The Coolest Photography Links Of The Week

The world of photography has been very active this week with people from everywhere posting photographs and articles that cover a wide variety of interests and styles.  This weeks list of links comes to us from Toad Hollow Photography who has been actively searching all week for tutorials, special features, and great photography to share here.  We really hope you enjoy going through this list of great content as much as the Toad did in bringing it to you.

Tutorials

How To Boost Your Golden Hour Images In Lightroom – capturing the shot in camera is often only the first step to creating a stunning golden hour shot, as shown in this terrific tutorial posted right here on Light Stalking. Lightroom is an excellent tool for making various adjustments to take the picture from good to awesome, and this easy to follow set of steps is a great starting point.

Learn the Best Ways to Make Selections in Photoshop – this has to be one of the most in-depth tutorials I have seen for how to make the most out of selections in Photoshop. Creating a good selection is a cornerstone skill to master when it comes to taking full control of your post-processing, and this tutorial covers 10 different methods, all discussed using real photographs as the tutorial unfolds.

5 thoughts and tips to consider with professional product photography – learning from those who do things on a professional basis can be a terrific shortcut to helping you achieve the results you are going for. This article covers 5 very useful tips and insights into product photography that can help capture great evocative product shots in a short amount of time.

5 Simple Tips for Shooting Better Interior Photography – shooting interiors can be daunting for many photographers who haven’t done it before, and here we find a short tutorial that covers 5 tips that are very useful in this regard. These tips are presented as guidelines as some of these may not provide the look you are going for, but they provide a great starting point.

How to build a cheap collapsible DIY light box – a light box is an indispensable tool for managing nice and even shadow-free lighting for shooting things like products. This tutorial will take you through a series of very easy steps to create your own light box that comes apart at the end of a session for easy storage and transport.

How a photographer created fantastic light painting with fire – check out this amazing feature that shares a set of photos captured with fire elements as a key factor. The results are stunning, delivering ethereal and almost magical themed shots that really use the mood and feel to their full extent. A video is included that shares some great tips and tricks as to how to go about this type of photography for those interested.

Special Features

This New York City ‘Layer-Lapse' Is Jaw-Droppingly Cool – sometimes you find something online that is so far out of the ordinary that it really leaves you feeling somewhat astonished. This time-lapse video presentation is definitely one of these things, combining incredibly complex masking techniques with computerized algorithms to blend day and night using cityscape pictures of the dramatic city of New York as the subject. Prepare to be absolutely amazed by this.

Photographer documents abandoned places in Fukushima in this devastating photo series – for many of us who appreciate and avidly follow this type of photographic documentation, the visual exploration of abandoned sites such as Fukushima and Chernobyl are important bodies of work that freeze a moment in time forever. In many of these places, time is having a profound effect on what remains, and in a matter of years much of these places will disappear forever. This poignant series of images was captured by an urbex photographer who gained access to the exclusion zone to capture and document what remains.

Taking Professional Portraits with a Mobile Phone – this is a behind-the-scenes peek at how a modern cell phone camera can capture and create stunning portraits with just a little creative thinking and an understanding of how the camera works its best. A series of shots is shared here, all done as black-and-whites, to really show off the power of the camera that many of us carry in our pockets every day.

The Mann Cave – an abandoned high school in Gary, Indiana becomes the focus of an urbex exploration in this series of haunting and profound photographs. Changing times and fortunes in the region saw great growth at one point that eventually led to an economic downturn, resulting in the eventual closure of this school in 2004.

Slow-Motion: Amtrak Train vs. Snow – it’s a well known fact that in almost any case where it’s train versus anything, the train usually wins. This slow-motion video reveals what happens when a fast moving train hits a huge pile of snow. Spoiler alert: the snow loses.

Great Photography

Arnarstapi – muted tones and soft contrasts are the star attraction of this cinematic feeling shot from Daniel Casson that reveals a white wood building perched on rugged cliffs. The approach that Daniel used in post-production with this piece does a terrific job of accenting the moody feel of the scene itself, making for a great image.

Amalfi from the Gulf – Amalfi, Italy – Len Saltiel takes a classic look at a town perched on the shores in Italy, revealing a glimpse of this place that is quite magical in nature. Len processes the shot using a subtle painterly approach, creating a picture that takes on a bit of a style from one of the early master painters with extraordinary detail.

