Photographer Joey Celis needed to shoot a photograph of eleven people in a dimly lit cigar lounge, but found it difficult to light the models without having lighting gear appear in the shot. In the end, he was able to make the image above with a single Speedlite.
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Photographer Denis Smith creates photos giant balls of light without any digital trickery, relying instead on light-painting. His technique is to spin a light around while slowly turning his body, creating spheres of light when seen in a long exposure photo.
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Flickr user Paul Little creates surreal images he calls “HDR Mixes” by combining different photographs with the help of HDR software. While you’re normally supposed to feed the program multiple versions of the same photo (which are bracketed), with HDR Mixes you use two photos of the same scene and a third that’s completely unrelated.
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Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher had the brilliant idea of using custom bokeh to spell out words in his videos, and spent a good amount of time developing and perfecting the idea. The above video, titled “Light Works”, is a demonstration of this technique in action. The results are pretty awesome.
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The concept of hyperfocal distance is used in landscape photography to achieve the greatest depth of field and acceptable sharpness for both near and far objects. In the two minute tutorial above, wildlife photographer Chris Weston walks through some hyperfocal distance focusing techniques. You can also find a couple informative tutorials at DOFMaster and Cambridge in Colour.

After photographer Ross Ching came across Dentsu London’s creative 3D light painting technique with an iPad, he decided to give it a try, combining it with timelapse photography to make a music video for “I’ll Try Anything Once” by The Strokes (seen above). The app he used was Holographium, which you can pick up for $5 from the app store.
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Here’s a scan of a Mechanix Illustrated magazine article from 1941 teaching readers how to get creative with their prints by creating “Shadowgraphs”, a technique that uses photographs for photograms:

In reprinting your negative with a shadowgraph border, you first insert the negative into the enlarger film carrier and project the image on the easel. With the red safety filter in position, place the printing paper on the easel and lay your shaving props directly on the printing paper, arranging them in neat order around the center of interest. Expose for one-third the normal time after which, without moving the paper, shift the positions of the razor blades slightly, and then expose for the second third of the normal time. The last third of the exposure is given with all the props removed from the paper.

Sadly (not maybe not), in the modern world of photography adding ghostly paper clips and razor blades to photos is no longer in vogue. Check out the full article here with more example photos.

(via Make)

This video is hardly new (appeared back in 2008), but could be helpful for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. In it, photographer Joe McNally teaches how you can use your body to stabilize the camera, gaining a stop or two of light. McNally says his technique is mostly useful for left-eyed shooters, but you can adapt many of the things taught regardless of which eye you use.

This video will blow your mind. We’ve all seen light-painting photos and stop-motion animations created with those photos, but marketing agency Dentsu London figured out how to take light painting a step further using an iPad.

By using all sorts of crazy computer modeling and animation techniques, they figured out how to create 3D light-paintings by playing a “CAT-scan” style animation on the iPad while sweeping the iPad through the air. By repeatedly doing this kind of sweeping with various 3D models, they were able to create 3D light painting stop-motion animations. Here’s how they explain it:

We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.

Prepare to be amazed.

A big thanks to Jim Goldstein for the tip!

You’ve most likely seen HDR photographs before, but how about HDR video? The above is a demonstration of HDR video by Soviet Montage, created using two Canon 5D Mark II DSLR cameras. Both cameras recorded identical scenes using a beam splitter, and captured the footage at different exposure values (over and under exposed).

We’ve posted HDR videos before, but they were created using stop-motion, so the process was more traditional. This is also the first time we’ve seen an HDR video of a person.

What do you think?

(via Engadget)