Skip to main content

Need extra photo effects? Use prisms to add creative flare to your images

The Best Cheap Prisms for Creative Photography - Long Prism

In photography, there are certainly many niches and schools on thought on how to capture a given scene. You can have a more documentary approach, where you look to capture things more or less as they are. But you can also have a more artistic and creative approach, looking to use the scene in front of you, molding it with light and other tools to fit your creative vision.

One such tool that has gained popularity over the last several years has been prisms. Their use has become popular among wedding and portrait photographers for their ability to add some creative flare to their images without adding a ton of bulk to their kit. Just throw the prism in your bag and you are good to go. Photographer Mathieu Stern has created a couple of short videos featuring prisms.

These videos are quick views but offer a great demonstration of some of the effects that one can create when utilizing a prism. It is not at all complex or difficult either, it is literally just holding the piece of glass in front of your lens and moving it around until you get the desired effect in your image. This is made easier by shooting with live view or through an electronic viewfinder on a mirrorless camera like the Fujifilm X-T2 or Canon EOS-M5.

Prisms are fairly cheap too, so who not run out and pick one up? There is no doubt after a little bit of playing, you may find yourself frustrated with your results, but just keep with it, keep moving the prism around your lens and sooner rather than later, you will start to see how to get the results you are looking for and all that frustration will fade away.

Editors' Recommendations

Anthony Thurston
Anthony is an internationally published photographer based in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Specializing primarily in…
GoPro’s latest action camera is $50 off for Black Friday
The GoPro Hero 12 action camera recording water on a beach.

GoPro is the best action camera brand for adrenaline junkies and outdoor lovers, so there's always high demand for GoPro Black Friday deals. The latest release, the GoPro Hero 12 Black, was just rolled out in September, but surprisingly, its price has already been slashed for the shopping holiday with a $50 discount from Best Buy, so it will be yours for $350 instead of $400. We're not sure how long this offer will remain online though, so if you want to get the action camera for cheaper than usual, you should proceed with the purchase immediately.

Why you should buy the GoPro Hero 12 Black
The GoPro Hero 12 Black continues the brand's tradition of stepping up the capabilities of its action cameras with every succeeding generation. It's capable of recording 16:9 videos in 5K resolution at up to 30 frames per second, and 4K resolution at up to 60 frames per second, and it adds High Dynamic Range, allowing you to capture all of your most memorable adventures with extreme detail. The action camera features HyperSmooth 6.0 stabilization that does magic on shaky footage, and up to 8x slow motion for moments that the human eye will never see on its own.

Read more
This Black Friday camera deal might just get me to switch to Sony
Sony A7 III in hand.

Hear me out — while I've been plenty happy shooting Canon the past few years and would be more than happy with my Black Friday pick on that system — you can't help but look at what Sony has to offer on the full frame front and be at least a little bit tempted. And I'm not even talking about newfangled global sensors on that ridiculously awesome A9 iii.

I'm mostly thinking about the much larger world of lenses, particularly because, unlike Canon, Sony has embraced third-party lens manufacturers these past few years, whereas Canon ... has not. (To put it mildly.)

Read more
This 128GB SD card Black Friday deal is perfect for photographers
version 1647869006 2 insert sd card hand

If there's one thing a photographer can't have too many of, it's SD cards. For one, they tend to go missing every now and then. It happens to us all. Another reason is that an SD card will eventually fail. It's nobody's fault — that's just something that happens with this kind of removable storage.

So better to plan ahead and have a few extras on hand. And that's what makes this 128GB card from ProGrade the perfect Black Friday deal.

Read more