Browsing all posts in Weekend Fun.

Your Weekend Project – Purposeful Focus

Focus is inherently critical in photography. What is OUT of focus is just as important as what is IN focus. Using unexpected focus, or off-center focus, can add interest to your photographs. This weekend practice purposeful focus. Focus and recompose, or practice moving your focus points around through the viewfinder. Break away from auto focus [...]

Weekend Project – Pattern Interrupted

This weekend, train your photographic eyes to find pleasing patterns and unique interruptions in patterns. Patterns can be abstract or specific, and occur naturally or are constructed. They create a path for the eyes to follow, and are heavily dependent on lines and angles to inspire interest. There is especial allure created in a pattern [...]

Your Weekend Photography Project – Get Low

I took this shot while balancing precariously with one foot a rock, the other foot on a branch, camera held down at a level lower than my feet. There was no way to look through the viewfinder to compose the shot, of course. So I set the camera on aperture priority (f/2.8), zoomed it all [...]

Your Weekend Project – Portraits Without Faces

The art of capturing a person’s portrait without including their face is gaining popularity in lifestyle photography. I see it quite often in family portraiture and wedding photography as well. It’s a fun way to include aspects of your subject’s personality that isn’t immediately apparent in their smile. This New Year’s weekend, I encourage you [...]

Your Weekend Project – Drip Drip Drop!

I just had way too much fun taking pictures of drops of water. This is a GREAT rainy-day (or cold winter day) photography project. It’s also a great teaching method if you have children or teens interested in photography! Here’s what you need: – A camera (naturally!) – A tripod – An external flash – [...]

Your Weekend Photography Project – Bokeh

Bokeh refers to the quality of the points of light in the out-of-focus areas of a photo (typically in the background of an image when using a shallow depth of field). Bokeh can be subtle and it can be overt – it can accent a photograph or it can be the subject of a photograph. [...]

Your Weekend Photography Project – Your Neighborhood

As the co-owner of a website whose readership spans the entire globe (hello to our reader from Vanuatu!), I am always very interested in learning about where our readers come from, and what their daily lives look like. So, in light of the article I wrote yesterday, I offer the following weekend challenge for you [...]

Your Weekend Photography Project – Manual and SOOC

This weekend’s project is designed to get you back to basics, and to break you out of your automated settings habits. We can sometimes rely too much on our camera’s auto settings, or on our post-processing skills, rather than concentrating on our photographic abilities to get the shot we’re looking for. Sometimes it’s good to [...]

Your Weekend Photography Project

This weekend I challenge you all to capture an unusual point of view. Use a Manfrotto Magic Arm or a Joby Gorillapod to take remote photographs from improbable angles. Get down on the ground and shoot up from under the subject. Climb up on your roof (safely!) and give us a birds-eye view of your [...]

Shoot What You Have, Shoot Where You Are

One of the lessons that I’ve recently learned and have tried to take to heart is a simple one… just shoot. Don’t obsess over having your entire lens collection with you so that you can get the “perfect” shot for any circumstance. Chances are you’ll miss the shot while you’re fumbling with a lens change, [...]