Adam Barker: Unconventional Portrait Tips

For those of you who know my work, you may be surprised to see a blog post from me on portraits. They’re certainly not my forte, and I don’t profess to be an expert to any degree. But perhaps that’s just what some of us might need to shake things up from the more conventional/traditional [...]

Nikkor 70-200mm Lens By Stacy Pearsall

Lens (mm): 90 ISO: 50 Aperture: 8 Shutter: 1/200 Program: Manual The Nikon AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 Lens is a quality piece of glass to have in your camera bag.  For those who are shooting full frame Nikon cameras, I suggest photographers have at least these three lenses in their kit: 14-24mm, 24-70mm and the [...]

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: How Did You Shoot That? – Imelda Marcos

The theme over on the other page this week is A Day in the Life – one of editorial photography’s most enduring forms, and a great way to kick-start an assignment for yourself. In the magazine world, it’s always run as a combination of pictures and words, with the balance between the two varying quite [...]

Michael Freeman: Low Key

A short while ago we looked at high-key imagery – bright and white. At the opposite end of the scale, naturally, there is another style, low key. And in the same way that creating a high-key photograph calls for a combination of the right kind of subject or scene, and the way of processing the [...]

Düpmann Frank: Color Key – Black & White in “Technicolor”

Sometimes the subject of a picture is dominated by just one color, other colors might be distracting. Or the subject is camouflaged by a background of similar color. „Color Key“ is a technique to convert pictures to black & white but leave parts or some details in color. The butterfly in the picture above was [...]

Michael Freeman: The Appeal of Many

Most of us have an inbuilt fascination with large numbers of things massed together. Naturally, it depends on what things — grains of sand on a beach certainly don’t count for much — but given the right choice of subjects, ones that we don’t normally see, or notice, in large quantities, this us a pretty [...]

Michael Freeman: Golden Light

It’s a term used by some photographers admiringly and by others, well….ironically, because to be honest, you could see it as something of a cliché, the predictably pretty. I’m a bit ambivalent towards it myself. It is, after all, an obvious approach. Make everything look good, as attractive as it can possibly be. If you [...]

Michael Freeman: Night-time HDR….and definitely a tripod

First let’s get one thing clear. HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging does not mean startling and hyper-ventilated scenes. It can end up like that, but that’s to do with the processing, not with the basic principle of shooting a range of exposures that are then combined into a single image file which, if you do [...]

Michael Freeman: Subject and Background

Photographs can be about anything at all, but when there’s a real physical subject, its relationship to its setting is crucial. You may choose to make much or little of this relationship, but the choice is almost always there. One of the most obvious things to do is to close right in on your subject [...]