photonovice.net » portrait

New Hungarian Photography Portal

photonovice — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:53:20 +0000

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.

My Xmas Presents For My Readers

photonovice — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:21:09 +0000

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!

Portrait Retouch in Lightroom 2

photonovice — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:11:33 +0000

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.

The tool is available in the Develop module as brush icon under the histogram on the right hand side panel. Clicking on it will reveal the adjustment options you can chose from.
They are: Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Clarity, Color.
We are going to be interested in the Clarity slider, but first lets select the area to be adjusted.

Set the size of your brush and give it some feather for the smooth transition between the adjusted and not adjusted areas and paint the “problematic”. See what I selected in my wrinkle hunting quest.

Clarity can help in showing more details if you push the slider to the positive direction. On the other hand you can soften edges nicely when using it negatively.
I pushed it completely down. Check the result.

You can use the same tool to emphasize the eyes (Clarity to positive, maybe Exposure and Contrast to positive), whiten the teeth (Brightness or Exposure to positive and in certain cases Saturation to negative) and many, many other things.

Street Photography With Hot Shoe Flashes

photonovice — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:05:55 +0000

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.

Nick Turpin shoots Portraits of thriller writers for Arena Mag
from Nick Turpin on Vimeo.

Some Recent Portraits

photonovice — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 07:30:26 +0000

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.

One Light Portraiture

photonovice — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:36:26 +0000

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.