If you’re looking to add a little depth and complexity to your photos, whether you’re shooting with a smartphone or a point-and-shoot, the answer may already be on your face. Just take off your sunglasses, polish the lenses a bit and hold them up in front of your camera before shooting. You might like what you see.
This tip comes to us from award winning photographer (and author of the photography education blog Lightism) Simon Ellingsworth, who admits that the image above is a cheating a bit (since it’s been processed to exaggerate the effect), but if you hit the link below, you can see two great examples of the technique in action: the same photo taken with and without sunglasses in play.
The beauty of this tip is that it actually uses some pretty basic photography principles to give you a softer, more diffuse, and more dramatic final image using a filter that you probably already have (and may even have on you while you’re taking pictures). Plus, it works just as well with your point and shoot camera as it does with a smartphone shot. Give it a try the next time you’re snapping an outdoor picture and see if you like the results.
Free & Simple Way to Add Drama and Depth [Lightism]
Comments
4 responses to “Add Drama And Depth To Photos With A Pair Of Sunglasses”
Instagram exists.
…. So its an ironically more expensive than the real thing version of a polarizing filter that forces you to use a longer exposure time? Wow what an innovation..
photography more and more is just PhotoShop skills, one day it will no longer be regarded as an art form, instead seeing classes perhaps like ‘an algorithmic approach to beauty’.
Here’s another tip.
Level horizons.
It also seems that “award winning” in his case means being short-listed in a couple of competitions, not actually winning them. Indeed his greatest accomplishment is telling everybody that he’s an award winning photographer and everybody buying it.
Yep, did this a little while ago when phone cameras were not so great, not that much now though.
I had a pair of slightly red tinted sunnies which really brought out the blues, like the sky, and greens in the trees.