In Camera Camera Tricks
Photography is my job and sometimes I just gotta have a little fun with my work. Having fun is a necessary component to inspire creativity and the interactive playing with these ideas with other creatives inspires new ideas.
Having watched a youtube video about prisms, I bought a few inexpensive items at the local Hobby Lobby and tried a few refracting in-camera tricks. There were several prism suggestions, I thought I’d just try working on two of them. First I tried a home made prism technique using three mirrors. The mirrors I bought were square, so I didn’t get the depth I needed for the lenses I used (but inexpensive rectangle mirrors were not readily available). Amazingly the square mirrors seemed to work even better with the iphone cameras because the lens on the iphone camera is flush on the camera body and angled for wide shots.
My models were having a field day with the contraption and their iphones and thus I got to be in a few shots, too.
With the benefit of my studio strobes, Angela angled the shot of me with her iphone to present me in a flattering light. This is a great representation of me because I could use an extra hand and if I could I would probably shoot two handed.
For my second trick, I used some little sticky “gems” at $2.99 for a strip of them, I wanted to sample how those would refract light. This one is a little trickier because I needed to trigger a strobe at the right distance and angle from behind me while I have the gems at the correct distance to be out of focus and blurry bubbles enveloping my subject. The light needs only skip across the beads to hit a facet or two on the gems, it seemed to work best if the light were pointed away and out. It was just off to the side and behind me. It would have been better if I used live view to see where the gems looked best in the image, but I pretty much always forget that I even have live view on my camera.
Experiment with how close the beads should be to the lens.
Voila! In Camera Boka!
Pretty fun, huh? Try it yourself. It’s easy, it’s fun and it’s under $10!
