Hello all!
As usual lately, it has been a while. That’s because I am getting ready to pack up and leave High Level, and move back to Ottawa! So it’s been hectic. But, over the past few weeks, I have still found some time for photography. One of the coolest things is … one of my photos was chosen for a winter photo gallery on a photo website! Here is the photo!
I sent this photo in and a few more, and this one was chosen to be in the gallery:) But what’s even cooler is that anyone in High Level can get a copy of this photo in the form of a postcard! I have two kinds of holiday post cards on sale at both Traditions and Esawa.
If you would like to see the photo gallery, click HERE.
And there is still more. Recently, I have been binging on a youtube channel called DigitalRev TV. It is hosted by a whacky chinese guy with a british accent, and, among other things, has shown me some different photo techniques. The two I will feature here are called “free-lensing” and “light painting”. Sounds cool, right!
These are techniques that you can try indoors, which was important for me since I have very little free time on my hands. These can be done with many types of simple camera gear, so I will show you how to try both of these techniques out here.
The first technique, “free-lensing” requires a DSLR, as the point of it is to shoot with your lens off. Whacky ey?
What you get is something like this:
Free-lensing literally removes the lens from the camera, but then has you shoot through the lens with different angles.
This does two things. It makes you able to take very close-up shots, and is also messes with the focus plane, meaning only a specific area is in focus, making many other things out of focus.
This is good for when you want to focus on one particular thing, or one part of something, as you eye goes straight to the part in focus.
This technique definitely takes some trial and error, but it’s fun to mess around with.
This technique gives a lot of “Bokeh”, which is the geeky term for parts of the photo that are really out of focus. Many people find good, smooth bokeh desireable in photos.
This technique also has plenty of faults, like allowing light to sometimes leak onto the camera’s sensor, around the edges of the lens, as it is no longer attached to the camera. That is what happened here.
But, when you get a bit of practice, you can get some pretty interesting results that make what would otherwise be a very ordinary photo into something a little different.
Here is the second technique, called “light painting”. With this technique, all you need is a dark room, some flash lights and a camera that has a 30 second shutter, or thereabouts.
This is what you can get.
One of my favourite things to photograph is car streaks, so I thought I would take inspiration from the red and white lights of a car to do a profile photo.
In this photo, I have my camera up on a tripod with a 30 second shutter, and a flash on top. I also have red and white flashlights. My living room is completely dark.
So, I run up, press the shutter, and the flash goes off right away, catching my handsome grin on the side of the frame. Then, in pitch blackness, I run to the back left of the frame (trying not to knock over the television) and turn on the two flash lights.
The idea here is to point the lights towards the camera, but not directly at it. Then I just had some fun with it. To get the ghosty face effect, I just aimed one of the lights at my face for a sec just before starting my light trails.
After some more trial and error, this is what I got.
Pretty cool!
I challenge anyone with access to this kind of gear to try these techniques out and see how it goes. It was lots of fun, and I hope it is for you too!
