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Soft Focus Photography Soft focus is when you intentionally reduce sharpness (just a little) to get a gentle, glowing image. It smooths out textures (especially skin), reduces contrast, and gives your photo a kind of, let’s say ‘ethereal’ look. It is often used in portraits, dreamy landscapes, artistic/fine art work, vintage-style shots or even editorial fashion photography It is not the same as being out of focus. Good soft focus still has structure in it. You can usually te

Median Stacking Photography Median stacking is basically a way of combining multiple photos of the same scene to remove anything that moves. People, cars, waves, clouds, birds → if it is not in the same place in every frame/shot you take, it fades away (well you will make it go away). What is left is a clean, quiet version of the scene that often never actually existed in real life. It is how photographers get those empty tourist spots for example (that are usually packed and

Abstract Firework Photography The new year is right around the corner, making this an optimal time to brush up on your firework photography skills. However this time, lets do something a bit different, lets focus more on ‘Abstract firework photography’, where you are not trying to show exactly what the fireworks looked like, you want to be using them as raw material to create shapes, textures, and motion that feel closer to painting than photography. A Different Approach Most

credits: Fujifilm The Golden Ratio Technique The Golden Ratio compositional technique is one of those ideas that sounds intimidating at first, but in practice it is really just a way to guide the viewer’s eye through an image in a smooth, natural flow. It has been used for centuries in art, architecture, design and of course photography. The Golden Ratio helps create balance that doesn’t feel forced. Instead of splitting a frame evenly, it places visual weight slightly off-ce

What is the Black Card Photography Technique? Black card photography is a technique that feels almost too simple once you understand it. The idea behind it is straightforward, instead of using an expensive graduated ND filter to balance the exposure between sky and foreground, you use a matte black card to manually control how much light hits different parts of the frame during the exposure. If you think about it, it is basically dodging and burning, but done in-camera while

What Is Panning Photography Panning is a technique were you are trying to match your camera’s motion to someone (/something) else’s movement, with the goal of hitting that perfect moment where everything lines up, the subject’s speed, your own rotation, your shutter etc. The key thing here is relative motion. Your subject stays sharp because, for a fraction of a second, you are essentially moving with them. Meanwhile, the world behind them sort of smears into streaks because

credits: Adobe What is duotone photography? Duotone is just what it sounds like, a photo that uses two tones/colours, typically one for the highlights and one for the shadows. It strips away the full-colour spectrum and replaces it with a simplified, stylised colour combo. In general you can use duotone photography with any scene and subject, however the most popular use cases are portraits, posters, album covers etc. How to create a duotone image Technically, you can just sh

What Is High-Key Lighting? High-key lighting is a style where everything in your photo, so the subject, background, and shadows, is evenly lit and bright. You reduce contrast as much as possible, so there are few (if any) deep shadows. In the end you get a photo that feels light, fresh, minimal in a sense, and often very polished. A lot of times you see it in fashion, beauty and product photography, but it also works outdoors, especially for landscapes and nature shots (a lot

What Is Exposure Stacking? Exposure stacking, sometimes called exposure blending, is when you take several photos of the same scene at different exposure levels (one brighter, one darker, one in between) and then you merge them into a single photo and you keep detail everywhere. Basically, instead of picking one “correct” exposure, you take a few and get the best parts from each. It is a very close cousin of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, which I have covered before, b

By Kuebi = Armin Kübelbeck - own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5618475 What Is Solarization? Solarization (also known as the Sabattier effect) happens when you partly expose a developing photo or film to light, then continue developing it. Instead of ruining the image completely (which exposure to light normally does), it reverses the tones in certain areas → blacks turn silvery, highlights go darker, and you get glowing outlines around s

credits: Canon What Is Time Stacking Photography? Time stacking is what happens when you take a bunch of photos of the same scene over a period of time and then combine them later into one single image. Instead of just one single moment, you get a picture that shows movement/change. It is very similar to long exposure, however instead of leaving your shutter open for a few minutes or hours, you take hundreds of quick shots and “stack” them together afterward. How It Works Thi

What Is Pinhole Photography? Pinhole photography is basically the most stripped-down form of photography possible. Instead of a lens, you use a tiny hole (literally a pin-sized opening) to let light hit your camera’s sensor (or film of course). It is how cameras started. Before lenses, there were camera obscuras, where photographers would project an image through a small hole onto a wall to then trace it. Modern pinhole photography is that same idea, just in ‘‘modern’’ camera