#FREE The DIY Photographer #Photography #Joseph “PhotoJoseph” Linaschke

In the world of photography, even the simplest accessories can cost a few days’ salary. The answer? Don’t buy it. Build it!
That’s the idea behind The Do-It-Yourself Photographer. Every other week, photographer and educator Joseph Linaschke shows how you can fashion ordinary items?from plastic cups to clamps to parchment paper?into accessories that will improve lighting, stabilize your camera, and much more.
So roll up your sleeves and break out the gaffer’s tape. Learn how to become a DIY photographer.

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Instructor’s Welcome Note:

– Photography is all about light which also means it’s all about shadows. Now if you take a light and shine it onto your backdrop just to illuminate it nice and clean and smooth, that can work out great but sometimes that smooth, clean background isn’t really what you want. Sometimes you need something a little bit more dynamic, with a little bit of texture, little bit of depth to it, and you get that depth through shadows. Now there’s lots of ways you can make shadows, of course you can make little shadow puppets but that’s probably not quite what you’re looking for for you photos, maybe something a little bit more controlled a little more more designed and with that in mind, I present to you the shadow caster.
Or in the technical world this is called a cookie, if you’re working in the film space you’re gonna call these things cookies, not the kind you eat, but the something that goes in between the light and the backdrop to create a shadow. And the first cookie that I’ve got here looks kinda like a venetian blind. Look at that so it’s just a piece of cardboard, with a bunch of slits cut through it. I have here my light and my background, now this is gonna work with any kind of light, whether it’s sunlight, a strobe, a constant LED light like I have here and when you put the cookie between the light and the backdrop you now have a shadow, now that’s pretty cool.
Now of course you can change the sharpness and the strength of that shadow but moving the cookie forward and backward or moving the light itself forward and backward. If you are looking for a very particular pattern you may have to size the cutout to go with your studio, the space that you have, the room that you’re shooting in, and of course the size of the backdrop, the positions of the lights and so on, so it may take a little bit of experimenting to get it just right but of course once you do you’ve got it and cardboard’s cheap you can probably get stuff delivered to your place all the time you can just take those boxes, cut ’em up into all kinds of different shapes.
So that’s a very man-made shadow there, that venetian blind type of a shape. Let’s go for something a bit more organic. So if you look at this one here it’s pretty much a seemingly random pattern of holes and chunks in here and this will look more like sunlight coming through a tree for example where you’ve got some dappled shade so let’s take a look at that, put that on there. And again we can move that back and forth to get the look that you want. And you know if you’re doing video, you could even record the video while this is moving, or take a couple of these and move them against each other then you really would get that look of light coming through a tree while the tree’s moving.
So now how’re gonna go about coming up with these shapes well an easy way to do it, of course you can just take your knife and start randomly cutting, but if you wanna follow a pattern an easy way to do it is to go online and just google any kind of shape that you wanna create, grab a picture, take it into photoshop or whatever and make it a really high contrast image that you can then print out into shapes like these which you can then just tape onto a piece of cardboard and cut through ’em. So this way you’re following a bit more a pattern you’re not going completely random, but you know whatever works. Here’s another one here for the venetian blind pattern you take that and make it bigger or smaller until you get exactly what you want.
Now these are of course just made out of cardboard which means they’re easy to make but also they’re not gonna last very long. They will eventually start to break down and fall apart so if you come up with something that you’re using all the time, consider making it out of wood. So this is a thin piece of plywood. The shape has been cut out with a jigsaw, and now we have something that will last virtually forever. Let’s see what this one looks like. So this has a pretty cool filig

 

 

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