Lighting How To

Macro season is in full swing, with colorful flowers, interesting insects, and other creepy-crawlies just about everywhere you look, so if you still haven’t dusted off your trusty close-up lens, now is the time.

Have you ever wondered how some photographers create photos with a magical, dreamy effect that make a subject seem to pop out of the background and direct a viewer’s eye to exactly where it should go? That’s what you’ll learn how to in the tutorial below, in barely seven minutes.

It’s not uncommon for photographers to adopt a “set-it-and-forget it” mentality when configuring their cameras, thereby ending up with photographs that aren’t as good as possible. Whether you call this habit lazy or uninformed, there are times when the choice of a custom setting results in more creative images.

Color temperature is a very important photographic concept that can be difficult to understand—depending upon who is doing the explaining. Booray Perry is an instructor who specializes in quick tutorials that simplify so-called “complicated” considerations, and that’s exactly what he does in the quick video below.

EV-Compensation is an important concept to understand if you want to consistently capture properly exposed images in the camera. Also known as Exposure Compensation, this setting is a feature in just about any camera you own, and when used properly it often eliminates the necessity of balancing tones during the editing process.

Hot spots and highlight blowouts are the bane of portrait photographers and others. They can occur with images shot in the studio under artificial illumination, as well as those captured with natural light outdoors. Fortunately there’s a simple and effective Photoshop fix, as you’ll see in the quick tutorial below.

Photography is all about maximizing light, and landscape photographers are always at the mercy of prevailing conditions. The quick tutorial below demonstrates how to make necessary adjustments in Lightroom when Mother Nature fails to cooperate.