Browsing all posts in exposure.

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 [...]

Review: Photo Recipes Live

I recently purchased Photo Recipes Live: Behind the Scenes: Your Guide to Today’s Most Popular Lighting Techniques, the DVD/workbook combo by Scott Kelby. This product goes into detail about how the photographs were achieved in “Photo Recipes That Help You Get “The Shot”” – the final chapter of each of Kelby’s three Digital Photography Volumes. [...]

Three Things I Wish I Knew Then

Sherry (who writes for PhotoBlog) and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about the things that we wished we knew, or that someone had told us, about photography when we first got started. Those tips or pieces of advice that would have helped us to avoid confusion or mistakes when we were first [...]

Noisy, Dirty, Gritty Fun

Sometimes, a photograph doesn’t have to have crisp, clean perfection. Sometimes, it’s kind of fun to let things get a little noisy, a little dirty, a little gritty. This photo was taken in Portland, Maine, on the wharf off of Commercial Street in the Old Port district. It was a night in late May 2007, [...]

Sunny 16 – A Rule of Thumb

“Sunny f/16″, or “Sunny 16″, is a mnemonic to help photographers recall a “rule of thumb” for estimating correct daytime exposure. Initially established for film photography (which is an obvious statement, since most “rule of thumbs” that have been around for a while, such as this one, were based in film photography) to help estimate [...]

Editing in Camera Raw

I admit that I don’t fiddle around too much with images in RAW format. I’m on the fence when it comes to shooting in RAW – I don’t really have an opinion about it one way or another. I can see circumstances where it would be really useful; I can see other circumstances where it’s [...]

Freelensing

While perusing the Internet for new photography techniques, I came across something referred to as “freelensing”. This technique is achieved by detaching the lens from the camera but holding it in place, then shifting the lens around to focus the shot. Shafts of light are “leaked” into the image, a high degree of bokeh is [...]