I’m sure you’ve seen light paintings like this one before. Painting with light is a technique that’s been around since the days of film. All it requires is a camera which has a controllable exposure, a dark environment, and some lights. You can paint anything with light. This streaky pinpoint light effect lets you write or create fine lines in the air… similar to streaking tail lights on the highway, and using the same principle. You can also light a regular subject using bursts of light from a flashlight or strobe. » MORE

Objects In Rear View Mirror May Appear Larger Than They Are.

I would have to say that the best advice I ever received as a photographer, from somebody much older and wiser than myself, was to “get closer”. It may seem a little trite and obvious at first, but when I started really listening to this advice while I was shooting, I started to see a dramatic difference in my shots. Pushing myself that extra bit to get just a step closer, to fill the frame just a little more, was giving me much better results.

Depending on the focal length of your lens, getting closer can have a dramatic impact. The image here was shot with a 10.5mm fisheye lens - and within a few inches of the subject. This is pretty extreme, but it’s taking advantage of the space I have to fill and the qualities of the lens I’m using.
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It’s time for a New Years resolution. Say it with me. “This year, I vow to change my dried up shooting angles.”

Let’s be frank. The dead-on angle of view is dead. Very few pictures look good when you pose your subject and take a straight, eye-level picture of them.

By simply changing the position of the camera higher, lower, or tilting it, you can come up with some much more exciting results. » MORE

Everything happens in threes. I’m not entirely sure that’s true, but somebody once said that and it seemed like an appropriate way to start this article, because that’s how a lot of the world’s strongest photographers see the world.

Just about anyone who has taken a photo class or read a photography book knows about the rule of thirds. However, given that cameras these days have come down in price so dramatically, we have a lot more lay people shooting high-end cameras… and not everyone has been exposed to this little tidbit of wisdom.

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I remember my photographer teacher talking about the ‘Sunny 16 Rule’ when I was shooting an old Canon A1. It’s one of those pieces of information you kind of forgot when you make the move to the digital world, where automation rules, and manual exposure tricks are resigned to becoming problem solving tricks. Why remember tricks when matrix metering is so smart?

Well, recently I was asked about taking pictures of the moon, which is when that buried information struck me again. Because of the way a DSLR meter measures light, by trying its best to find a balance of light and dark, you’ll find it’s difficult (even with a spot meter) to properly expose something like the moon. The ‘Sunny 16 Rule’, or more appropriate to this particular question, the ‘Moony 11 Rule’ - is perfect for this type of problem. » MORE

They glow and sparkle and can be virtually irresistable to a photographer. Taking pictures of outdoor Christmas lights is tricky, but it can be done - with some amazing results if you do it right. If you walk through a few steps outlined below, and are willing to get a little creative with your settings and experiment, you’ll be able to get some gorgeous Christmas light shots as well.

As is usually the case with odd lighting situations, there is no particularly right answer on how to approach the problem. I can point you in the right direction, but playing and understanding why you’re doing the things you’re doing is key to getting the shot.

Ideally, we’ll want to try and shoot our lights in twilight. The biggest problem most people face with Christmas light shots is waiting until it’s totally dark. We can do it at night too, but by shooting in twilight, we’ll be able to more easily get some context in the image and balance the lights with our surrounding. To do this, we’ll shoot in a Manual exposure mode so that we can have full control over the settings, and we may use some flash if we also want to see some of the house or the surroundings. » MORE

Many digital cameras don’t do black and white natively. Those that do shoot in black and white are actually shooting in color and converting in-camera - and they usually do a less than adequate job of it.

Something happened around the late 1990’s that saw a dramatic decrease in the number of black and white pictures being published. Though there were still a good number monochrome pictures being produced, it suddenly became more trendy for commercial photography and photojournalism to be shot in bright color.

I think with the loss of film, many of us started losing our taste for black and white images. Maybe that’s because it’s trickier to get a good looking black and white image now, as the one-stop “convert to black and white” button in cameras rarely do a stellar job.

Though black and white is still a very popular way of finishing a picture, within the realm of digital photography it’s more realistic to shoot in color and convert the picture in post-processing after the fact. This can be done differently in different software, but we’ll approach the Photoshop and the Lightroom method. Any application that gives you control over color channels and a conversion tool will allow you to get similar results, though. » MORE

If you’ve ever used a flash on your camera, be it a built-in popup flash or a single external flash on the hotshoe, you’ve almost certainly gotten pictures that look flat and drab at one time or another.

This is kind of typical for single point lighting which happens to be fired directly at the subject. With a single light, it’s best to diffuse the light somehow or redirect it by bouncing it off a ceiling, a wall, a bounce card, or something similar. You’ll still only have one source of light, but you’ve now softened it and distributed it over a larger area, which is typically more flattering for your subject.

Multi point lighting is a more advanced method of lighting your subject using several sources of light. Those sources could be studio lights or strobes, it really doesn’t matter. It’s the positioning and use of those lights which define the method, which is the de-facto industry standard for photo and video lighting. Every good photographer should understand these lighting basics. » MORE