Playtime: Using Mirrors

I try to take pictures every day. Some days, of course, I’m inspired by something I see. At other times, I need to inspire myself and come up with an idea. This week, an idea was prompted by discovering an old discarded medicine cabinet that had mirrored doors. The doors were removable and provided me with two relatively large rectangles of mirrored glass.

One day, I decided to play with the mirrors, and it certainly was fun. First, I washed them to eliminate distracting blotches and spots. Then I tried laying various objects on them. I found that some objects are pretty boring on a mirror. For example, most thin flat objects do not produce interesting reflections. All you see are the edges. Plump or rounded objects reveal more of their undersides. If the underside is a different color from the top side, you can get interesting images. Although you can create the appearance of reflections using software, you will have far more fun experimenting with real ones.

clementine pieces
Irregularly shaped objects make the most interesting reflections, I think. It’s hard to tell where the object ends and its reflection begins.

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Black & White Is the Key to Better Color

Lately, I’ve found a great way to use black and white to improve my color photographs. So, you say, that doesn’t make any sense, right? Well, I understand your confusion, but it’s really quite simple. What I mean by this, is you can convert your photo temporarily to black and white and perform some editing to make your photographs more appealing in color.

sunbathing.jpg

This is a photo I took at Hanauma Bay in Oahu of a lady sunbathing. It’s a nice photo. I’m actually fairly happy with how it turned out. I had taken it a couple of years ago, so I though I’d try reworking it using my black and white trick.

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Photographing People in Public Places

For years, I was too shy to ask to take a stranger’s picture. Normally, I’m not at all shy. I’ll talk to anyone. But stick a camera in my hand and I would become horribly self-conscious. I thought it a bit presumptuous to ask to take someone’s picture. After all, I wasn’t a “real” photographer but only a hobbyist.

ballerina

I did take photographs of people who were unaware. Some were interesting pictures, I thought, that captured moments or moods. They were small slices of real, unrehearsed and unself-conscious life. I think such pictures have an important place in any photographer’s repertoire, but I am not discussing those here.

Then I read up on various ways that street photographers took pictures without being noticed. These surreptitious shots did not appeal to me, though, because they seemed a bit sneaky. I wanted either pictures of people completely unaware, or pictures of people who were totally aware. I did not want to furtively snap images of people who did not want their pictures taken.

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8 Online Lens Rental Stores Compared

While big chain stores have a great selection of gear  including lenses, lighting, bodies, and accessories, they don’t deliver and their rates are high.

Rentglass package

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you just want to try a lens out before you buy a copy, if you are looking for a bargain rental and don’t mind waiting a little while to get it, or if you just can’t rent anywhere locally, then one of these online lens rental shops could be the perfect fit.

Read on to find out more.

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Mastering a Subject

daisy showerDo you take the same types of pictures over and over again? You know what I mean—hundreds of flower images (or cars or cats or whatever) fill your photo albums, but no portraits, buildings, action shots, or street scenes. One school of thought urges you to push yourself to shoot what does not come naturally. However, I have another suggestions: stick with what you love, but work to perfect that subject.

There is a vast difference between lacking the imagination to try new subjects and deliberately working on one subject to develop skills. The first is a type of laziness; the second is a path to mastery. I like to think that I’m following the second path, but I’m too close to tell, so I’m going to use another example, flickr photographer Steve Wall.

Now, I’ve never met Steve; I know nothing about his life; he isn’t even an online correspondent, or at least he wasn’t until I asked permission to use his photos. But I have been following his photography on flickr for a few years because I saw some pictures of his that I liked and marked him as a contact.

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Super quick (and easy!) tip for more flattering portraits

One of my goals when I take portraits is to make sure the resulting photograph is flattering to the subject. There are a ton of techniques one can use to improve a portrait from lighting to digital alteration but one of the very best and quickest ways also happens to be one of the easiest. Here are three photos of the same subject taken from three different perspectives (uh, please forgive the model). In the first, the camera was slightly below the subject shooting up, then at eye-level in the second, and finally a few inches above the subject:

BelowEye-levelAbove

It’s clear to me that the last photo is the most flattering. Not only does this perspective make me look thinner, notice that it also opens up the eyes and hides wrinkle-revealing shadows. A few inches of elevation above the subject’s eye-level is all you need.

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Review: Rentglass.com lens rental service

Many professional photographers rent lenses. Rather than spending huge sums on lenses (or other equipment), they rent just what they need for the job at hand. Sounds good, right? But not everyone has a decent camera shop nearby with rental service. In fact, I’d wager that you could only find lens rentals in large metro areas. Rentglass.com, an online lens rental company operating out of Florida, solves that issue by delivering lenses directly to you and at a price often cheaper than bricks and mortar stores.

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RAW vs. JPG: Myths and misconceptions

Most digital cameras record JPG images because the JPG format provides a very high degree of fidelity for photographs in a very small amount of space. JPGs are high quality, small, can be viewed quickly and easily on any computer, and look great when printed. But JPGs, like all image formats, also have some limitations. RAW is another image format that addresses some of JPGs problems. But no format is perfect and RAW images have problems of their own.

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Portable Photo Storage Review

Storing your photos may not seem a big problem, unless you decide for a long travel with your photo camera. While modern memory cards can hold thousands of JPG files, having the same amount of RAW data may put you in trouble.

Of course, you can take a laptop with you, but for a number of situations it may appear too large and heavy. One of the solutions is a portable storage device, which is independent. In other words, one that does not require a computer to transfer data to it.

A really interesting solution is a Sanho HyperDrive COLORSPACE UDMA 2 Multimedia Storage

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Understanding exposure: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO

When your camera is set on automatic, making a photograph is as simple as pressing the shutter release button. Somehow, the camera magically records just the right amount of light to render an image of the scene before it. But what is really going on? How does the camera know how to do that?

Read on to find out how a little knowledge about what goes into making an exposure can open up new worlds of creative possibilities.

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