Browsing all posts in exposure.

Shortcuts and Rules of Thumb

Following are a few shortcuts and rules of thumb that help me in my day-to-day photography needs. Since I refer to them often enough myself, I thought I would pass them along to you. Using a Teleconverter Keep light loss in mind if you use a teleconverter in combination with your lens. In general, adjust [...]

Guest Entry – Is a Hand Held Light Meter Really Necessary?

This guest post is kindly provided to us by Steve Russell. You can contact Steve at steve.russell@russellpc.net. ———- Is a Hand Held Light Meter Really Necessary? By: Steve Russell Recently Tiffany Joyce posted an article about determining correct exposure by reading histograms. She opened the article by questioning the need for the use of a [...]

Photography 101 – How to Read a Histogram

I happened to be driving through the “fashionable” part of Arizona a while back (Scottsdale, for those of you familiar with the state), and saw a professional photographer arranging a wedding party in front of a fountain. The photographer was holding up an external, hand-held light meter to judge the exposure settings to be used. [...]

Photography 101 – Exposure Compensation

The exposure compensation feature on today’s digital cameras does what the name suggests – compensates the exposure of the shot according to the conditions in which the photo is being taken. Exposure compensation is used to manually adjust the exposure to something different than what the camera’s meter is suggesting. The photographer can tell the [...]

Some HDR Learnings

I’m an HDR novice, so I took the opportunity yesterday afternoon to futz around in my house and try to familiarize myself with the concept. I addressed things with an eye toward learning what works, and what doesn’t work. For the purposes of the exercise I used the HDR Photo Merge capability in Corel PaintShop [...]

SOOC Challenge

This weekend I challenge you to share your “straight out of camera”, or “SOOC” shots. Sometimes we all need a little motivation to get back down to basics. We sometimes tend to allow our post-processing skills make up for less than perfect shots. We think, “Well, the exposure isn’t quite right, but I’ll fix that [...]

Celestial Photography

The moon and the stars have always held a great amount of fascination for us humble inhabitants here on Earth. Since the invention of the camera, photographers have striven to capture the brilliance of the night sky. At one point or another we’ve all hauled our tripods out to the back yard in the middle [...]

Six Tips for Photographing Wildflowers

Spring is just around the corner (well, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere – our friends in Australia will be coming up on wintertime in a couple of months!). With spring comes wildflowers. I live in the desert of Arizona and we’re about to reach our peak wildflower season. Here are some tips [...]

Tips for Focusing in the Dark

Taking a long exposure picture in dark conditions can be a challenge, because the camera’s auto-focus capabilities find it difficult to “see” a point of focus. Manual focus can be hard, too, because you can’t see what you’re trying to focus on through the viewfinder! In keeping with this month’s “long exposure” challenge, here are [...]

Stops 101

When I was new to photography, I was very confused whenever someone said they needed to “stop down” or “stop up” a shot. Basically, all the term “stop” refers to is the change in the brightness of the light, or exposure, of the photograph. Doubling the light is one stop up (or brighter), reducing the [...]