All posts filed under: Community

Shooting HDR for Landscape

By Rachel Ross Introduction Very quickly it’s important to establish what HDR merging is and why it’s so useful for landscape photography – because it is. If you’ve ever picked up a camera you’ll know that what the camera captures often doesn’t quite match what you see with your eyes, especially in situations of high contrast. Your eyes and brain work in tandem to provide an image that is balanced through the entire tonal range, but cameras aren’t quite there yet. Cameras still struggle to capture the full dynamic range spectrum of darks, shadows, mid-tones and highlights in a single frame, as usually a camera will expose the shadow areas correctly or the highlights or takes some average of the two that doesn’t accurately expose any of it. HDR merging is the solution, as it captures the full range of tones in multiple frames of the same scene (this is ‘bracketing’), and blends them together to show the full range of light in a single image. So, HDR is really perfect when you want to …

Polina Washington – Painting the world as she sees it

Based in rainy, gray St. Petersburg, cinematic storyteller Polina Washington brings a much more colorful world to life in her photography. Continually exploring who she is as a creative, Polina’s style has jumped all over the spectrum during the last 15 years, from black and white street photography to multiple exposure on film to self-portraits and nature. “Photography is always connected with who you are in the moment because I think you’re never the same person as you were yesterday. The more you explore, the more opportunities you get for inspiration and to create something new. It’s not about being locked in a box of one style – it should be about trying to explore everything around you. For now, I’m mostly interested in creating cinematic stories,” she says. With darker settings as her backdrop, Polina uses color and light as her key tools to show the world as she sees it – a brighter, dreamier reality. For many years, light and color were the essentials missing from Polina’s life and art: “I never knew …

Spotlight On: Eric Ronald

The Art of Wedding Photography The Perfect Day Often, weddings take on a life of their own. The so-called perfect day comes with its expectations and not to mention pressures from family, friends, and even oneself. Capturing that range of emotions is no easy feat. Even more challenging is capturing the essence of the couple – the newlyweds who are about to embark on a new life together.  This is what motivates Eric Ronald, a wedding photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. A recent addition to the brand ambassador program, the Capture One team, spoke with Ronald about his journey to become a professional wedding photographer. “I was always drawn to the arts,” said Ronald. “After high school, I went to film school. So that’s where I received more of a foundation, both technically and creatively, in how I can start working on how to become a cinematographer.” From there, Ronald focused on making films, music videos, but upon graduation, he realized that the reality of being a professional cinematographer was quite different than he imagined. …

Spotlight On: Jean Cazals

The Art of Food Photography Foodie Craze In the last decade, food photography has accrued a cult-like following, thanks in part to digital platforms such as Instagram. The meals once recounted on personal blogs (think Nora Ephron’s film, Julia and Julie) have now been replaced with imagery of one’s breakfast, frothy cappuccinos in southern Italy, or the perfect slice of pizza in some dilapidated Brooklyn borough. You get the picture. No stranger to this is Jean Cazals, a French food and lifestyle photographer based in London. For the past 35 years, Cazals has photographed food after 10 years of shooting portraiture, witnessing all its trends and guises, or what he refers to as the “fashion of food.” “I originally wanted to be a heart surgeon,” said Cazals from his Notting Hill home base of London, “But I did not have the grades, and my parents urged me to explore something else, which then led me to photography.” The visceral element of Cazals’ ambitions to be a doctor permeates much of his work. His unconventional approach …