Archive for the 'portrait' Category

After weeks of secret discussions and work I proudly announce now that Fenyertek.hu, our Hungarian photography tutorial portal has just started to operate.
We are aiming to fill in the itching lack of freely available photography related information in Hungarian. We are going to share videos, podcasts and written material about lighting in studio and on location, portrait, landscape and macro photography, retouching and whatever else comes up as a matter of interest from our readers.

If you speak Hungarian come and visit us. But even if you don’t, you might enjoy some of our videos.

Update: Today I’ve closed the comment possibility of this post and I announce the winners of the presents offered Uprinting.com:

• 250 Postcards has been won by Kim and Arpad (see their comments below)
• 1 free 18×24 Canvas Prints is given to Argos.

Congratulations to the winners!

I would like to offer some presents to my most loyal readers in cooperation with Uprinting.com.

In order that I can give you more valuable and interesting content next year I would like to get some feedback from you on which posts you enjoyed the most on Photonovice.net and what photography related topics you’d be happy to read more about in the coming year.

All you need to do is writing a comment below mentioning your favourite topics and you will automatically participate in a completely random drawing of three winners.

The prizes are:

• 250 Postcards for 2 Lucky Readers and
• 1 free 18×24 Canvas Prints for one reader

(3 winners total) from Uprinting.com.

Winners in the United States and Canada qualify for free shipping. Shipping fees will apply to winners outside these areas.

So, make your comment and win!

Local adjustment brush is a great tool in Lightroom 2 that makes photographers use Photoshop less frequently. Earlier you could make only global changes on your photos that impacted the whole area of the picture. Now it got local.
The very same – any more – effects can be achieved with layer masks in Photoshop. However, this tool is so easy and intuitive to use in Lightroom that sometimes I have to resist using it.
I show below how it works.

Look at the pic on the right. The photo is dominated by the model’s eyes and smile and the eye really attracts the attention. However, we could be kind to our model just making her wrinkles just a bit less visible.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Turpin is a commercial and magazine photographer and just like Joe McNally he also loves using remotely triggered small hot shoe flashes even for serious assignments. I’ve just come across his video on Strobist.

Recently I photographed the members of Martenica Folk Dance Ensemble which is a dance group performing Bulgarian and other south-Slavik dances.

I loved to meet and talk to these guys in person after seeing them performing on the stage so many times. I hope that from the portraits you can feel a bit the mood of their lively and full of energy dances.

And my old friend needed some pics for his employer’s corporate Website. These two were the best of the series. “Pro” pics for free this time.

In all cases I used a one light / big fill card set up. The one light source was from a softbox quite close to the models’ face.

During a smaller family gathering I set up my gray fun-to-fold background and one studio strobe with the 1mx1m softbox on it and persuaded my family members to suffer a bit in front of my camera.
The light source was just a few feet from the models’ faces slightly pointing down on them. I really like the effect of this lighting. It is subtle enough – due to the proximity of the relatively big light source – not to grab the viewer’s attention and also natural looking because there is only one light.

There are a few big guys who use extremely simple lighting set-ups and yet make amazing portraits, like Timothy Greenfield-Sanders or Platon just to name two of them. Visit their sites to get some inspiration.