Night Photography 2 – overcoming the darkness
Posted by Tony on Nov 27, 2009
in Photography Techniques | 6 comments
So you have the night photography bug. You sit twiddling your thumbs in the daylight hours waiting for the light to fade so that you can go out and leave your camera perfectly still with its shutter open for many tens of minutes. You are not...
Read MoreAdvanced Photoshop – Dramatic Mono Conversion
in Photoshop Techniques | 2 commentsThis tutorial looks at ways to convert your image to black and white using the tools available in Photoshop CS3. There may be work-arounds for other versions of photoshop or other image editors, but the work horse in this tutorial is the powerful ‘Black and White Tool’ in CS3 which has a great selection of filter pre-sets. To emulate this without the tool, you could try blending channel levels. The first step is to prepare your image. Black and white has a higher dynamic range than colour so it may be advisable to create a HDR from multiple exposures or even tonemap a single...
Read MorePhotoshop basics – simple colour correction
in Photoshop Techniques | 2 commentsThis is a quick and simple technique for correcting the colour of an image in photoshop. It is not always successful and will not give you the desired results 100% of the time. But as it is quick and easy it is definitely one to try first. My picture of Goðafoss has a dictinct blue cast. It was taken in low light and this is a common problem as my canon couldn’t really see well enough to decide on an appropriate white balance. I could have corrected this at the RAW stage, but for the benefit of this tutorial, I burned it as it came out of the camera. Duplicate the layer. Then apply an...
Read MorePhotography techniques – Hyperfocal distance
Hyperfocal distance is the art in photography of achieving as much sharpness as possible throughout the image. In other words, it involves careful focusing adjustments to ensure that objects close to the camera and objects in the distance all have the same sharp focus, but more accurately, the hyperfocal distance is that point of focus where things are in focus from a point half way between you and the focal point all the way onward to infinity. Hyper-focal distance is more of a landscape photographer’s concept. When shooting landscapes, I never use auto-focus. Although the Hyperfocal...
Read MorePhotography techniques – focus stacking
This articles looks at a lengthy and complicated procedure to render every part of a scene with perfect focus. the aim is to achieve a high depth of field (DOF) whilst maintaining the high quality of your lens’ sweet-spot. The main challenge is, maybe, deciding what situations exactly would require this sort of treatment. This technique is popular for macro work, where the DOF is usually too shallow to capture all the sharp detail in a subject. Landscape could benefit as there is a requirement for sharpness throughout the scene. Usually an f/16 and careful hyper-focal calculations will...
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