[aabram]

How To Get That Perfect Frame, or, also known as "look Ma, no hands!"

Photography is all about timing. Well, it is about bucketloads of other things too, but there just are things you can't do without perfect timing. If you want to capture something like this or this, you have to press the trigger at that perfect moment.

But not only birds or sports demand good timing, there are other things too, which are impossible without it. Surely many of you would like to reproduce something like this, but once you try, you'll quickly find out that it's not as easy as it looks. Not at all. Yet there's a techinque which will allow us, mere photography mortals, to achieve similar looking results in no time.

Suppose you're tossing an orange up and down in front of you and just for kicks want to freeze that exact moment the fruit passes your face. You want to capture something like this:



You set up a tripod, prefocus your camera and give it a try. You quickly find out that it is not easy to ensure that a flying object will be in the right place in that exact moment when camera timer runs out.

So, after tens and tens of tries your best picture will still look like this:



And most of your pictures will probably end up without the main subject at all:



You're frustrated and about to give up. You think that you'll better resort to Photoshop trickery to place the orange where you want it to be. Don't. There's still hope. Using following simple technique you'll be done in 5 minutes tops.

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First you need a suitable fruit and a helper tool. You may pick what you'll like but in this tutorial I'll use well known kitchen utensil:



Stick it in the chosen fruit, picking strategically the position so that the fruit wouldn't fall off of it:



And you're ready to shoot:



That wasn't all that hard, now was it? ;-)
Feel free to experiment.

Hahaha!! Man this was really funny!

[clarenceclose]

Too cool. Thanks for the laugh....and the idea

[roy]

wow clarence!! it's definately magic for sure.

edit: i had the pic of my avatar set up for around 20 minutes before it happened but it would be a completely different shot in 1/1000s of a second either way.. it was the last of 3 shots.

[Rolly]

Don't you just hate it when professional practices get into the hands of mere amateurs.

[Alvin]

LOL - Good trick! I'll remember that! Thanks!