Dave Johnson, PC World, Zack Stern

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can’t promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus.

For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from February, March, and April.

Cameras are like sunflowers: They thrive on light. And when there isn't enough light to go around, you need to add some of your own--that's where your camera's flash comes in. Looking for ways to take better flash photos? You should learn to master your flash's various modes and settings, of course. But it's also important to understand how your flash works--the "physics" of flash photography, as it were. I've rounded up nine ways to improve the often harsh and contrasty photos that happen when your flash fires.

1. The More Diffused the Source, the More Pleasing the Light

No doubt, you've heard it said that you should shoot on overcast days, or wait for the sun to pass behind a cloud. And you know that you can get better results when you bounce your camera flash or use an adapter that diffuses the light.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Mariano Kamp.Summer is upon us, and that means we'll be spending a lot more time outdoors, capturing photos of stuff--kids, friends, cars, planes, dogs--in action. Perhaps you've applied some of the ideas in "Digital Photography Tips: Capture Summer Action," and discovered that some of your action photos lacked the excitement you saw in the viewfinder. That's the problem with freezing the action. Sometimes, it's just too frozen. The antidote? A classic photo technique known as panning. This week, let's review five things you need to know to pan the action to get some exciting, vibrant action photos.

Before we begin, what is panning? In a nutshell, it's a technique that lets you convey a strong sense of motion in your photo by freezing a fast-moving subject, but allowing the background to blur. When done well, panning shots virtually scream action and excitement. Here's what you need to know to take your own.

I love this time of year. The days are getting longer, the temperature is on the rise, and all around me, flowers are starting to bloom. This is a great opportunity to grab a camera and capture some of the natural beauty around us, whether it's in your backyard, at the local park, or along a hiking trail just out of town. Recently, I've explained some general-purpose photo tricks like "A Fast Trick to Salvage an Underexposed Photo" and "Four Easy Tricks for Better Photos." This week, let's focus on tips for capturing some great flower photos--they are a great addition to the advice I gave last year on photographing spring flowers.

Know When to Get in Close

More often than not, flowers look their best when you get in close, which often calls for using a macro lens or dialing in the macro setting on your camera. Macro mode lets you get very close to your subject, filling the frame with small details. If you have a point-and-shoot camera, the macro setting is generally marked with a tulip. Digital SLR owners have the option of adding a macro lens to their camera.

My friends call me a camera snob because I prefer digital SLRs and typically turn my nose up at camera phones. But lately, I've fallen in love with my iPhone's camera; more and more, I find myself snapping photos with my phone. One obvious advantage that a smartphone like the iPhone has over a traditional camera is portability. I've always got my iPhone in my pocket, while my Nikon often languishes at home. But another great advantage is apps: It's easy to add new features and capabilities to your iPhone by installing a free or inexpensive app. To do the same thing with a traditional camera, you'd need a degree in electrical engineering. Last year, I told you about five reasons photographers should love the iPhone. The apps I mentioned back then are still great, but this week, I've rounded up five more iOS apps that I highly recommend.

Afterfocus

One of the reasons that I ordinarily prefer a digital SLR to a camera phone is the control an SLR gives me over shutter speed and aperture. By dialing in a specific aperture setting, I can create a sharp hyperfocal photo or one in which the subject is sharply defined and the background is blurred out of focus.

Photographers love to chat about (and bemoan) their digital workflow--the process that begins with downloading photos from a camera or memory card, and continues with managing, organizing, sorting, editing, and eventually publishing, printing, or sharing the best shots. Adobe introduced Lightroom back in 2007 to help users perform that daunting series of tasks, and Lightroom quickly became the gold standard for digital workflow software. Now, Lightroom has some capable company: The latest version, Adobe Lightroom 4.1, is joined by Corel AfterShot Pro and CyberLink PhotoDirector 3.

Both AfterShot Pro and PhotoDirector 3 deliver essentially the same workflow experience as Lightroom, including lossless editing, essential photo editing tools, a rich organizer, and convenient ways to print, share, and publish your photos. We found that each one of the three programs has its own strengths and target audience.

Corel's AfterShot Pro tries to challenge Adobe's reign as the king of digital workflow software, and it makes a strong showing. Priced at $100, AfterShot Pro's strengths lie in what it does differently from Adobe Lightroom 4.1, and its approach may appeal to photographers interested in an alternative.

Like Lightroom, AfterShot Pro specializes in lossless editing: Nothing you do in AfterShot Pro ever touches your actual photo files; instead everything is stored as metadata. That means you can recompose, crop, adjust exposure, and even mask part of a photo without changing a pixel of your original file.

CyberLink PhotoDirector 3 offers a mainstream--and less specialized--digital workflow management alternative to Adobe Lightroom 4.1 and Corel AfterShot Pro, both of which plainly target professional photographers. PhotoDirector 3 ($150), resembles Lightroom in many ways, but its design and approach make it far more inviting to casual photographers.

PhotoDirector lets you fiddle with the program's many exposure controls manually; but it helps keep things simple with a one-click presets menu, where you can choose from among two dozen custom settings that emphasize skin tone, optimize for landscapes, convert photos to black-and-white, and more. Hundreds of additional user-created presets are available for download in the online DirectorZone community, and you can save settings for one-click recall.

Adobe Lightroom 4.1 is a comprehensive, self-contained environment for importing, editing, organizing, printing, and sharing your photos. Lightroom accommodates JPGs and video, but it's primarily designed with RAW image files in mind: All of its editing is lossless, and its many tools are designed to tease hidden visual information out of your RAW photos. Unlike the jam-packed but expensive Adobe Photoshop toolset, the $149 Lightroom is optimized for digital photographers. The latest iteration isn't revolutionary, but it adds an impressive number of important new features.

Lightroom's design is set up around "modules," with each tab revealing context-sensitive menus pertinent to a specific task.

One of the most intriguing aspects of photography is that it's both an art and a science. Science tells us that, for most photos, there's a specific amount of light that will generate the "perfect" exposure--sort of like measuring chemicals in a laboratory. But it's not all test tubes and Bunsen burners in photography, because there are a million ways to get the right amount of light into your scene. Lots of different shutter speeds and aperture settings add up to the right exposure, for example. You're already had a chance to experiment with that using an interactive online camera simulator. And therein lies the art: No two photographers will ever capture the same scene in exactly the same way. This week, let's zero in on shutter speed and talk about how you can get a variety of different photo effects and visual styles just by varying this one camera control.

Understanding Shutter Speeds

This Canon camera uses a four-way rocker to adjust exposure: up and down is shutter speed, while left and right is aperture.You probably already know that your camera's shutter speed setting controls how long the shutter is left open, and therefore how much light is allowed to reach the camera's sensor. Most cameras let you control the shutter with a dial--spin it to change the exposure time--or some sort of rocker switch.

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can't promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus.

For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from January, February, and March.