Histograms are like road maps. You need them in order to see where you’re going. Without them, you’re just guessing. OK, I suppose with some experience you can get a pretty accurate guess. But if you’re a perfectionist like me, you’d feel way more comfortable if you knew you nailed the shot with the perfect […]
Landscape photography relies a lot on good lighting. Let me rephrase that… it relies on great lighting. Great lighting can be found if you know where to look, and when. Understanding the balance of light—or light ratio—between foreground and background areas will put you on the road to better landscape photography. The background usually means […]
Not everyone can afford—or needs—the most expensive kit when it comes to lighting. As a matter of fact, small and portable lighting kits make a photographer’s work more efficient. Here’s a selection of tools to help you assemble your lighting kit even with the smallest of budgets. Speedlights Speedlights are portable alternatives to heavy and […]
Exposure compensation is what you can do to override the exposure settings set by the camera’s metering system. Assuming you have set the ISO to a specific level, eg. ISO 100, the metering system in your camera measures the amount of light in the photo and tells you the aperture and shutter speed needed for a correct exposure. There are usually 3 types of metering methods used in today’s DSLR cameras. Most cameras use multi-segment metering as the default metering system. This metering system measures the brightness in several areas in the photo and finds an average (emphasis varies depending on the camera).
The RAW format is a digital photographer’s friend. If you shoot for commercial purposes (eg. to sell your images to a stock image library) shooting in RAW allows you to squeeze every single drop of quality from your shots. For a JPEG image, the image is first captured by the sensor, then the camera processes the image by applying a contrast curve to it, sharpens it (unless you turned off sharpening), converts it into 8-bits and then stores it in the memory card by compressing it. When this compression is performed, a little bit of image quality is thrown away, in order to achieve a smaller file size.