Purification – a truly ethereal feel is found in this great shot from Sebastian Luczywo that takes advantage of back-lighting to create a strong silhouette of a woman standing by a still body of water. The golden tones of the natural light lend themselves perfectly to the overall feel of this highly mesmerizing piece.

Enchanted – Michael Criswell shares a terrific black-and-white shot that showcases the drama found from the perspective high atop Enchanted Rock in Texas. A cloud cover adds great textures to the sky which enhances the drama found in the endless landscape revealed below the horizon line.

~ Amsterdam ~ – taken in the heart of the night, this shot overlooks one of the famous canals of Amsterdam to take in the old architecture of this wonderful city. Remo Scarfò’s shot reveals terrific textures and details in the old stone structures, finished off with a dash of neon blue light created by a fixture on a dock.

Grizzly Bear Family – once again my deep love and admiration of the great grizzly bear finds expression in this wonderful photograph from Ron Niebrugge taken in their natural habitat in Alaska. In this shot we find a mom bear and her two cubs, with one of the cubs looking up at her with a rather quizzical look on it’s face.

The Golden Tunnel – Daniel F. creates a wonderful picture here that takes on a painterly effect, using a row of trees that stand alongside a ribbon of roadway as a leading line into the picture. There’s a great vanishing point featured here as well as the road snakes its way through the grove and out into the great unknown.

Mustang GT – Bob Lussier grabs a terrific automotive themed shot of his friends latest acquisition, a Mustang GT sports car. Bob’s composition features the steering wheel in the interior with the rest of the frame falling beautifully out of focus.

Lago Porma – an amazing sunset casts vibrant colors across the sky and the scene in this great photograph by Anna Ovatta. A small wooden boat sits in the foreground as an anchor as rugged mountains loom in the distance, finished off perfectly by the silky waters with a muted reflection from the long exposure used to capture this shot.

The Blue Swallow Motel – Route 66 is a famous ribbon of highway that has been the source of movies and music lore over the years, creating great vignettes that immediately immerse the viewer in a time 50 years ago when highways were a source of adventure for many families as cars became easier to acquire. Jim Nix captured this terrific shot during the blue hour, freezing a moment of Americana that could just as easily been from the 1950’s as it is today.

The way to Hades – this landscape takes on an abstract quality to it, creating an almost otherworldly feel with the textures of the dry land and the mists in the background that add an eerie element to the composition. The colors expressed in this shot lend themselves perfectly to the scene, perfectly captured and processed by wim denijs.

Grand Finale – the incredible scenes of Venice come to life in this photograph by Simon W Xu that features a winding canal surrounded by the old buildings of this romantic city. A set of gondoliers make their way through the canal, adding to the unique feel that can only be found in this ancient city.

A good omen – Mike Olbinski gets a distinct rush from chasing storms and trying to photograph the intense cloud formations and lightning strikes that come with them. This shot features a very dramatic lightning strike with tendrils reaching down towards a baseball stadium below that serves as an awesome anchor point in the shot.

The Opera Singer – epic abstract beauty comes to full life in this amazing photograph from Peter Coskun Nature Photography taken deep inside the slot canyons of Arizona. The singularity of the color palette found here uses the natural light that finds its way underground to create textures and lines that can only be found in nature.

Smoke from Pasayten Fire covers Diablo Lake Overlook – a thick haze of smoke lingers over the beautiful landscape in this dramatic shot by ツ Jesse Sacdalan ????. These fires dominated the headlines of our summer here in British Columbia, covering a huge swath of land in the Pacific Northwest over the entire season.

Blue Jay – Wayne Beauregard’s photograph features a delightful portrait of a blue jay perched on a branch in natural light. Wayne also shares some anecdotal information on this species, adding a great element of interest to the image itself.

Goodbye – this shot features several strong compositional features, with dramatic accent found in the black-and-white processing used to finish the picture by Lars van de Goor. A pathway leads the eye into the frame where a person on a bicycle disappears in the distance, highlighting the terrific vanishing point found here.

Hot Seat – Stone Mill, Lawrence, Massachusetts – Len Saltiel takes us inside an unused floor in an old stone mill building that was built in the mid 1800’s where a chair was used as a prop, and it was lit using red gels to add mood. Behind the chair we find visual artifacts through the old windows that look out at another of the old buildings in the complex.