With Spring underway, you might be thinking about doing some Spring cleaning around the house. As well as the house, how about giving your photography gear a spring clean? You could also think of it like an annual service.
Read the rest of this entry »If you use an interchangeable lens camera, you can purchase an adapter that will let you reverse mount a lens on the camera. Depending on the focal length of the lens, this can get you a good macro photo. A lens with a focal length of 50mm will give a reproduction ratio of around 1:1 when reverse mounted.
A macro photo of an ant drinking from water on a red leaf - this photo was captured using a reverse mounted lens.
If you have an interchangeable lens camera, you can purchase a macro lens for your camera. A macro lens allows you to focus much closer (and so obtain greater magnification) than a standard lens.
Thorny Pettle by the_tahoe_guy on flickr (licensed CC-BY)
Macro and close-up photography is all about enlarging small subjects so we can see the beauty (or some might say ugliness in the case of some subjects) that we would otherwise miss.
Libélula I by | Ray | on flickr (licensed CC-BY-SA)
Slit scan photography is a technique where a slowly moving shutter is used. When combined with subject movement, this can result in quite abstract images where the subject becomes stretched out over the photo.
I covered how to create a slit scan style photo of an object rotating on a turntable in my post Slit Scan Object Photography How To. At the time I wrote that article, I didn't have a camera that could record video. I now do, and have found that using video greatly speeds up the process of recording the needed images.
Read the rest of this entry »I've already written a similar article to this before, covering 5 Mistakes Photographers Make, in this article I want to cover a few more common mistakes.
Of course, if you do these things on purpose (which you may have good reason to do - there are always exceptions to the rule), then it's not a mistake. But if you're doing these things without really thinking about it, then hopefully this article will make you open your eyes a bit and consider if the way you currently do things is really the best way.
Read the rest of this entry »It's easy to just grab your camera and go out to take some photos without considering whether the camera is clean or not. Dust on the front of the lens won't normally degrade image quality visibly (unless you have a whole layer of dust on there). But if you have an interchangeable lens camera, dust can get onto the camera's image sensor, where it will cause problems.
Dust on the image sensor shows up as dark blobs in your photos. Unlike film, where the dust would only appear in one frame, then the frame would be wound on, in digital the dust spot will appear in all your photos until it is cleaned off.
Sensor Dust by Brent Schmidt on flickr (licensed CC-BY-SA)
Vignetting describes an effect where the edges of an image are darker than the center.
The main reason that vignetting occurs is that light beams at oblique angles are blocked at the edges of the lens. The blocking of these light beams could be due to usage of a lens hood, or it may be inherent to the lens.
Read the rest of this entry »Lens distortion is something that is common across the vast majority of lenses. This applies to both cameras with integrated lenses, and interchangeable lenses for DSLRs, MILCs, etc. Where a lens should capture a flat view, instead the view is slightly bent or warped in some way.
Photographing inside a constricted space such as an oven or washing machine can give an unusual view that you don't normally see. I don't mean taking a photo from the outside looking into your oven or washing machine, but rather a photo taken from the inside, looking out.
