125
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 ...
55
There are two ways to go about accomplishing this - in camera and in post.
Both techniques will rely on shooting a rim-lit subject.
Put a flash behind the subject. In my image, I actually had the flash cranked up WAY too much, so I'm getting additional light acting as fill (bouncing off the couch and back toward the front of the subject):
Set-up below ...
41
Directly with regards to the lighting:
Much of her recent work has strong light sources from behind the main subject(s). About 45° (either to the side or a combination of to the side and above) from directly behind the subject seems to be the most common angle in her examples on instagram. She's not afraid to let the highlights go to get the shot she wants.
...
20
Background bokeh straight out of camera
The above picture isn't necessarily a composite. You can achieve a similar effect straight out of camera.
Here's a picture I took almost 10 years ago:
And here's the setup:
SB600+gridspot, back camera right, 1/16, 85mm
SB25+Plusgreen gel, camera left, 1/64, 24mm.
One chair as a big gobo to prevent light from ...
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, ...
15
You don't actually need a tilt-shift lens to do this. This particular image was taken with a standard lens (50mm f1.2 according to the filename of the image on Ryan's website) rather than with a tilt-shift.
The extreme bokeh effect here was achieved by using a freelensing technique, where the lens is detached from the camera body and held at a tilted angle ...
14
Low contrast (just look at the areas of deep shadow-- grey instead of black), possible desaturation, plus possibly a slight touch of simulated cross-processing, I'd say. Note also that in the region of the head, the contrast is stronger, indicating that a mask was applied at some point. This tutorial on a washed-out look may be interesting to you-- I ...
14
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 ...
14
The key is to find areas of the image with a lot of parallax, such as a foreground building and a background tree. Try to pick a point as close to one edge of frame as possible. Now walk left/right (green) to find the correct point of intersection from the old photograph.
Now that you've done that, you've established a straight line to move along (red).
...
14
The setup is relatively simple but to do this as one shot you will need space. An awful lot of space. Doing this indoors in a regular sized house is not going to work, the walls/ceiling are going to reflect light back filling in the shadows and you wont get the fading-into-black effect.
The easiest way to shoot this (short of renting a studio) would be to ...
13
I'm the photographer, who made the picture, and I used Photoshop to make the strings invisible holding the lenses.
This is not a composite. The picture was made from 1 shot. The CE logo on the lens confuses people, because it looks like it's upside down, but actually it's reflected from a mirror.
13
I recognize this exact picture - I've seen it before. There are two photography magazines that I read that showed how to do this exact type of family portrait.
This was done in a home with a simple black background. One article uses a softbox slightly off to the side and behind the subject. The other article uses a speedlight with a simple grid straight on (...
12
This technique is called Selective color.
Sometimes, you select a point (in this case, somewhere on the CD-R case), and the region around that point that is close enough to the same color retains its color, while the rest of the picture becomes black and white.
Other times, as you mention, you can select a color and a tolerance, or a range of colors, and ...
12
Look at the shadows under the cars. Now look at the shadow under the model... Oh wait! This looks to be more about how it was lit and exposed when shot than how it was post-processed.
This photo is not really as much about the lens, the camera, or the post-processing. It is more about the off camera lighting illuminating the model and what that allows with ...
12
I think it combines two techniques:
strong backlight (also known as contre-jour)
fill-flash to add light to the details of subjects
It can be created using lighting setups (absolutely artificial lighting), or using natural light as well (like sunset).
11
Have a DOG sniff out blur in the photos.
If you're going to be penalizing for digitally enlarged photos, you might as well penalize for out-of-focus photos too. The blurred edges and details in both cause the same bad experience for viewers, regardless of whether it is caused by a small original or poor focus. What you want to do is detect blur, which is an ...
11
Is there something important to say about the light in the portraits of Charles?
There is. There is no mastering of light here. It's always diffused natural light, either from an overcast sky or very large windows, with very little shadows. No risk taken, just the very basics and lots of color retouch in post. The catchlights in the eyes here and here show ...
10
I'm not quite sure why you're so skeptical; it's well-explained and the explanation seems plausible. To respond to your particular points, having read the page:
The setup with the stool and glass is used for the photos where the snowflakes are on the glass and backlit. They are on the glass, 2.5-3cm away from the lens. The rings on the front of the lens (...
10
Agree with some of the previous answers, but not all of it...
Golden Hour, for sure - highlights under the arm, camera right, & the reflection in his pressure gauge, look to match what we can see of the sky.
Additional lighting camera right; broad white, not too high & not too far off-centre. Look at the catchlights in the eyes & highlight on ...
10
There are two distinct characteristics that most of these images share - colour palette & 'hazy glow'.
Let's tackle them separately.
I'm always tempted to think that any edit was done as easily as possible rather than as complicatedly as possible...
Comparing the first set of 'Ravenclaw' pictures to the 2nd 'cup' image, the only real shared ...
9
Fireworks require a long exposure. In this case, the photographer shifted focus while the camera was capturing the fireworks. For this reason, the shape has points from the time the image was in focus it widens as the image was pulled out of focus.
It is easiest to start with the image in focus and then defocus as time passes, rather than the other way ...
9
I can see two possible ways this shot was done:
Light was injected where the cartridge would go. We can't really see what is back there in the picture. Some LEDs could have been carefully placed inside or almost inside the gun, and the wires run so that they would be obscured in the picture.
A beam splitting mirror was used. The camera was looking thru ...
8
I borrowed your image and one from another question like it, to try it in Image View plus more 3, which I made myself so I know all the underlying algorithms.
I think this is pretty close, albeit the colours may be a bit different (my weakness as I am colour deficient).
What I did was:
Local contrast enhancement. Adobe calls this "clarity". It is similar ...
8
Those images have little colour to start with, a touch of red and the rest are earthy tones. He may have desaturated the colours somewhat.
The lighting is very even. From the catchlights the main light seems almost behind the camera, so there isn't a lot of shadow. However the tones in the images to my eye range from black to almost white, so I wouldn't ...
8
It is very important to understand the difference between a high dynamic range image, and a high dynamic range image that has been tonemapped back down to low dynamic range for display on a standard monitor.
This is a high dynamic range image that has been produced from multiple exposures:
Looks dull and lifeless because you're viewing it on a low dynamic ...
8
It's a fact that using two lenses with one reversed works. Here are a few quick examples that I shot by combining two lenses:
50mm with 50mm reversed:
50mm with 28mm reversed:
105mm with 28mm reversed:
These were quick, dirty, and hand held -- I held the camera with one hand and held the reversed lens against the camera lens, focusing simply by moving ...
8
This not a thing that can happen. Cameras just don't work that way. For that matter, light doesn't work that way.
Specifically, for digital cameras: every "photosite" — each individual pixel-level sensor — is just a counter of photons. It doesn't have any sense of the wavelength of the light received, and correspondingly no perception of color. In order to ...
8
This looks very much like a the photographer duplicated the image as a new layer, used a large radius Gaussian blur, and then set the blending mode to "overlay". It's the same effect I used in this photo:
You get a soft focus effect but with crisp details, and a boost to the saturation. They have also reduced the contrast by bringing the black ...
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