5 life-saving DIY hacks every photographer should know

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN ANY OF THIS CONTENT, ALL THESE CONTENTS BELONG TO THEIR RIGHTFUL OWNERS

There are so many smart inventions on the market to help you take great pictures, but instead of burning your savings on kit, you can make brilliant light modifiers out of standard household items and fashion accessories. In their latest guest post the photo management and Canon Project1709 experts at Photoventure offer a few clever ideas every photographer should know.

There are so many smart inventions on the market to help you take great pictures, but instead of burning your savings on kit, you can make brilliant light modifiers out of standard household items and fashion accessories. Here are a few ideas; if you have others, let us know in the comments section.

DIY Hack 1. Wrap and diffuse

Bubble wrap shaped into a cone and placed on your flashgun can turn harsh, bright light into much softer flash for portraits, at a fraction of the cost of a commercially produced light modifier.

DIY Hack 2. Reflect with foil

Cooking foil has so many great uses that it ought to be a staple item in your home on par with toilet paper. For photography purposes, it makes an excellent reflector. Place it on the ground under drooping flowers and you can get beautifully sun-bounced macro pictures.

DIY Hack 3. Shades of exposure

Tinted sunglasses with a gradient colour can make a great alternative to a grad filter for landscape photography, helping you bring out the colour in the sky without underexposing the foreground.

DIY Hack 4. Between the sheets

A white pillowcase in front of a lamp can create a pretty, diffused light for your home studio. If you prefer natural light sources for indoor shoots, you can scale up your bedding hack and cover your window(s) with a white bedsheet to diffuse the light.

DIY Hack 5. Filter chic

Commercial filter systems are great, but sometimes you just want that slightly different effect that a .6 grad won’t give you. If you have a filter holder, try removing the filters it came with and instead suspend an old panty hose or a thin silk scarf on to it to get soft-focus portraits and dreamy, tinted landscapes.

Souce:http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2013/12/07/5-life-saving-diy-hacks-every-photographer-should-know/

DIY Photography Hacks: make custom bokeh shapes and get creative with blur

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN ANY OF THIS CONTENT, ALL THESE CONTENTS BELONG TO THEIR RIGHTFUL OWNERS

Get creative with your photography and learn how to make your own custom bokeh shapes by making your own template at home. Our latest DIY Photography Hacks series post shows you a quick and inexpensive way to produce fun and exciting background blur effects.

The word ‘bokeh’ comes from the Japanese word ‘boke’ meaning blur or haze. This photography slang term relates to the aesthetic quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image, which in turn is determined by the way the lens renders those areas.

In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to create your own custom bokeh shapes, by making a template that fits over your lens. To do this you’ll need nothing more than some card and an elastic band.

We’ll guide you through the process of drawing and cutting out the template, and fixing it over your lens. We’ll then show you how to compose a subject with a backdrop of fairy lights, which will look really striking when blurred. Finally we’ll show you how to set up your camera to capture the bokeh effect.

Step by step how to make custom bokeh shapes

1. Draw your custom Bokeh shape

Place your lens on the card, and draw around it with a pencil. Next, draw a shape in the middle of the circle to create the desired bokeh effect – we’re using a heart shape. You need to keep the shape fairly small – roughly the size of a penny.

2. Fit the bokeh shape template over your lens

Next, draw a larger circle outside the first circle, so that the custom bokeh template will overlap the front of the lens like a cap. Using a cutting blade, carefully cut out the heart, and then cut around the outer circle. Fit the card over the lens, and fasten it in place with an elastic band.

3. Set up the backdrop

Hang up a dark piece of material for your backdrop – we hung ours over a radiator. Next, arrange the fairy lights in front the backdrop, making sure they’re evenly spread out. Place a small table 4-5ft in front of the backdrop to place your foreground object on. Close the curtains to darken the room.

4. Set up your camera

Set your camera to Manual mode, set Quality to Raw, and set the ISO to 100 for noise-free images. Open up the aperture as wide as it will go – we set ours to f/1.4, which gave us a shutter speed of 1/80 sec. A flashgun produced too much light, so we used our on-body fl ash. Set your lens to Autofocus, focus on your foreground object, and start shooting.

