Keeping your image creation fresh and exciting means coming up with creative photography ideas that give you the opportunity to learn and have fun. Well, this week we’re going to explore a method that’s equally frustrating and fascinating, but can give you the kind of results that will have everyone talking when they’re printed onto canvas and hung on your wall!

A prism, in a photographic context, is a clear glass or plastic shape (usually a triangle) that separates the white light we see around us into a spectrum of colours. Think about how light creates rainbows when you hold a crystal up to a window, and imagine how many creative photography ideas you can come up with using those colours!

Prisms come in all shapes and sizes, but for photography it’s best to find a relatively small one. Why? Well, you don’t want the prism to mask the entire lens because the best images will be created when the rainbow effect is a feature of your shot rather than the main event. For example, a bridal portrait can be given a dreamy, fairytale quality with the addition of a carefully placed prism over part of the lens, but if it covers the whole lens it’ll take over the shot.  

With this in mind, think about the lenses you’re using and choose accordingly – oh, but make sure it’s long enough that you can hold it without your fingers getting in the shot!

Because prisming is such an organic, freeform method it’s hard to really describe how to do it – it’s very much a trial and success kind of process! 

To begin with, it’s a good idea to practice with your rear screen in live view to give you an idea how the prism affects your exposure as you move it around. You want to focus on your subject and then see how you can manipulate the natural light from different angles, but when you’re confident you can experiment with adding artificial light from a torch directly into the prism – it’s a very exciting method!  

We hope that prisming is one of the many creative photography ideas that you’ll feel confident in trying as you grow as a photographer – seeing your creations come through our lab and printed to canvas for the first time is one of the big reasons we write our blogs, so please let us know if this has been helpful by dropping us a line.