The next time you travel or are out and about with a camera, consider
starting a trick photography project. It's not only a great way to
impress and confuse your friends in equal measure, but it also helps you
to hone your photography skills and have fun at the same time. The more
stunning examples are usually digitally manipulated in photoshop, but
even if you're not a tech whiz there are a wide variety of trick
photography techniques that are at your disposal.
What you can do is to choose one or a combination of the trick
photography techniques explained below and focus on that. Keep taking
photos based on that technique until you have some really great examples
before moving on to the next one. The idea is to try new things and be
creative to capture images that nobody has seen before.
Forced perspective
In our daily lives we use perspective to visually perceive the
distances of objects and ourselves. Distorting the perspective produces
the illusion of abnormally large or small objects in comparison to the
rest of the objects in the photograph. This effect is possible because a
camera produces an image in two dimension as opposed to our eyes that
work in three dimensions. When we're unable to tell if the objects are
actually further or nearer to the camera and assume it is actually of a
similar distance, then objects appear smaller if they are further away
while closer objects appear bigger. This is probably the simplest trick
photography to pull off, as you only need to move your camera and the
subject matter around until you get what you want.
Angles
Another easy trick is to turn the camera on its side. With some
creative poses, you can create mind-boggling images simply by turning
your camera around. The trick to this technique is to shoot something
that when turned to the side has a completely different meaning. For
example, if you lie on the floor horizontally and take a picture with
the camera rotated ninety degrees, it would look as if you're climbing
up a sheer wall vertically.
Levitation
This is also a simple but very creative trick that will leave your
viewers scratching their heads. You don't need photoshop to create
pictures of people hovering a few inches off the ground. What you need
is an able and willing model who is happy to keep jumping around on your
command. You basically set a high shutter speed on your camera to
remove any blurring that will destroy the illusion, ask your model to
jump and then snap away. The more outrageous the mid-air pose, the more
stunning it is.
Long exposures
Using the opposite of a high shutter camera speed are the long
exposure trick photography techniques. Most cameras especially the DSLRs
allow you set and change the shutter speed manually to set it slower.
This technique is best used with a tripod as you'll want to reduce
camera shake as much as possible for a sharp image. This technique works
best when you have stationary subjects and moving subjects. Moving
objects or a light source will create a blur or trailing lights in the
image, so some people have used this technique to create "light
paintings" by waving a bright light source around a stationary object.
Shadows
Good photographers pay a lot of attention to shadows, so being
mindful of where and what you or other people's shadow are doing is a
good thing. You never know if you catch your shadow in an interesting
pose in contrast to a subject matter.
Picture masks
This is an interesting technique to play around, often with hilarious
results. The idea is to hold up a picture to cover part of your face
where the edges are perfectly aligned to the real world from the point
of view of the camera. You can then pretend to be whoever's face that is
now grafted onto yours. The hardest part of this trick is to find a
magazine or any pictures that is the right size and matches your face
and surroundings.
Conclusion
These are just some of the simpler trick photography techniques that
you can immediately use and take on as part of your photography
challenge. They're fun to do and can produce some spectacular results
with a bit of imagination and patience.
