histogram shows a majority of pixels on the right side, representing brighter pixels. A histogram, in it’s simplest terms, is simply a graph showing the brightness levels of pixels in the image. Since a histogram is simply a representation of the tonal range of a given image, there really is no right or wrong histogram. As I mentioned, when judging exposure, the primary areas of the histogram to be concerned with are the right and left edges. In this image, since the subject is in silhouette, and there are lots of dark tones, we expect to see most pixels on the left side of the histogram. When judging the histogram, one must take into account the subject matter of the image. Now, here’s the big secret.

Afgan Girl: A Life Revealed She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The photographer remembers the moment too. The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film’s EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. No, said a man who got wind of the search. It took three days for her to arrive. Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Time and hardship have erased her youth. Now, consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. “There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war,” a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that appeared with Sharbat’s photograph on the cover. “We left Afghanistan because of the fighting,” said her brother, Kashar Khan, filling in the narrative of her life. It is the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. ”No.

Celebration Of Smoke Photography and Smoke Art | Monday Inspiration Advertisement Photography is constantly reminding us how wondrous and beautiful the world we live in truly is. It often urges us to take another look at the ordinary things around us in a new light, revealing a quiet beauty in even the most mundane of objects. More specifically, smoke photography, with its alluring images of ghostly wisps of smoke, shows us that we don’t have to look very far to find this beauty. In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series, we present 60 examples of beautiful smoke photography and smoke art: a round-up of some of the best examples of photos and artworks where smoke dominates. 35 × Elegant Smoke Photographs Magicnikon Dry ice was put in the bottle to get this great image. Hughes Léglise-Bataille Selva Morales Ibai Acevedo Larrañaga Alberich Mathews Wonderful fantasy image. italian.meatball Frances Dre icewomanfirst moczkos Corica No HDR in use. Wolfgang Schlegl olvwu Greg Cope brents pix Howya cubanito ubierno lapebo Mohammad Moniruzzaman Stephan Bollinger Lumendipity G.

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