I’ve been working on doing some digital landscape paintings recently and thought I’d share this technique that uses 3D software (in this case Blender) to create the basis of the landscape. This doesn’t have to be complicated and can in fact generate a reasonable starting landscape in a matter of minutes once you’ve become familiar with it.
For this, I’ll be using Blender 2.93 but the technique is pretty much the same in any version of Blender. If you’re not up to date though it’s worth downloading the latest Blender to make the most of its current features.
Let’s fire…
At one point in history, the human race looked to the stars and declared that space was the final frontier. It’s been some time since then and we can say we have, as a race, made some inroads into that space. (pardon the pun) But, can we yet make the claim that we’ve conquered it?
As technology has advanced there is no doubt so has our understanding and even exploration of space. We’ve put robots on other planets that are still roaming around. We’ve built space stations which orbit the planet and is occupied. …
No doubt you’ve seen on social networks people asking for constructive criticism (CC) on images they post. Perhaps you’ve asked yourself. As with everything these days it seems that asking for CC is something of a double edged sword… especially in online communities with people of a wide variety of skill levels. Everyone has their bit to say and ultimately it’s up to the original poster to determine what’s constructive and what’s not.
Sadly, in every group it seems there must be some that can’t help but forget the constructive part of term. These people tend to just criticism without…
Let’s do a gimmicky little bit of JavaScript that will censor a website if the focus is lost. For this what we will make happen is to cover the screen in black if it loses focus. Losing focus could happen when another app is opened, causing the web browser to be in the background or simply when switching to another browser tab.
For this example we are going to cover the page from view, but you could use this also to be able to pause processing data or performing tasks while the user is not active on that page. …
Windows 11 has been officially announced by Microsoft despite having been told in the past that Windows 10 would be the last. It was leaked early and many screenshots and much speculation was made but with the official announcement what we saw was more polished and more detailed than the leak showed.
There is some nice improvements to be had such as better window tiling (although they aren’t the first like they claim). It also sports better handling of windows on disconnected monitors as well as a fancy new UI.
But at what cost. The system requirements state that the…
There is about 27 weeks left of 2021 so here is a list of suggestions for photo topics you can tackle each week to keep you shooting and maybe take you out of your photography comfort zone.
1. Self portrait
Self portraits can be tricky to get right if you’re using a camera. Focusing is half the challenge but also lighting and framing the shot. A remote trigger can help to get focus and take the shot as well. Setting the self timer and using that can also help.
2. Reflection
Capture an image that clearly reads as a reflection. This could be something like…
If you’re into photography and part of photography communities on social media then no doubt you’ve come across the term “back button focus". Maybe though you’re still not sure what it is. Basically it lets you separate the task of focusing and taking the photo while providing some other benefits at the same time. Let’s look at the benefits of back button focus (BBF) and why it’s something you should learn to use.
What is back button focus?
Most cameras by default will focus when the shutter button is half pressed. …
Have you ever tried taking a close up photo of a beautiful flower using a telephoto lens and realized after focusing that most of the flower is still blurry due to depth of field?
It’s a challenge because you often need a wide open aperture in order to let enough light in to get the shot without too much noise but doing so also means a very shallow depth of field when what you really want is a large depth of field.
This doesn’t only apply to close up photos of flowers and such either. This technique can also be…
Ever wished you could copy multiple things to the clipboard and then choose which one to paste? I have but find myself pasting one then copying the other and pasting it.
Well today we have a Windows 10 tip that allows you to select from items in your clipboard to paste. This means you can copy a number of things and choose which one to paste where. One thing to keep in mind is that this seems to only work with text and not for files and other such things.
Open your settings app.
Click on the System settings category.
Darktable is an excellent free and open source software tool for processing RAW photos. It can be used to edit non-raw photos as well but it is designed as a RAW photo processor and so some functionality may be disabled if editing non-raw images.
Here I will look at the basic steps I take when processing a RAW file using Darktable.
Here is the RAW image as it appears in darktable without any modifications made. As you can see it’s a little dull as is usually the case with raw images.
If you’ve ever taken a shot in RAW, then…
Tim Wells
Self taught software developer and photographer.
