A few weeks ago I introduced you to Elinchrom’s latest offering, the ELB portable strobe kit. Now that I’ve spent a few weeks shooting with it both on location and in the studio, I can finally tell you if it’s actually any good and whether it can compete with the newly released Profoto B2.
For the longest time I viewed tethered capture as a nice-to-have reserved for high budget shoots and simply shyed away from it. I tried it a few times and after constantly being plagued with technical problems, I decided I'm better off sticking to my camera's LCD screen and didn't give it a second thought. Through my ignorance, little did I know how much I was actually losing out on and how much time I wasted in the process.
With companies like Profoto and Elinchrom offering an increasingly broad range of self-contained strobes, Broncolor was no doubt feeling left out with its predominantly pack and head oriented lineup. That’s all changing now with the release of the new Siros strobe; a compact, wall powered, feature rich and wallet friendly flash unit.
As a photographer, your average day most likely includes at least one blog, social media, or image post. Piggybacking on these posts with additional links is a great way to sell a product, promote a service or grow your following, but as with anything, there is a good, better and best way of doing things. Here are some tips that will help you to maximize the return on your daily posting efforts and generate more business.
So it goes without saying that there are a ton of different ways to match skin tones across your subject or between images in Photoshop so it's often just a matter of picking the option that is most convenient or intuitive. Despite the wide array of choices, I seldom see people use the selective color adjustment layer for this task. The beauty of selective color is that it allows us to go off the numbers rather than intuition and achieve an accurate result in little time.
With the recent announcement of the Profoto B2, Elinchrom's position in the ultra-portrable strobe pack market was somewhat overshadowed as the former exceeded the Elinchrom Quadra Hybrid in many aspects. Not to be outdone, Elinchrom has now announced the release of its next generation on-location pack and head kit known as the ELB 400.
If you’ve made the transition, or are planning on making the transition from photography as a hobby to photography as a job, you’ll invariably come to a point where you’ll just want to throw your hands in the air and give up. These bouts of self-doubt and frustration will likely occur many times and seem to appear not only during your lows but even at the highs. These feelings are normal, and it is those that rise above them time and again that end up successful.
Whether it's photography or videography, we're always of the belief that we need that extra piece of gear to produce high quality and professional looking content. Be it a high-resolution camera to showcase detail, a rig for steady frames, or filters to deal with challenging light conditions, we're convinced that our vision can't be conveyed without a bag full of gear. While that may sometimes be true, this touching slow motion video shows just how much can be achieved with only a phone and a strong vision.
In beauty and portrait retouching, one of the most important goals is to retain skin texture and keep the image from looking soft. We often however face a situation where the existing texture is unflattering and harsh. While we could heal out each pore or patch manually, this often leads to sub-par results and takes a long time. In this video I'll show you a unique, precise and fast way to target a particular texture frequency and offset it in a largely automated way.
A common issue that we're often faced with when using hard light modifiers such as a beauty dish or open reflector, is that of over-exposed highlights on our subject's forehead, nose and under eye areas, which also results in lost skin texture in those regions. While raw processors offer up the ability to recover highlight detail, this rarely leads to satisfactory results. In this tutorial I'll show you how to recover the texture while leaving the overall luminosity in-tact to produce a well-balanced result.
Martin Heck from Timestorm films kicked off a series of timelapse videos through New Zealand with the release of Awakening earlier this month. While Awakening took the viewer across New Zealand's grand landscapes, his latest film Amplitude explores its details. Taking you on a journey through its caves, waterfalls and lush greenery, the details and colors are sure to excite your senses and have you putting New Zealand on your bucket list.
Phase One has officially announced the release of Capture One Pro version 8 with a host of new features and a new purchasing model option. More than just minor enhancements, version 8 brings with it truly useful features that allow you to perform more of your work within it and not have to turn to Photoshop or additional plug-ins.
The evolution of a photographer is rarely a linear one. We get better, we get worse, we think we’re improving but we’re not, and then with some luck and a lot of patience and practice, we actually start to produce great images. For some that last point is never reached and it’s usually due to a few common mistakes.
When it comes to the quantity of lights that one needs, opinions are often heavily polarized and a hotly contested debate often rages. There are those that are staunch supporters of one light while others claim that a handful of lights are needed before anything meaningful can be done. Ultimately neither group is right as there is no definable minimum or maximum number of lights that one should use.
From a retouching standpoint, there are few things more unpleasant or challenging than dealing with chunks of hair on the face, missing patches of skin texture and large folds of skin. Generally the existing tools in photoshop such as the healing brush or patch tool fail in these situations and we often end up with unnatural or unpolished results. When all else fails I often turn to a technique called texture grafting to deal with a multitude of issues.
