The Practicing Photographer - Post archive

Shooting silhouettes: The Practicing Photographer

Published by | Thursday, February 13th, 2014

Ben and Musician

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Sometimes shapes tell a better story than details. When you photograph a subject in silhouette, you emphasize body language instead of facial expressions. A silhouette can be a powerful way to tell a story or convey a scene in an abstract way.

Scanning Polaroid negatives: The Practicing Photographer

Published by | Thursday, February 6th, 2014

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A couple of months ago on The Practicing Photographer, fashion and portrait photographer Troy Word joined Ben Long for a discussion of the joys of instant photography—specifically, using a Polaroid camera along with beautiful black-and-white film manufactured by Fuji.

Fuji’s film works in what are called “pack-film” Polaroids. After you shoot a photo with these cameras, you pull the exposed film out, wait a specified amount of time, and then peel the print away from its backing. It’s that process that earns this format its other name: peel-apart.
And it’s that peel that holds such appeal to Ben Long in this week’s The Practicing Photographer. When you separate a sheet of peel-apart film, you end up with your photo (obviously) and a negative.

Panning for blur: The Practicing Photographer

Published by | Thursday, January 30th, 2014
Panning for blur: The Practicing Photographer

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Blur. We buy tripods and motion-stabilized lenses to avoid it, and we use Photoshop filters to try and fix it when it creeps into our shots.

But blur can also be a powerful tool for conveying a sense of motion in a static medium. A speeding car or motorcycle, a galloping horse or bounding dog, a cyclist on a track, a kid on a sled—subjects like these are natural candidates for some motion blur.

Blur is the subject of this week’s installment of The Practicing Photographer. Ben Long and his motorcycle are joined by lynda.com videographer Josh Figatner, and the two explore various techniques for capturing motion blur as Ben rides down a deserted highway.

The importance of warming up: The Practicing Photographer

Published by | Thursday, January 23rd, 2014

warming-up-your-photo-skills-lynda

No athlete would take to the field, and no musician would take to the stage, without first warming up. But what about photographers? Do you really need to do stretching exercises before pressing the shutter button?

In this week’s installment of his series, The Practicing Photographer, Ben Long discusses the importance of warming up your photographer’s eye when you go out to shoot.

Product photography made in the shade: The Practicing Photographer

Published by | Thursday, January 16th, 2014
Product Photography

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Last week, we published a new course called Photographing Clothes and Textiles. The fourth course from photographer Konrad Eek, it’s a detailed look at styling, lighting, and photographing everything from garments to beach towels.

Top-notch textile photography—indeed, top-notch product photography of all kinds—greatly benefits from dedicated lighting gear such as studio strobes or compact flash units. But what if you simply want to take an attractive product shot for an online auction or a webpage?

That’s the topic Ben Long explores in this week’s installment of The Practicing Photographer. Ben joins Konrad Eek for a look at some simple, inexpensive techniques for taking great-looking product shots without any external lighting gear.

A raw+JPEG workflow for the iPad: The Practicing Photographer

Published by | Thursday, January 9th, 2014

PP - raw+jpeg Ben

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The best way to extract every bit of image quality from your camera is to shoot in its raw mode. A raw image contains the exact data recorded by the camera’s sensor. By comparison, when a camera creates a JPEG image, it discards significant amounts of data in order to make the image more compact.

But life is full of trade-offs. Raw files provide far more flexibility when adjusting exposure and color balance in a post-processing program such as Adobe Lightroom, but use far more storage space than JPEGs. Many cameras have a “best of both worlds” mode in which they create a companion JPEG file along with a raw file. This lets you use the JPEG for minor edits but fall back on the raw file should the image require significant adjustments that, with a JPEG, could compromise quality.

Portrait photography lighting exercises–with an egg: The Practicing Photographer

Published by | Thursday, December 19th, 2013

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Ben Long would like you to have an egg. As a photo subject, that is. In this week’s installment of his weekly series, The Practicing Photographer, Ben issues an assignment: Photograph an egg in a way that conveys emotion.
How do you get emotion out of an egg without drawing a face on it, Ben asks? Through lighting and composition. As this week’s two-video installment unfolds, we join Ben and photographer Troy Word in a classroom at the Oklahoma Arts Institute, where Troy gives his students this very assignment.

Troy demonstrates various lighting schemes, which you can replicate using anything from a studio light to a desk lamp or work light. As he moves the light around, changing its angle and its distance from the egg, the shadows on the egg change—and the mood in the resulting photos changes along with them.

Have a holiday photo-scanning party: The Practicing Photographer

Published by | Thursday, December 12th, 2013

Getting together with family over the holidays? Take advantage of all that togetherness by holding a scanning party, and scanning your vintage family photos, as Ben Long describes in this week’s installment of The Practicing Photographer.

It was inspired by an experience I had recently. During a trip to my hometown in Pennsylvania, a couple of family members showed me some photo albums containing riches that I’d never seen before—and that I wanted copies of. It dawned on me that every member of my family probably has an album of photos they’ve curated from their unique perspectives. So while I was in town, I ordered a $49 flatbed scanner from Amazon.com and had it shipped to my mom’s house. Then I told my family members to bring those albums over, and we sat around the dining room table as I scanned and scanned and scanned.

scanning photos