Here’s another weee trick that I came up with a couple of years back (but I’m sure other people must have dis­covered this too).

I stated earlier that it’s usu­ally great fun to use wide angle lenses to pho­to­graph your little ones. It requires you to get in really close (oth­er­wise the kid would be lost in the image) which in turn gives a great sense of “par­ti­cip­a­tion” or “imme­di­acy” poten­tially lead­ing to some cap­tiv­at­ing shots.

But there’s a prob­lem: The corners of the image get stretched the more wide angle you go. This can lead to some rather unap­peal­ing dis­tor­tions the fur­ther your sub­ject (or parts of your sub­ject) is away from the image centre. Have a look at this image for instance, which is the uned­ited ver­sion of the pic­ture shown above. Yuk!

That said, fret not, there is a fix: The fisheye /​bar­rel dis­tor­tion. In LightRoom/​Camera RAW just go to the lens cor­rec­tion sec­tion and play with some neg­at­ive val­ues in the “Dis­tor­tion” field (in the manual tab). For instance, in the image at the top, I used –60 — and I think it looks much bet­ter than the ori­ginal! If you didn’t shoot raw, you can still do this in Pho­toshop using the built-​in Lens Cor­rec­tion plu­gin, or, altern­at­ively, fiddle with the “Spher­ize” effect (or whatever it is called in your photo edit­ing soft­ware).

As always, there are some down­sides, mainly two. Fist, you lose some of the wide-​angled-​ness (again, com­pare the above shot with the ori­ginal), and it’s a ques­tion of taste whether the arti­fi­cially intro­duced dis­tor­tion is accept­able (this is not very obvi­ous here, but it will be much more notice­able when you have straight lines in the image).

Here’s part 5 (of 5, but there’ll be at least one more soon) of my little pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial series. I’m show­ing two tech­niques how to edit the ver­tical down view, or “nadir”. You mostly need this to remove the tri­pod from your image, or when you have some unwanted lens flare in the image (espe­cially when using the Peleng).

Here’s a trick that I heard about a couple of years back and that I use every now and then.

Have you ever had a nice “keeper” image but that was ever so slightly out of focus? If you took it without using a flash and if there are some eyes in the image, here’s what you could try.

To make the image appear a bit sharper (this is going to be really dodgy…) add a small white dot just above each pupil of the main subject’s eyes, imit­at­ing what you would see if you had used a flash in the image. In Light­Room for instance, use the local adjust­ments tool, choose a very small brush size and set the expos­ure to +3EV. Then zoom all the way into the eyes and try hard to make out the reflec­tion of the per­son with the cam­era. Then add a bright dot right there.

The reason for that is that you’re try­ing to loc­ate a com­mon reflec­tion in both eyes in order to make your hack look more real­istic (care­ful, our brains are extremely good at detect­ing any manip­u­la­tions in the face, and in par­tic­u­lar the eyes).

Clearly, this hack only really works if you’re not aware of it. So if you look at Sophie’s image real close, you will see that it is not 100% in focus — but only because you just read this post ;-)

Here’s part 4 (of 5) of my little pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial series. This time around we are deal­ing with the images shot from the tri­pod, so we need a couple of extra steps (using the mask­ing fea­ture and “View­point cor­rec­tion”) to pre­vent the tri­pod from appear­ing in our final pan­or­ama.

I was recently asked by a young father about some recom­mend­a­tions regard­ing cam­era lenses. I know, gear talk is dry, but then, if you don’t have the right gear for the right job, you may be dis­ap­poin­ted with the image you get oth­er­wise.

If you remem­ber my tips from a while ago, I like to use a macro lens to pho­to­graph little babies, as this allows you to get some really nice up close shots of your tiny little gem without it being lost in the frame (here’s a good example of a frame filling macro shot). Well, the young father already had a macro lens, so what next?

I’d say, get the “nifty fifty”. That’s a 50mm lens with a very bright aper­ture (typ­ic­ally in the ƒ/1.7 to ƒ/2.0 range) which costs you no more than a hun­dred bucks, in any cam­era sys­tem (of course you could also get ƒ/1.4, ƒ/1.2 or even ƒ/1.0 ver­sions, but those will set you back much, much more). In any case, with these won­der­ful lenses — really the first addi­tional lens you should be get­ting bey­ond your kit-​lens — you will be able to achieve some extremely shal­low depth of field, nicely sep­ar­at­ing your little smil­ies from poten­tially dis­tract­ing back­grounds (here’s one such shot). Also, again thanks to the wide aper­ture, you will be able to take pho­tos even in dark­ish light­ing con­di­tions without hav­ing to des­troy the ambi­ence with your onboard super nova.

But apart from that, go wide! Get a wide angle lens. With these lenses you are forced to get in close so that you’re right part of the action, and not just a by-​standing observer. Robert Capa once said “If your pic­tures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” He was a very wise man (and bril­liant photographer)…

Here’s part 3 (of 5) of my little pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial series. After shoot­ing and devel­op­ing the images, we will now stitch them together into the final 360×180° fully spher­ical pan­or­ama.