Editor's Notes

Those who have labored long and hard to create a many-layered workflow may find a certain sense of exasperation when confronting the latest software that’s come and is coming down the pike. If it’s ease of use you are after, and a certain push-button path to myriad results, much of the new crop is just for you. Yes, you have to know where you’re going, but more and more that...

While we at the magazine tend to get caught up in the exciting news about new products and technology, we also keep our eye out for topics we believe are of interest to photographers today. You might call these guiding lights that we will follow in the months and years ahead. We feel we owe it to you to occasionally state those topics explicitly, so you know where we are coming...

As this issue goes to press we’re off to photokina in Cologne, Germany, for the one show that always rocks the photo world. Held every two years, photokina is where just about every manufacturer in the industry from around the world gathers to show their wares, and their future tech, so that’s where we’ll be. Shutterbug is sending a team of reporters to cover every aspect of the...

When I first started out in photography one of the foundations of the craft I set out to learn was lighting. So I went out to my local camera store and bought a set of metal reflectors with clamps, and, aided by the storekeeper, got me a pair of blue, daylight photoflood bulbs and a few rolls of color film. Those hot lights wilted...

Those who spend most of their time working in natural light have come to appreciate the difficulties of making the best exposure reading, working the point of view, and maintaining tonal value and detail in the scene. One of the reasons for the increasing interest in HDR (so-called High Dynamic Range imaging) is that it seems to be a digital way to overcome the curse of the ancient...

I tend to separate light into two distinct areas—that supplied by the one true light source, the sun, and the other by the inventiveness and ingenuity of people, namely flash, a controlled explosion, and continuous, usually some form of filament, spark, and vapor, or controlled burn. My tendency is to seek out natural or ambient light whenever I can, mainly because I like the hunt and the...