Browsing all posts in filters.

Yes, you can shoot at midday!

We’ve all had the “golden hour” concept drilled into our heads – those times around sunrise and sunset when the light is long and lovely, creating beautiful conditions in which to capture our photographs. So does that mean your camera has to languish in its bag during the midday hours? No, it does not! All [...]

Beach Photography Exposure

One of the great things about photography in the summer is there are so many mid-tones – greens, blues, reds, etc. – that getting the right exposure becomes less of a challenge. Just point the camera at something that is mid-tone with the light falling on it the same way it’s falling on your subject, [...]

Let’s Talk Filters

A friend of mine requested that I write an article about filters. When he asked I laughed and asked him, “Why don’t you come up with a subject that’s controversial?” At the risk of stepping on the toes of many of our readers, here is my take on filters. Back when shooting film was the [...]

The Beauty of Soft Focus

We talk a lot about how to achieve tack-sharp, perfectly focused photographs. We extol on the virtues of the Unsharp Mask in Photoshop, and enumerate the countless ways to steady our cameras in order to achieve perfectly crisp images. There is great beauty to behold, though, in a softly focused photograph – keeping in mind [...]

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 [...]

Filters

A friend of mine just got a new Nikon D90 and has pestered the heck out of me requested that I write an article about filters. (Hi, Dys! Your wish is my command. Ha!) There are many, MANY kinds of filters, and many, MANY different brands of filters, that allow for a near-infinite level of [...]

Vignetting – When and Why to Vignette

If you are anything like me you have a regular set of sites you stop at for inspiration of photos and one thing I’m noticing all the time now is Vignetting.  Vignetting is a photographic effect and it’s also a by product of super zoom lenses.  In the easiest language possible it’s when you have [...]

Filters 101 (Part 2)

You can read the first part of this article here. •DENSITY FILTERS Density filters are like sunglasses that you would wear on a sunny day. They effectively darken the scene and are available in different strengths. The most commonly used type of density filter is the neutral density (ND) filter since it does not add [...]

Filters 101

Filters are basically tools to modify the quality of light hitting your sensor. They used to play a more integral role in photography before digital cameras came along. Nowadays, a lot of people discount the importance of photographic filters thinking that they can replicate any effect they want during post-processing. This is not entirely true. [...]