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Showing posts from November, 2018

Beginners Guide To Cleaning A Camera Lens At Home

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We often overlook the simple things that are necessary to  take care of our equipment  and get so caught up in the act of just shooting that we don’t pay much attention. We just stuff our lens in our camera bag along with our camera and other gear and blast through the door to complete another session of photography. Our lens is as important as our  camera sensors  and should be cleaned accordingly to achieve the best quality images from your camera. A dirty lens can actually decrease the quality of your images as well as provide smudges and other annoying things in your frame that you will then have to edit out during your post-production process. This article will provide some key information as to how you can care and clean your lenses at home in your spare time as well as how you can continue to take care of them while in the field. 1. Create A Cleaning Station Depending on the number of lenses in your collection, you might want to create a designate...

How Centered Compositions Can Improve Your Photography

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The  Rule of Thirds  is the first composition rule most of us have learned when we started doing photography. There are times when it works, of course – but sometimes, centering your subject is a much better choice, yet many photographers tend to avoid it. In this video, Haze Kware of  Hk Visuals  discusses when centering your subjects is a better option and how it can improve your photography. 1. WORKS GREAT WITH WIDE-ANGLE LENSES When you photograph people with wide-angle lenses, there will be some distortion and your subjects may look weird if you place them near the edges of the frame. The impact of distortion is minimal when you center the subject. In addition, as Haze puts it, this can give an “epic” feel to your environmental portraits shot with a wide-angle lens. 2. PLAYING WITH SYMMETRY If you shoot in a symmetrical environment, centering your subject will add to the symmetry. This creates the feeling of balance and it can work great...

10 Photoshop Hacks for Portraits

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Photographer Irene Rudnyk made this 22-minute video to share her top 10 Photoshop hacks when working on portraits. These are tips and tricks Rudnyk says she uses all the time on all of her photos. Hack #1 (0:16): Stretch Technique. Using Free Transform to stretch out secondary areas of photos to change the aspect ratios of photos without cropping. Hack #2 (2:14): Long Legs Stretch Technique. Using Free Transform to slightly lengthen your model’s legs. Hack #3 (3:33): Hair Liquify Technique. Using Liquify to add volume to your model’s hair. Hack #4 (5:08): Long Neck Liquify Technique. Using Liquify to slightly move a model’s shoulders down to lengthen the neck. Hack #5 (6:30): Easy Skin Retouch. Using sampled color from a model’s face and the Brush tool as a simple way to retouch skin. Hack #6 (11:05): Camera Raw on a Layer Mask. Using Adobe Camera Raw to edit just the model using a new layer copy and masking. Hack #7 (13:29): Oranges and Teals. Ac...

5 Tips for Capturing Nature Across Different Seasons

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Lavendar, Provence, France Taking photographs of nature can be an incredibly rewarding experience. During the year the change in seasons provides you with wonderful photo opportunities to capture the variety of nature subjects on offer. Here are some tips for capturing nature across the different seasons. 1) Shoot The Same Location in Different Seasons You may have a favorite location that you like to visit. For example, it could be a local woodland, a landscape or a place of interest you enjoy visiting during a holiday. When visiting there, you may find the scenery looks unique at different times of the year. The changing seasons mean the conditions may vary dramatically from one period to the next. Snowfall in winter makes way for spring flowers and lush green vegetation in the summer, which can have a significant effect on the look and feel of your image. Frosty sunrise, Kings Sutton, Oxfordshire, England Frosty sunrise, Kings Sutton, Oxfordshire, England A bl...

The Approach To Better Landscape Photos

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Three perspectives on seeing what is familiar—versus seeing what is new—in landscape photography Pioneer Basin, John Muir Wilderness, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California. Photo by Marc Muench. You are standing atop a ridge looking down as the world spreads out below you. Late afternoon sunlight dapples a forest of pine trees that stretches for miles along either side of a winding river. In the distance, rugged mountains rise from the earth, their jagged peaks scraping the clouds above. Where do you point your camera? Approaching a landscape can be among the most daunting parts of landscape photography. It is also the most important. Everything begins with seeing. But how we see is situational and is influenced by our experiences and familiarity with a location and subject. Photographers Marc Muench, Sivani Babu and Andy Williams discuss previsualization, discovery and how they each approach the landscape. Marc Muench For the first half of my life, almost every landscape wa...