Final Tips!

- A good bokeh effect requires a wide aperture, ideally f/2.8. Prime lenses are great for this technique as they tend to be faster lenses. Position your camera as close to the subject as it will focus and the greater distance between the foreground and background, the more the lights will blur and the greater the effect will be.

- By using multi coloured fairy lights you’ll get a much more colourful and fun effect. If you use white fairy lights you can adjust the colours in Photoshop CS or Elements with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. See below…

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Play around with the colours – You can change the look and feel of your bokeh image using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop.

To change the colours of your image, add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, and select a colour from the menu above the sliders so that only those tones in the image are altered – for our image we chose Blue. Now simply drag the Hue slider to adjust the colour; you can also adjust the strength of the colour using the Saturation slider. Alternatively, you can leave the menu set to Master, so colours throughout the image are altered, then adjust the sliders to suit. You can also graduate the effect to combine the altered colours with the image’s original colours. To do this, select the Gradient tool, click Edit, select Foreground to Transparent and click OK. In the Options bar select Linear, and set Mode to Normal and Opacity to 100%, and check the Transparency box. Target the mask by clicking its thumbnail, and draw gradients of differing lengths and directions on the mask to partially reveal the colour change.

Source:http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2012/11/22/custom-bokeh-shapes-step-by-step-how-to-get-creative-with-blur/

DIY Pop-up Flash Bouner

Disclaimer: I DO NOT OWN ANY OF THIS CONTENT, ALL THESE CONTENTS BELONG TO THEIR RIGHTFUL OWNERS
Yet another small internal flash bouncer. I really like this one since it is the fastest one to make yet. I'll estimate about 15 seconds.

If you are a big executive and have your own business card, you can cut the time it takes you to get a business card and you are at 5 seconds. The results are not professional and there is some light lost, but when all else fails, it is a neat trick to have up your sleeve. It will defiantly work for Canon internal flashes. Other brands - you might need to adjust a bit.

I got this trick in the mail from Marko Helenius. He holds a nice gallery at markohelenius.fi. Pleae go over there and have a looksy. Judging by th
e (small number of) studio shots, this guy knows what he is doing. Now I give the floor to Marko.

I've been countless times in a indoor situation where the hint of light is just not enough to shoot even slightly sharp portraits from friends and family and you just know even without trying that the use of integrated flash in SLR would end up in a catastrophe.

At one time I came up with extremely simple, cheap and diy Party Bouncer. All you need is a white business card and a pair of scissors

(knife, sharp edge, nail etc). Make two cuts on the other end of the card and install it to the metallic hinges of the integrated flash. You might even consider an angle near 45 degrees. :)

Cardboard is great material for this Party Bouncer. Most of the light bounces from the card into the roof, creating nice overall illumination, while some of the light penetrates directly through the card, disperses and lights the subject from the front.

Test photos below show the amazing overall light. First photo is shot with integrated flash and second photo with Party Bouncer attached. Direct flash tends to burn areas in front and leave very hard

and visible shadows.

No Bouncer - Everyone is sad

Party Bouncer Installed - Man, It Rocks!

The coverage test images below were shot with 10mm Sigma wide-lens approximately 1.5m from the wall, again with and without the Party Bouncer. The coverage with Party Bouncer looks very scattered, but for example with the Canon 50mm lens the shot ends up in the middle of the plain area. In this case, the direction of the light is more important that the coverage.

Party Bouncer doesn't look professional at all, but can give you great photos when all hope is lost.

PS: few pointers that came up 3am :)

- You cannot get Canon 350D and 400D to take a picture of each other in the exact same moment with remote ir switch. It's easier to shoot through a mirror if you want to get a picture of the integrated flash in action (400D has slightly smaller flash latency).

- You cannot use the radio trigger transmitter as support piece in the picture if you want to similarly actually use the studio flash.

More Lighting Related DIY :http://digital-photography-school.com/diy-flash-and-lighting-hacks-for-digital-photographers

Sourcehttp://www.diyphotography.net/the-party-bouncer-is-back-in-business