In another film in this series on composition elements Eberhard Schuy explains the use of foreground and its function in landscape photography.

We are presented with a very pleasant landscape view. This is a view that any photographer may encounter and decide here's an opportunity to make a landscape photo. We see how simply taking a photo as a souvenir, may be sufficient for the picture-taker, but doesn't work without the context of the picture taker. Essentially, without a compostional element the picture will fall flat. Such pictures do little to document the surroundings and well are.... boring.

Eberhard shows us how incorporating a foregound element will give the viewer a reference point. A point that will guide the viewer into the picture. Suddenly, with this simple contrast of a foregound element the viewer is drawn into the picture and the landscape has a relevance that speaks to the viewer. There is also a little hocus-pocus.. see if you catch it before the film ends!

In this film, FotoTV founder Marc Ludwig visits the Museum for Industrialization in Wuppertal to test the GigaPan robotic device, a tripod-mounted, motorized camera robot that automates the process of creating massive, gigapixel-size panoramas. Beginning with complete theoretical aspects, we learn from Ludwig that the GigaPan is really quite easy and uncomplicated to handle.

Almost any compact digital camera will fit onto the adjustable mounting plate. Moving on to practical examples, and after a short calibration of the manual settings on the digital camera, Ludwig sets up a scene to photograph while discussing the importance of specific settings crucial to shooting panoramas with the GigaPan. The device works by taking many zoomed-in shots of a chosen scene, with each one at a slightly different angle.

These photographs are then stitched together seamlessly by GigaPan’s software, on the computer. In conclusion, GigaPan produces astonishing detail, is amazingly simple to operate, and an overall well-built device that creates photos that are artistically good as well as technically interesting.

Greg Gorman is a famous American photographer who is mostly known for his photographs of celebrities and nudes.

Greg Gorman kindly agreed to talk about his life and work with FotoTV. What he said can be seen in this five-parted video series.

In this second of five videos, he will talk about how he works and what his work is like. He talks about some photo shootings and his projects.

If you like have a look at the other parts, too, to learn everything about Greg Gorman’s early years, some anecdotes about celebrities he photographed and in the last video a tour around his exhibition.

In this FotoTV. film photographer Dirk Wächter of D-Forum community is here for a third installment to create another exciting special effects photography tutorial dealing with specifically backgrounds.

Today Wächter discusses how to set-up backgrounds using electronic flashlight. In two previous segments we learned how to create colorful background effectively and how to make backgrounds out of focus using movement. This time Wächter wants to top his previous installments by showing viewers how to make the backgrounds out of focus using a lot of light and how to prepare for such situations and how to make great business portraits.

This tutorial is good for photographers who have to travel to a client to make business portraits or for photographers are unsure of what awaits them at the location. Wächter methodically goes through all the tech specs he uses to show the users how to get a great useable shot in any kind of condition and any kind of background.