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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No doubt you have heard someone be complimented with the effusive expression, "You are positively radiant!" I love the sentiment, but I've never quite seen it in real life. Who has skin that actually glows? Perhaps I'm being too literal. Nonetheless, regardless what you think of this in real life, you can create a radiant glow in your digital portraits through some clever photo editing trickery. Using a technique similar to the Orton Effect--which works very nicely in still life and landscape photographs--you can add a warm and romantic glow to your portraits. Here's how.
Begin by opening the photo that you want to tweak in your favorite photo editor. For starters, choose a portrait of a single person in which the overall exposure is about right, and the person fills a lot of the frame.
Photos and the Internet go together like peanut butter and jelly. For as long as there have been web browsers, people have generously posted photos online--which other people have then downloaded and used for their own purposes, whether or not they've actually asked for permission. To make it easier to legally and ethically reuse photos posted online, the Creative Commons license was created. I first mentioned Creative Commons in "Your Photos, Your Rights, and the Law." This week let's learn a little more about Creative Commons--both how you can use it to share your own photos and how to use other peoples' works.
Before we go any further, I should point out that every photo on the Internet has been taken and published by someone, and that means all of those images are implicitly under copyright. You don't have to see an explicit copyright notice in order for an image to be protected by law. Indeed, all creative works are implicitly protected by U.S. copyright law.
Cameras are, like Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel, easily confused. If you take a photo of a scene that has a lot of contrasty lighting, you're likely going to end up with parts of the photo that are under- or overexposed. I have written about ways to fix photos like this--for example, check out how to brighten unwanted shadows. Most of these sorts of techniques take time and effort, though.
This week, I've got a trick that takes less than 2 minutes and is perfect for situations in which you want to take a photo with badly underexposed areas and make it presentable for uploading to Facebook. It won't be perfect, and I wouldn't use this approach to make a large print, but it's awesome for rapidly making snapshots presentable.
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 December, January, and February.
There are about a million books about photography on the shelf of your local bookstore. I should know, because mine is one of them. But you don't need to remember a book's worth of tips and tricks to improve your photography; for the highlights, you might want to play with an online camera simulator. And when you get right down to it, there are just a handful of easy things you can do to make a dramatic improvement to your photos.
Want to improve your photographic composition? Stop putting your subject in the center of the frame. The "rule of thirds" tells us that photos (and video--watch TV and movies for proof) look better when the subject is off-center, aligned about a third of the way from the right or left side. Here, you can see that the wolf's face is positioned on the line of thirds on the right side of the photo, and his eyes are almost exactly a third of the way from the top as well.
A few weeks ago, I wrote that photography is often called "painting with light." In response, a reader asked me what you do when there isn't any--light, that is. Well, unless you're shooting inside a closet or at the bottom of a mineshaft, there's always some light around. Your job as a photographer is often to make the most of whatever light you have access to. I've explained how to get the best results with your flash, but there's a way to maximize the natural light in your scene as well: Using your camera's ISO control.
I get a lot of questions about ISO--many photographers don't seem to understand exactly what it does. Your camera's ISO control determines how sensitive the camera's sensor is to light. On most cameras, ISO starts at 100 and goes up from there; the higher the number, the more sensitive the sensor will be.
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