Crystal Ball Photography

 At the beginning of the year, I set myself 30 photography related goals. Currently, I have started 11 of them, and today I am going to talk about goal number 24 which was to begin using props within my photography.

My First prop of 2018 is a Crystal Ball because this is something I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Crystal ball photography is a type of photography that distorts your image, simularly to a fisheye lens except your subject will appear upside down inside the ball, which is the main reason it appeals to me. I also started following the #crystalballphotography on Instagram to find inspiration.

The first time I used it was sometime in mid-February when it snowed overnight, so I went into my garden the next morning and experimented with my Nikon D3200, my iPhone 8+, and my crystal ball.

I decided my sigma 10-20mm (wide angle lens) was the best one to use for this experiment, so I placed my crystal ball on my garden wall making sure I had foliage behind and shot at ISO 100 but kept varying the aperture and shutter speed to achieve a variety of different photos. I decided that the crystal ball in the snow tended to look better in black and white, so I adjusted this in the post-processing in Lightroom. I did this by taking down the contrasts and highlights and upping the shadows and exposure and then converting my image to black and white.

I also used portrait mode on my iPhone 8+ to test a variety of different types of lighting my crystal ball and edited these in photoshop express. My favourite set-up in portrait mode is the stage lighting in black and white as I felt it made the snow stand out.

The Second time with my Crystal Ball I went to Beacon Fell with a friend who held the crystal ball for me while I photographed some sunsets. Anyone who knows me knows that this is a type of shot I thoroughly enjoy taking so I couldn’t wait to try a new approach.

Finally the third time I took my crystal ball out it was also snowing except this time I went to Avenham Park using the landscape as my backdrop.

Here is a gallery of my Crystal Ball photos:

If you enjoyed my article be sure to keep checking out my website and for further reading check out what other bloggers have written about this topic  in the links below:

1. Photography Fun With A Crystal Ball
2. How To Create Glass Ball Landscapes
3. Glass Ball Photography
4. The Travelling Crystal Ball