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I can see three very clear aspects that all three photos share, so let's concentrate on those.
Two can be done in camera, the third is a software process.
I didn't have time to costume a collection of actors or find a nice medieval-style location... but I have a toy bear & my living room, with a bookcase in the corner.
I didn't set up any lighting for ...
35
Actually, this is intentionally done and can be duplicated with any camera and flash combo (ish).
To me, the second and third image seem indicative of a technique known as second curtain / rear curtain sync. The first appears to be good ol' flash during a long exposure...(more below)...
In all of the examples, a decently long exposure (for the event) was ...
26
Increase the contrast - globally and additional local contrast in the trees and other areas
(when you say amazing sharpness I think it's a big boost in contrast that you're noticing)
Increase saturation
Warm the image - you can see the greens have gone yellow
Vignette
In addtion, looks like they've applied some "glow" to the image. You can do this by ...
25
What you are looking for is a ND (Neutral Density) filter.
To illustrate, here is an example of a photo taken in daylight in a street with a ND1000 filter. The filter allowed a shutter speed of 6 seconds. With no filter, with the same aperture and ISO, the shutter speed would have been approximately 6/1000 = 0.006 seconds (no "ghosts" effect).
Contrary to ...
22
When light bounces off a relatively nonconductive surface it becomes partially plane polarized, meaning the light tends to have the same polarization direction.
Polarizing filters can be used to counteract glare/reflections, by orienting the filter at 90 degrees to the polarized reflection so that it get filtered out.
If you orient the filter so that it is ...
20
So, here's what I got in just a few minutes using two basic tools: Curves, and Unsharp mask:
I used Gimp, but this is basic stuff any decent image editing software will have. Here's all I did. First, I used the curves tool to dramatically increase the black point, increasing shadow contrast:
Then, I pulled the curve upwards to brighten the (new) midtones:
...
20
There are two main elements I see in your example images:
Contrast
These images have relatively low contrast. The brightest whites are nowhere near pure white. They're light grey. The darkest blacks are nowhere near pure black. They're dark grey. You can do this by reducing overall contrast, by lightening up the shadows (also known as reducing the blacks, ...
20
The blur is caused by the shutter being open for much longer than the duration of your flash.
The orange color of the blur is due to the ambient lighting being much warmer in color than the light from your flash. Since the camera has almost certainly set white balance automatically to match your flash, the much dimmer and warmer ambient light has a very ...
15
The effect is due to combining flash and ambient light on a moving subject. The flash illuminates the subject which then moves. The subject blocks the ambient light creating a silhouette, and then moves before the flash fires so that the image lit by the flash is offset with the silhouette, giving the hard cartoon outline effect. No photoshop required for ...
15
In Lightroom I increased exposure, contrast, hightlights, whites, clarity, and decreased shadows, and blacks. The biggest impact comes from contrast boost and black decrease.
Before/After:
Lightroom:
15
The lighting is from the sides, which you can tell from the highlights on his face, and lack of catchlights in his eyes. The light brushing across the face from the sides creates shadows in all the pores and accentuates them (as opposed to front-on lighting, used in fashion shots, that fills the pores with light, removes shadows and hides them).
Another ...
15
This is motion blur caused by 'panning'. Ideally, you would use a tripod or monopod and track the car (panning) as it's moving with a relatively slow shutter speed. The background will blur as you move the camera, but the car will stay in focus as it's relative position with the camera hasn't changed.
The slower your shutter speed the harder it will be to ...
14
Shoot with a small aperture, f22 or like. It is called diffraction.
There is a detailed answer Here
And here are some sample photos taken with Sony Alpha A35 and an old Carl Zeiss Sonnar 135mm f/3.5 lens. I choose this lens to experiment because it has six blades and has a nice octagonal aperture at f/22. And also being a lens from cold war era, it is much ...
14
Light Trails
This style of photography is often referred to as light trails.
Photoshop is not necessarily needed. Effects like this can be achieved on a single photograph without multiple exposures.
1. You need darkness for this style. Even though the photo may end up looking light, absolute darkness is needed do this sort of photography. Usually this ...
14
All conventional photographs are 2D representations of 3D scenes. Our brain creates the illusion of depth based on cues from the image. This process is easily manipulated, see forced perspective or a famous example the Ames room.
Some images contain a particular blend of contrast, vivid colours, lighting direction, DOF and sharpness at the plane of focus ...
14
Apart from using an ND filter, you might be able to achieve the desired effect by taking multiple photos and then blending them in post processing. Either an automatic blend with "ghost removal" might work, or layering the images and manually masking/unmasking selectively (in effect "painting out" the people).
All of this pretty much requires a tripod for ...
14
The easiest way is to take a Live Photo, then while viewing it in the Photos app, swipe up to access effects and choose Long Exposure. This will blend the frames of Live Photo together into a single image.
I'm not sure how necessary a tripod is for this; since you're expected to hold your phone while shooting, I'd imagine the stabilization+blending software ...
13
I used Photoshop with Topaz Labs Denoise and Adjust.
13
Looking at the shoot I noticed this scene where the photographer is holding a filter at a diagonal angle as if he was trying to catch some light.
Does this technique have a name? And what kind of effect can I hope to achieve with it?
He is purposefully reflecting light from an off-camera light source onto the lens front element to create "lens flare" ...
13
I'm not seeing this as particularly pastel. What I do see is a very common and popular look we get asked about a lot, often does described as a "old film effect". (See also this and this.)
The black point this slightly raised. The deepest blacks are shown as medium/dark gray.
A color cast is applied. In this case, yellowish.
And that's really all there ...
13
One word, Instagram. It's become a social fad. It does have roots in Polaroid photography which tried to capture casual moments instantly, on low-fi instantly developing film. This look carried forward in to the filters of Instagram due to it being a legit cultural reference to Polaroids.
From there, the vintage feel of it took on a life of it's own ...
13
In my career as a VFX supervisor, I've helped supervise several miniature shoots. Shooting miniatures in substitution of a full size scene has been a common technique for almost as long as films have been produced.
There are several important steps to make the photograph convincing:
Use a small aperture
Consider a 1:10 scale model, and put your camera in ...
13
In addition to the factors mentioned by AJ Henderson, I think another important aspect here is previsualization. A highly skilled photographer already has a very good idea of what she/he wants the final picture to look like before actually taking it. In such a case the photographer might then work "backwards" from the desired output (be it via the digital ...
13
I was always wondering if theres anyway to get bokeh that looks something like this (vertically distorted bokeh).
This vertically-oval bokeh is the result of an anamorphic lens, which "squeezes" an image horizontally to fit a laterally-wide field of view into a relatively narrower film or sensor format. The image must be "unsqueezed" in post-processing or ...
12
There is one fundamental difference between your shot an the sample shot you linked that no one seems to be addressing: The sample has highly reflective windows on all the buildings, each of which are reflecting each other. There are reflections.
Your photo is of an isolated building that either does not appear to have very reflective windows, or is simply ...
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