For one day only (Friday 30 May) you can save 50% on your ticket to our brand new event, Photoshop Live.
Photoshop Live is a brand new conference for photographers and designers. Taking place at the Brighton Dome from 18-19 July (19 July is Photography Day); Photoshop Live will arm you with all the techniques you need to develop your Photoshop skills.
By visiting Photoshop Live you will get face-to-face tuition and inside tips from some incredible Photoshop artists. The fantastic line-up includes; Miss Aniela, David Clapp, Glyn Dewis, Matt Kloskowski, Tigz Rice and more.
With an opening keynote from Adobe, retouch masterclasses, Lightroom for landscape, surreal fashion and much more, Photoshop Live is a must-attend for photographers keen to improve their photo editing.
Your ticket will also include the opportunity to enjoy a stunning photowalk around Brighton with fellow photographers and the Photoshop artists on Sunday 20 July. We hope to see you there!
Backlighting is one of the most attractive forms of lighting for photography but it can present a big challenge, not least when it comes to exposure. In this tutorial Mark Hamblin explains how to master backlighting like a pro.
All images by Mark Hamblin
We're all familiar with the concept of front lit images but if you turn around 180ยบ and shoot towards the sun you'll be amazed at the difference it makes.
Backlighting is a more a creative way to use sunlight and creates a beautiful aura around the subject giving your images greater impact.
To use backlighting most effectively it's best if the sun is quite low in the sky so that it's coming from directly behind the subject.
You can even use the subject to hide the sun and this will produce very dramatic results with bright rim lighting around the edge of the subject highlighting hair or fur.
Backlighting by its very nature increases contrast in your images. This adds to the drama of backlit images but it does make exposure more difficult because of the extreme range of tones.
Bright sunlight produces the most extreme backlighting effect but also the greatest contrast with black shadows and very bright highlights.
No camera can handle such extremes and so you either have to compromise and decide what is the most important part of the subject to expose correctly or shoot when the light is less intense.
The overall mood of a backlit subject is strongly influenced by how the picture is exposed.
In this softly backlit woodland scene I was able to capture all the tones but I still had to decide what exposure settings to use to get the effect I wanted.
In this case I used Manual metering mode and spot metering to take a meter reading from a trunk that I wanted to be recorded as mid-toned.
Using these exposure values meant that all the light and dark tones were correctly exposed, which I confirmed by checking the histogram.
The eye is the most powerful sensory tool in our bodies. A camera lens works in a very similar way, with the added bonus of providing a permanent memory of what it captures.
However sophisticated they may be, the lenses in both our eyes and our cameras can be easily misled. Optical illusions are a great piece of visual trickery and can keep us guessing for quite a while.
To celebrate these, the contact lens retailer VisionDirect is challenging photographers to share their best photographs of optical illusions.
Whether it is a seemingly levitating person, an animal-shaped cloud or a human face in an inanimate object, VisionDirect wants to see your best examples. And the very best will win a brand new Canon EOS 70D + 18-55mm lens kit!
VisionDirect.co.uk and its judging team will only consider genuine optical illusions. The use of Photoshop or other photo editing software to create an illusion is not permitted.
No comments:
Post a Comment