I’m good at messing up stuff.  I’ll admit it.  Take for instance the photo above.  It is the final shot I took of many while in the Kazumura Cave on the Big Island of Hawaii.  And it still needs help.  In a recent post here on DPS entitled 14 Tips For Cave Photography, I explained some of the things I learned from a first time attempt at underground photography.  In this post I’d like to humbly share my mistakes while researching the topic in hopes that it’ll speed up your learning process.  My basic idea was to use the flash off camera and fire it multiple times using the pilot button.  In this sense I hoped to gain a more even lighting.  Let’s take a look at some of the shots that lead up to the final shot. (All photos are 30 second exposures)

A few months back we published a collection of Forced Perspective images which was very popular with readers.

Forced perspective is defined as ‘a technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is.’ (Wikipedia)

This is far from a recently popular thing for photographers to do. Here’s a great example from 1918 which was submitted by one of our readers – Graham Parkhurst – that illustrates it from 90+ years ago.

The picture is of 18,000 men preparing for war in a training camp at Camp Dodge, in Iowa.

A few facts about the image:

• Length from base to Shoulder: 150 feet
• Right Arm: 340 feet
• Length of Torch and flame: 1000 feet
• Total Length: 1490 Feet
• Number of men in body and head of figure: 2,000
• Number of men in right arm:

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Weekly Assignment

Ghosts, goblins and things that go bump in the night were a common theme in our Scary or Spooky assignment. There were definitely some scary and spooky entries this week but we had a very clear winner with this week’s votes. The winner this week was Murtasma’s Skeletor shot. This elaborate costume was both scary and well done. Our first runner up was a_brewley’s “Thing under the bed”. She took this shot while her daughter was asleep! Thank goodness she didn’t wake up. One thing we learned from this shot was that lots of us mods were scared of finding things under the bed as kids. It was gritty and scary and all kinds of film noir and probably a few of us found …

The white-room studio look has become really popular lately, especially for children. I love it for so many reasons:

• Kids are unpredictable, especially when you don’t know them. Removing the element of not only trying to catch the right moment, but also crossing your fingers hoping that the ‘moment’ happens in the right position within the frame of ideal natural light (while chasing them around) gives me more energy to actually focus on the child.
• It is a more affordable option for clients who can’t afford to hire you for a location shoot. I spend about 30 mins with kids in my studio.
• The lighting set-up is easy and optimal for whatever the kids decide to throw at you (sometimes literally!)

There are, however, a few drawbacks

• If you’re not a pretty decent photographer, it can be hard to produce the type of images you see in your head and without the element of a location/surrounding (sunny day in the park?) the only emotion you will convey through this style of photography is that which comes directly from the kids and you have to be pretty darn good to get kids who don’t know you who feel a bit strange in a white room filled with big flashing lights to open up and show you emotion. And then when they do, you have to be ready to catch it in a split-second.
• The right equipment can be really expensive. There are some really cool and clever ways of doing high key studio without any lights at all, but they’re not at all ideal for children as they involve staying in the same place within the set-up and kids never want to sit in the same place.
• You need quite a large space for this type of set-up

Every now and again I have to stop and pinch myself as I think about where this site has come from since we began in April 2006.

I usually do it on milestone days when we hit some new mark in terms of traffic or subscriber numbers. Today is one of those days – we just hit 70,000 forum members!

Congratulations and welcome to Tinkybell for being number 70,000 and a huge huge thank you to everyone who has joined and who contributes in our forum area. We’re seen 160-200 new threads being started over in the forum each day, 1500-2000 new posts being written and around 150 new members joining every day.

What’s more satisfying than the numbers though is the people who are a part of the community. There are

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