The digital darkroom has made it simple to accomplish print and image effects
that would have taken hours in the chemical darkroom environment. While the
learning curve can be steep (as it certainly was for the chemical darkroom,
at least if you wanted good results) the ease with which some tasks can be accomplished
is almost...well, embarrassing, at least to those who once labored in the
amber-lit confines of the darkroom.
Backgrounds are virtually as important as subjects in making a picture work. If they are messy and there is a lot going on, they tug at our eyes and pull our attention away from your subject. Just as you carefully consider your subjects, at the same time you need to carefully consider the background. For example, is it too light? Too messy? Too attention-grabbing? Does it have distracting lines or colors? Is it too sharp or too defined?
My wife, Olivia, is a naturalist. In one of her educational programs, she teaches children about the life-cycle of monarch butterflies. To show their four stages of life, she begins by collecting eggs from milkweed plants. Olivia keeps leaves from...
Now I know how stagecoach drivers felt when they saw those first rail lines
being laid over their routes. The recent announcement that Kodak would be discontinuing
their silver black and white papers didn't come as much as a shock as
an inevitability that one always hopes will not be manifest. With inventories
expected to last a few months, we're now witnessing the disappearance
of venerable brands such as Polycontrast IV, Azo and Polymax Fine Art, Kodabrome
II and Portra, even their "Digital Black and White" paper, which
was used for digital printers. According to a Kodak spokesperson, Kodak has
seen a cumulative drop in black and white paper buying of 25% per year over
the past few years and could no longer justify being in the market. We also
learned, by the way, that Kodak black and white papers had of late been produced
in Brazil, being packaged from rolls in Rochester. The spokesperson did stress,
however, that Kodak black and white film and chemistry was not on the chopping
block and that Kodak sees silver photography as still extremely viable.
Pictures displayed are bright and readable from a fairly wide angle from center, and having a 4 inch LCD means editing and perusing is easy on planes, trains and, when not driving,au...
Now we come to how ISO, aperture, and shutter speed relate to one another. They exist to balance the amount of light in the scene with the recording made by the sensor and ultimately made into an image file on the memory card. Your goal is to record the scene with as true and balanced a color and lightnessof...
Until recently, few digital camera owners were able to make true wide angle
images because a 38mm focal length was the shortest available in built-in zooms.
(All focal lengths are discussed in 35mm format equivalent.) Today, an increasing
number of digicams include zooms that start at 28mm or even 24mm. Many of the
high-end cameras also accept 0.7x adapters, ideal for ultra wide angle photography.
And SLR system lens manufacturers have also started making incredibly short
zooms, such as 12-24mm, for a very wide angle of view. All of this is great
news for creative shooters who want to expand their visual horizons.
There are many fun and creative images you can create with flash if you allow yourself to think outside the box. In the past when we all shot film, we had to wait until the film came back from the lab to see the results. If the pictures weren’t what we wanted, we’d have to start over and figure out how to improve the images on the next roll of film.
What makes us stop and say to ourselves, “There’s a photograph here!”? It really comes down to one element that is all around us—light. The play of light off objects, critters and people is what grabs the mind’s eye and makes us take note and sparks visual interest in the viewer. There are lots of processes that go into that final photograph to make it successful, yet none are as important as how we speak with light. And that’s all done through exposure.
“Exposure” is shorthand for the delicate balance of the light sensitivity of the recording material (in our case the camera’s CCD or CMOS sensor with picture sites, known as pixels) with the amount of light in the scene. There are two parts of a camera system that control the amount of lightcomin...
Now we come to how exposure and creative photography go hand in hand.
Why would you need to change the aperture or shutter speed under different lighting conditions? Why would you want to use a fast shutter speed for one shot and a slow one for another? Why change apertures or ISO?