September 2018 – Sky Replacement, Repetition, Patterns, Long Exposure, Warp, Sports
Here’s a trick we all do (or wish we could do) occasionally. We have to replace a sky. There’s several techniques for doing that but here’s one I hadn’t seen before from Blake Rudis of f.64 Academy titled “Replacing a Sky With the Soft Light Blend Mode”,
https://f64academy.com/replacing-sky-soft-light-blend-mode-video/
One of the things we seem to naturally gravitate toward in our photographs is the use of repeating patterns. Some of us do it consciously and compose specifically for repeating patterns while others seem to just naturally pick a composition with repeating patterns. Whichever one you are, knowing when they enhance our photographs and knowing when they don’t add anything to the image will help us improve our photography. Here’s an article published on Picture Correct by Tedric Garrison titled “Repetition and Patterns In Photography”.
https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/repetition-and-patterns-in-photography/
We can use long exposure photography for a lot of different things like blurring the water in a waterfall, calming the waves in ocean image and even removing people from walking through a picture. More and more manufacturers are making Neutral Density filters and they’re making them darker than ever before. A 15 stop ND filter isn’t a bit unusual these days. Here’s an article published on Peta Pixel by Antony Zacharias titled “A Beginner’s Step-by-Step Guide to Shooting Long Exposure Photos”.
https://petapixel.com/2018/08/17/a-beginners-step-by-step-guide-to-shooting-long-exposure-photos/
One of the, what I would consider, more advanced features in Photoshop is the Puppet Warp Tool. That’s a strange name so what does it do? One description says “Puppet Warp provides a visual mesh that lets you drastically distort specific image areas, while leaving other areas intact”. Sounds scary doesn’t it. Here’s an article by Greg Benz that uses it in a small area of a photograph that should give you an idea of what it can do and show you it’s not that difficult of a tool to learn. Greg’s article and video are titled “How to Use Puppet Warp in Photoshop to Change the Flow of Water”.
Sooner or later, we’ll all be trying our hands at sports photography. Weather it’s for a local road race, bicycle race, Head of the Hooch, grandchildren’s sporting events or you really have an obsession with the Chattanooga Roller Girls; our local roller derby team. The best sports photos seem to capture the action without blurring the photograph. Here’s an article posted on Picture Correct by Amy Renfrey titled “Capturing the Motion of Sports Photography”.
https://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/capturing-the-motion-of-sports-photography/