Photography Tips & Tutorials1000 articles

Many of us have received or bought ourselves new digital cameras for Christmas and together with this comes the zeal to create great images. Sadly, the chances of this happening are small as most of us know that a camera doesn’t take great images, it’s the photographer. So what resolutions can you make that will start your photography journey in the New Year on the right footing? Remember that because you own a camera it doesn’t mean you are a photographer in the same way owning a box of paints doesn’t make you an artist. Resolve to do these things as you enter a new year with a new camera and start your new photography journey as your learn digital photography.

Smile, you’re on candid camera! Remember that TV show? One of the most exciting forms of photography is candid photography. Taking pictures of people in public situations doing natural acts has always been fun. Candid photography was largely taken in the streets and now it’s indoor at places like malls, night clubs and everywhere that people reside. When you’re engaged in candid photography, you’re not looking for people to pose for you, you’re looking for people doing natural things. Usually they are not aware that you’re taking a picture of them. Candid photo taking came from documentary photo taking.

Many digital photography beginners I know stick rigidly to daytime shots, apprehensive about their rate of success at night. If you’ve delayed taking that next step, or find you just don’t seem to take many night time photographs, here are a few common sense tips that will quickly help you on your way. If in doubt, just get out there and start taking shots. You just don’t know how good you are going do be until you try. Remember, especially if you are a digital photography beginner, if you don’t get it right first time, just keep plugging away until you do. It’s all digital – so just keep practicing until you are pleased with the results.

The eBook industry has skyrocketed recently as more people acquire tablets and other digital reading devices. Many high quality photography eBooks are now available that offer extremely valuable information. For photographers they can be very helpful for ongoing training because they can be digested on a computer and then also carried for reference on location via a mobile reading device. As we draw close to the end of the year I thought it would be useful to list the most popular eBooks consumed by our readers.

Taking great photographs of interiors is more difficult than simply pointing and shooting. To compose an effective image, it takes some forethought and careful consideration of your surroundings. To improve our understanding of photographic composition, professional photographer Scott Hargis provides this very helpful insider look into the art of interior photography. Shooting as wide as your camera will allow is not always the best choice. Many times, photographs taken from wide angles will feel cluttered and may distort objects, distracting viewers from the photograph as a whole.

What the umbrella does is diffuse light to enable you to achieve a softer lighting in your images. So instead of letting light directly focus on the subject, the umbrella bounces of the light in different directions. The result is a clearer image with softer shadows or no shadows at all. Basically, there are two colors of umbrella you can use when shooting. These are the black/silver and white, each with its own purpose. A white umbrella is normally best to use for indoor photography. This needs to be open when using it to achieve a softer glow. To use it, you have to shoot light directly through the umbrella for a softer appearance.

It’s approaching Christmas (faster than I would like!) and it’s a sure bet that lots of “point and shoot” digital cameras will be in many peoples stockings. Hopefully, the gift givers will have charged the batteries (or provided them for those cameras that come without) and perhaps made sure that there is a media card of the right type for the camera, or else there will be some very unhappy would-be photographers on Christmas Day. If you get past those hurdles then there is the actual process of taking the first pictures – which one of all the funny symbols does the new photographer use, and why, and will any one of them ensure that the new photographer will get any good pictures right away?

A week ago I was invited to take part in a workshop titled, Lights and Shadows. Demo models were available and various photographers were shooting in a temporary set photographic studio. I could not help but notice impractical mistakes done repeatedly by some of the photographers present. This led me to write this article, in order to pin point three basic mistakes that you should avoid when shooting a model, in particular a female model. Before you start shooting a model, it is a very sensible to check that your model is excellent. You should check that makeup is to your liking, hair is set well, clothes are not creased, clothing labels are not visible, in short that your model is nothing less than perfect.

Beautiful time-lapse photography is difficult enough to achieve, but attempting it in HDR (high dynamic range) photography adds another layer of complexity as was done here successfully in France (Normandy & Britany). This means the photographer has to take bracketed photos at different exposure levels for each individual frame, and then post-process those bracketed sets into HDR in a way that the lighting stays consistent so something called “flickering” does not occur due to rapid changes in lighting between the video frames. This new video has created a lot of discussion between photographers because it is such a difficult technique to master.

Many articles discuss the best practices for travel photography, and many of them, while providing worthwhile advice, tend not to take into account the fact that conditions are not always perfect for making photographs. The sky is not always blue, the crowds of tourists do not always clear a path for you to make your image, the light is not always perfect and you may not always have the latest gear. There are however some practices that you can put into place to help you create strong images when time is short and you can’t always wait for conditions to improve.