Photocritic photography blog

I know we’ve featured Still Life With… once before, but they deserve another mention, for being so damn good. This time, they’ve made a fabulous little guide to how you can make food look good, by using creative lighting techniques.

The great thing is that the tips and lessons learned from this post don’t just apply to food - it works excellently for all sorts of stills photography in a studio setting. Read the rest of the article »

We’ve been talking about flash diffusors before, but someone kicked me in the shins the other day for having forgotten this guide. and I deserved that kicking for sure - Torsten’s OriBounce (Origami Bounce, of course - and a fantastic pun on the OmniBounce flash diffusors from Sto-Fen) is basically just a piece of paper and some tape, but this guy has gone to great lengths to make sure that his diffusor works best.

As with most of these projects, making sure that you use thick, glossy paper works best - and if you use gummed paper, you could even build a diffusor that can stand a bit of rain, too!

Torsten’s guide to the Ori-Bounce is well-written and funny, with loads of photos, too, so why not check it out?

Disposable cameras have a lot of re-usable electronics in them. The flash unit, for example, is perfectly usable, even after the 27 exposures have come and gone. So what do you do? Well, DIY live decided to turn the disposable camera shell into a slave flashgun.

It ain’t for the faint of heart, this project, but if you are handy with a soldering iron, it may just be of use. Or you could of course buy one. But what’s the fun in that?

It’s an old trick, but it’s a goodie: If you find yourself in a pinch and need to bounce the flash off a compact camera, grab a piece of white card (my credit card has come in more times than I care to admit - good job they wouldn’t give me a Mastercard Gold, because that would have eskewed the white balance :), and hold it at a 45° angle in front of the flash. That way, the flash will bounce via the ceiling, and you get far softer lighting than with a direct flash. Read the rest of the article »

People get extremely creative when it gets to getting the lighting right. My old mate Ed just tipped me off about one which is particularly weird. But as far as making people laugh, it works. The bonus? it means you can get some excellent lighting for impromptu portrait photography! Read the rest of the article »

You may never have heard of Harold Edgerton, but we’re willing to bet that you know one of his most famous photos - the Bullet through the Apple.

Taken in 1964, it became a very famous image , not least because it was such an unusual photo based on a great achievement in high speed photography.

What you may not know, however, is that you can do a lot of high-speed photography stuff yourself, and much of it can be done on a tight budget, too! Read the rest of the article »

Well, just when I thought we had seen all the tutorials possible on studio lighting, Michael Quack comes along and proves me wrong. In his DIY guide to cheap studio lighting, he attacks the whole process of outfitting a complete studio with gusto. Read the rest of the article »

This do-it-yourself project is a studio broadlight particularly suitable for portraiture.

Unlike point source lights diffused with fabric coverings, this mammoth fixture uses 16 100w bulbs, arranged in a grid within a wooden box, to flood a very large area with soft illumination. This is a rather complicated project, and the parts and materials can easily top $100. On the other hand, the results of this type of lighting is downright amazing, and it may be worth it, if you are seriously into portrait photography.

Read the whole article over at Shutterbug!

So, photography is nowhere unless you have some good lighting. Therefore, one of the most important things you could do, is to have a collection of tricks up your sleeve which will be useful for collecting, distributing, and aiming light. In our very first round-up article, we’re taking our e-surfboards around the interweb to look at a series of cool, relatively cheap DIY projects for making photography lights.
Read the rest of the article »

Of all things when working with macro photography, light is the biggest problem. Of course, there are hordes of ways to solve it, but many of these ways are quite expensive.

The main problem is that you need to get really close, and your lens will get in the way of the light. As such, you would use a ring-flash. These can be clumsy and expensive, too.

Luckily there are other ways of doing things… Read the rest of the article »