Whether you’re using an expensive SLR, a digital point-and-shoot camera, or a cell phone, you’ll take much better photos when you learn more about lighting and your camera.
Taking photos with a flash often gives ugly results. Washed-out, flat, phony-looking faces with monstrous makeup can ruin your memories of any special occasion. Everything else is so dark it’s useless. Here’s how to take great, natural-looking portraits and photos in low or very low light.
Lighting is one of the most important aspects of any photograph. This is especially true for wedding photography, where lighting can often be difficult to control.
In a church ceremony, for example, flash photography is usually prohibited, and the wedding photographer will have to rely upon their fast lenses and high ISO speeds to get the shot.
Light painting is not difficult to learn, doesn't require much experience and is a lot of fun! The idea behind this technique is really simple: while shooting a long exposure photo, move a source of light around, this gets recorded onto the sensor of the camera as an abstract drawing or 'light painting'.
Back in the old days with 35mm film the photographer had his darkroom where he developed the film, in our day and age the computer has taken over the role. This tutorial will deal with some of the adjustments you can use to develop your photographs in the digital darkroom.
It takes a lot of ambition, interest, and curiosity to have the drive to go back to the traditional roots of photography and get stuck into manual photographic printing and processing. For me, however, we find this to be an utterly rewarding process in our constant exploration of the medium.
In this tutorial, we will go through the basics of what is needed to set up your very own black and white photographic darkroom.