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A small knowledge in color correction makes a big difference for your photos.

Ever wonder how the pros hold their cameras while shooting? World-famous photographer Joe McNally shows a pretty cool way of doing it.

I think this is a really cool action to turn some ordinary photos into something different.

The abstract forms conjured by smoke particles can be mesmerizing. But lighting smoke particles so that they’ll show up in one’s image sensor can be challenging at first. One way of bringing these smoke particles out of oblivion is to light them white-on-black, i.e. making the smoke particles look white while keeping the background as dark as possible. An obvious way of doing this is to light the smoke particles from behind (backlight) so that maximal light will be cast on, and hence scattered by, the particles while leaving relatively a small amount light to the background giving enough smoke-background-contrast to accentuate the form of the smoke.

The usage of a strobe doesn’t have to be restricted to the normal flash light. The golden glow given by the modeling light can be very effective when put to proper use. The image above is taken with only one strobe modeling light. It shouldn’t be difficult be observe which direction the light is pointed at.

One will be amazed by what one can do by utlilizing just window light. The image was taken with the window to the left of the camera. In order to get soft diffused light, make sure that the window is large enough compared to the size of the subject matter.

A dark surface has to be lit correctly so that the details would not be cast into oblivion. Since a dark surface absorbs most of the light shined on them, the diffused reflection is very weak to be registered on the image sensor. While we can always bump up the exposure of the camera, this would sacrifice the highlights of other objects in the scene. One way around this is to place the light in such a way - camera opposite light - that the dark surface produces direct reflection. This can be achieved quite easily especially with a glossy surface, and keep in mind that a softbox makes the gradation of the light smoother. The shots above show how products can be given some “sparkles” with direct reflections.

One of the best time to shoot a night scene is the period just before the sky light goes off. Shots at this hour (minutes in fact) will give you saturated blue/purple sky which is of good color contrast with the tungsten street light. The remnant sky light while can be captured more easily with the limited dynamic range of the camera (as compared to the human eyes) - hence preserving more details in the sky - also lights up the building structures to fill in the shadows.

Some HDR photos from my recent photographic endeavor. Will expand this post to make it a mini tutorial. Keep tuned in!

For you strobist-to-be, here’s a great video to start you off.