We’ve had many a discussion in our CRAFT offices with our photographer Sam Murphy about how hard it is to photograph food. For you budding food bloggers, take a visit to Chow.com’s slideshow 10 ways to photograph food for more inspiration. I like the approach used by Jamie Olivier pictured above where it’s real food […]
Recently, I came across photographer Michael Paul Smith, who has an online showcase of his miniature scene photographs.
I asked him to tell of his process, influences and techniques.
I first start off with some very rough sketches on the particular building I’m thinking of making. Really, they are mere scribbles, but they capture the key points of the structure. I have to ask myself questions like: when was this building built and in what style of architecture. Has this building been added to over the years and if so, in what way.
If you walk down the center of town, and really study the buildings, you can see their history.
For what I’m doing, my structures have to be generic enough so they don’t look too unusual, yet they have to have some character to them to make them interesting.
I also study photographs from the past. There are books out entitled Then and Now, which show photographs of buildings taken in the 1890’s and also in the present at the exact same spot. These are very telling because you can see how drastically or subtly things have changed. I want my models to have the feeling that they have traveled in time.
This week’s Flashback, from the pages of MAKE Volume 15, shows how authors Jim Moir and Ken Lange devised a camera setup to auto-trigger photos of the critters who came to visit their backyards in the dead of night. Judging from the multitude of pictures they’ve gathered over the years, there is no shortage of […]
Do you have to take some tabletop product shots in a hurry, but don’t have access to studio seamless or a light table? Try this hack. Using plain paper and some binder clips you, too, can assemble your very own light tent.
Katie Sokoler of Color Me Katie is a constant source of fun and inspiration and colorful projects. Her latest DIY tutorial is for making a cute little blow-a-kiss flipbook so you can give your loved one a kiss to keep in his or her pocket at all times. Adorable!
A reader who saw Marc’s recent post about an Arduino-controlled laser photo trigger wrote in to tell us about the amazing work of Belgian photographer fotoopa (which, we hear, as “foto opa,” means something like “photo grandad” in Dutch). That’s him in the picture above, and that’s his awesome homebrew laser-triggered camera set up that he uses to capture amazing pictures of insects in flight and splashing drops of colored water. I’m generally skeptical of film purists, but fotoopa makes the compelling point that no digital camera has the shutter speed necessary to do this kind of imagery. He claims the Compur #1 shutter used in his 2008 setup has a speed of less than 5 milliseconds. Technical details about his 2009 setup are available here. [Thanks, Wilco Schillemans!]
Kristen of Pommes Frites shares how she turned a dollar store umbrella into a handy light umbrella to diffuse even light over her photography subjects.
