Get Started Now With Some Trick Photography Projects!

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.

How to Do Trick Photography And Special Effects

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. Become Unique, Creative, And Artistic By Taking Breathtaking Photographs That Blow People's Minds Away! Dozens Of Rare Trick Photography Ideas Are Included In This 295 Page E-book, Along With 9 Hours Of How-to Photography Video Tutorials. Read More

Trick Photography and Special Effects Techniques

If you're ready to take your photography skills to the next level and have fun, read on to discover the different trick photography and special effects techniques that you can instantly use. We'll cover 3 of the more common trick photography and special effects techniques as they require very little extra effort to get started.

Most of these techniques won't require you to buy any special equipment. You can get started with any decent digital camera (preferably a DLSR) and a tripod for night time photography. As for trick photography software, you need at least a good photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop or a free alternative like Gimp. Once you get the hang of it and your skills improve, you can consider investing in higher-end cameras and special effects software. But enough about hardware and software, onwards to the techniques!

Forced perspective photography

If you've seen pictures of the Leaning Tower of Pisa taken by tourists, you'll definitely have come across forced perspective photos. These usually depict people "pushing" the tower with their bare hands. This is probably the most overused trick photography technique for that landmark.

Forced perspective employs optical illusion through clever positioning of the photographer and the subject matter. So to achieve that effect you position yourself nearer to the camera so you look bigger than the tower from the point of view of the camera, and you hold up your hands while the photographer adjust their position to line up your hands against the wall perfectly to create the illusion of you "pushing" the tower.

There are endless variation you can try to create interesting photos, such as making yourself look taller than a building, holding up a person with your bare hands, interact with an impossibly large object, and more.

Long exposure photography

Long exposure trick photography techniques are usually taken at night or under low-light conditions. Basically you set the shutter speed of your camera to a longer duration so you get sharp details of stationary elements in your images while blurring, smearing, or obscuring the moving elements. You need a tripod when attempting long exposure photography to get clear and crisp images.

The most common examples you might have seen are night-time city street photos with those surreal long streaks of light made by passing car headlamps. Other common examples are pictures of the skies during night time where you can see the trails of stars. Or you can also have fun creating light paintings where you can "paint" a picture with a bright light source against a dark scene to create spectacular and vivid images.

Tilt-shift photography

Tilt-shift photography literally refers to the tilting and shifting of the camera lens to achieve selective focus. This technique is more commonly known for creating miniature versions of real life images. Certain part of the image is in very sharp focus, but other regions are gradually blurred. This creates the illusion that the people or cars inside the image look like miniature toys.

You'll need to get special camera lens with tilt and shift capabilities, but you can also fake this effect using software. In fact, this technique has recently become so popular that you can install software apps on your smartphone to automatically produce the fake miniature images you take using your smartphone's camera directly.

Experiment and have fun!

Try to incorporate some of these techniques into your everyday or travel snapshots, and you'll already be miles ahead of many people who take plain and uninteresting photos. Sometimes we take photos as if we're at a crime scene, to document all the important bits to be submitted as "evidence" that we were there. While there is nothing wrong with this kind of clinical approach, it sure doesn't hurt to have a little fun with trick photography and special effects once in a while with your pictures.

Trick Photography And Special Effects E-book

If you're ready to take your photography skills to the next level and have fun, read on to discover the different trick photography and special effects techniques that you can instantly use. We'll cover 3 of the more common trick photography and special effects techniques as they require very little extra effort to get started. Become Unique, Creative, And Artistic By Taking Breathtaking Photographs That Blow People's Minds Away! Dozens Of Rare Trick Photography Ideas Are Included In This 295 Page E-book, Along With 9 Hours Of How-to Photography Video Tutorials. Read More