Personal Notes On Photography

After reading through Gilad's journals, I've learned quite alot about using different effects to one's advantage, and thus I have to note it down here. He's a great photographer, and his submissions always blow me away. The colors, contrasts, themes. I think I'd learn alot about photography just by trying to emulate him.

• Apparently, using long exposure when shooting water will get you that "steamy" effect, as if you're taking a picture of mist.
• You can use underexposure to your advantage to get a more "dramatic" picture, with stronger/darker colors. To achieve this you can utilize the fill flash (also called slow flash) or HDR. Remember the "exposure compensation" feature on most cameras.
• The built-in flash, if too sharp, can be softened with a bit of tape.

And now a direct quote about filter types:

ND filters
Natural Density filters are like sun glasses that you put on your lens, to help you get less light in the camera. Like sun glasses you are able to select the level of darkness applied on the lens by the thickness of the glass in the filter.
Why do you need it?
Basically it help Get longer exposures in strong light conditions (up to 10 full stops. The colors are deeper and the effect is usually more surreal. You will need tripod, and the ND filters matching your lens. There is no way to get that effect in Photoshop, since longer exposures will get you effects of transparency and movement (like water breaking on rocks turning into mist).
Another thing, there are ND filters that comes in grad (circular grad). That means that they block the sun only in a portion of the filter. This is recommended for sunsets and sunrises, when you want only part of the frame to block the light.

Polarizer filter
This filter is a "must" when shooting landscape shots on a summer day.
You know how the blue sky looks too bright in contrast to the land? If you use polarizer you will get deeper blue and better contrast. Basically that filters gets you better balanced light in outdoor shooting.
Second use for that filter is avoiding reflections. Like trying too shoot through a glass, by turning the circular filter you can adjust the reflection up to the point it disappears.


To summarize, I need to check if we've got ND and Polarizer filters at work.