Experience the Manfrotto School of Xcellence at Focus On Imaging

Stand N10 -11 Manfrotto School of Xcellence (MSoX) – the online tutorial platform that allows users to log on and access the expertise and know-how of the world’s most famous photographers and videographers, will be available at the Focus On Imaging trade show (4th to 7th March). Focus is the most diverse and comprehensive imaging [...]

Michael Freeman: How Did You Shoot That? – Just a gesture

Sometimes it’s a simple little thing that wins the day. Or at least, wins my day when I’m on assignment. There was very little to this shot really, but it worked for me because of just one unpredictable thing. I was in Songzanlin Monastery on the outskirts of Zhongdian, a Tibetan town in northern Yunnan, [...]

Michael Freeman: Words and pictures

It’s a funny thing, but most photographers aren’t very much into writing. Perhaps I’ve got some quirky gene somewhere, because I actually do like writing, and so I do books, and pages like this for Manfrotto – and enjoy it. But there’s a very basic kind of writing that needs to be part of the [...]

Michael Freeman: How Did You Shoot That? – Bassac River

This week’s tutorial is about removing stuff from digital images – the contentious issue of content removal, to be accurate. It’s contentious because it interferes with the apparent reality of what was in front of the camera, and many people do not approve. Well, that’s discussed sufficiently over on that page, and I’m not going [...]

Michael Freeman: Removing the Unwanted

Specks of dust and people who wander uninvited into your frame (or inconveniently hang around and won’t leave) may not seem to have a great deal in common. But for image capture they share the quality of being unwanted. And because of that, they can be dealt with later, if you wish, with similar techniques. [...]

Michael Freeman: How Did You Shoot That? – Udon Noodles

It was a food assignment, studio work, a cookery book for Wagamama, a successful chain of restaurants in London specializing in many kinds of Asian noodle dishes. Part of it, because these were early Photoshop days and we were experimenting with assembling images, involved photographing the ingredients one by one. Udon are the thick chewy [...]

Michael Freeman: Ordinary Objects

When there’s something special – spectacular scenery from a great viewpoint, or a palace, or a costumed festival – it acts as a magnet for cameras. Indeed, photography of the special, the beautiful, the grandest, becomes something of a purpose. When the question is ‘what shall we go and photograph’, pride of place in the [...]

Michael Freeman: How Did You Shoot That? – Wulingyuan

When it comes to fog and mist (see the other article this week), few scenes are more evocative and more archetypical than a Chinese scroll painting, particularly those in the ‘mountain-water’ style known as shanshui. Slim craggy peaks emerge from wreaths of cloud and mist, and rise tier after tier one above the other. The [...]

Michael Freeman: Fog and Mist

Unpredictable is good in photography, although it’s also frustrating not to have guarantees. Most of us like to plan ahead so that we can be as certain as possible of getting the right light and best view, but when you look back at your library of images, you’re likely to find that many of the [...]

Michael Freeman: Portraits in Context

One highly effective way of making a portrait, although it takes some preparation, is to set the person in the context of what they do — whether work, an interest, some characteristic location or unique activity. This approach, heavily used by magazines, attempts to cram more information than usual into the image, by telling a [...]

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