Studio lighting can be broken down into two categories, continuous and flash. While continuous lighting has two main advantages there are many disadvantages.
The good points of continuous light:
* It's inexpensive, and makes a good starting point for anyone on a small budget.
If you are a photographer and using flash (either for studio pictures or for outdoor shooting), you are probably aware of the problems that a hot-shoe flash introduces: the shadows of an object are crisp-sharp, creating an artificial look to the object. When dealing with studio lighting, you can use a softbox to diffuse your shadows and this is an acceptable solution, but for the amateur photographer it does have some disadvantages:
1. A softbox is very expensive. A simple softbox like this softbox from Arri, can cost several hundreds of dollars. (See our big DIY softbox version)
2. A softbox is big, and can not be carried around.
The new Canon EF200mm f/2L IS USM and EF800mm f/5.6L IS USM, both of which are L (luxury)-series lenses incorporating a high-performance Image Stabilizer, feature optical systems utilizing special optical materials such as fluorite to correct chromatic aberrations, making possible high-resolution, high-contrast shooting performance.
The Canon EF200mm f/2L IS USM, targeting users who seek a brighter lens for portraiture and indoor sports photography, realizes a large aperture of f/2. The EF800mm f/5.6L IS USM, expected to deliver telephoto performance surpassing the current top-of-the-line EF600mm f/4L IS USM super telephoto lens, is being developed in response to requests from users working in the fields of sports and news photography who are looking for a high-performance lens that offers a longer focal length.
Night photography has the ability to take a scene and cast it in an unusual light-- much like the golden hour surrounding sunrise and sunset can add an element of mood and uniqueness to a sunlit scene. Just as how sports and landscape photography push the camera's limits for shutter speed and aperture, respectively, night photography often demands technical extremes in both.
The Gigapan imager can capture incredibly high-resolution panoramic images with a standard consumer digital camera. It accomplishes this by precisely manipulating the camera's pan and tilt gaze with precision motors while taking many, possibly hundreds of pictures.
Learn how to sharpen an image on the edges only with this Photoshop tutorial. Ordinary sharpening methods sharpen the entire image including the areas that you don't want sharpened such as the skin, clouds, etc. But with this tutorial, you'll learn how to sharpen only on the edges so that artifacts don't appear.
An important concept to understand when dealing with studio lighting for portrait photography is contrast. Contrast is the difference in the amount of light that falls on the dark areas of a scene and the amount of light that falls on the highlight areas of a scene. Humans can see a wide range of contrast while film and digital capture devices are much more limited in the light level ranges that they can record. For this reason, we must use caution when lighting a scene, and consider the ratio of the amount of light between light and dark areas or the Lighting Ratio.
Post Processing HDR images - Tone mapped HDR images are rarely perfect when the HDR program finishes with them. They can look flat, lack overall contrast, and can suffer from artifacts, ghosting and halos. Ferrell McCollough of www.beforethecoffee.com explains how to correct such problems.
Many problems can be corrected in post processing using:
* Levels/Curves
* Simple cloning
* Blending of the tone mapped image with another image to restore realism.
GigaPan Epic Pro
Canon EOS 5D Mark II Firmware 2.0.3
Profoto AcuteB2 600 AirS Flash Generator
Profoto Pro-B3 1200 AirS Battery Pack
BenQ C1250 Camera
Pentax 645D Camera
Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2010
Tamron SP 70-300mm f/4-5.6 Di VC USD Lens
Panasonic Lumix DMC-G10 Camera
Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 Camera
