Photo How To

In this article we’ll be exploring various in-camera creative options. Today’s cameras contain microprocessors that are like having a custom photo lab and graphic art studio built-in. In the color realm they allow you to choose color saturation (vividness), neutralize or enhance color casts (white balance) and even create custom color renditions to match every subject and scene. Drive modes allow you to capture fast action “in a hurry” and pick out the best frame, aiding you in getting the best sports shots you ever made.

What’s proper etiquette when capturing chow with a digital camera? If you like to shoot your food, here are a couple handy tips. 

Everyone is insecure about getting the correct exposure. We have good reason to be insecure because too often we’ve experienced over- and underexposures when we didn’t expect it, and that leaves a lasting impression that exposure technique is a mysterious and elusive thing.

Known as a master of combining art in the traditional sense with photography, Chiarenza has been making pictures for five decades. He started out with tightly framed, documentary-style photographs that sparked a lifelong interest in abstract images and landscapes. But since 1979 he has been making collages out of scraps of paper, foil, can lids, and whatever else he finds or people send him. He then photographed the collages with Polaroid positive/negative film, always in black and white. Using light, shapes, forms, and surfaces, the results are very unique images that encourage the viewer to let his or her imagination do all the interpretation.

An exposed photographic plate or a segment of exposed film inside a dark camera body are analog equivalents of today’s Raw file. Before digital technology made it possible to capture visual images electronically, a photograph was visible only after it had been processed in a darkroom with chemicals. Now the processing is handled either in camera or by Raw rendering software. The word “Raw” is not an acronym; it’s a simple description for a file that contains pure data, invisible to the human eye.

The pearlescent colors that appear in soap bubbles are endlessly fascinating if you take the time to look at them closely. It is chaos at its most beautiful—a random mix of color that, unfortunately, we can’t freeze with our mind to examine any one instant in time. With a camera and flash, however, we can capture these amazing works of art and examine every detail, even though each design lasts only milliseconds.

Human visual perception is a wondrous thing—it allows us to see a wide spectrum of colors, with all the subtleties and shades, lights and darks, pastels and richness of the earth and the heavens. To see in black and white is an abstraction of that world, one that perceives luminance, or brightness, without the benefit of hue. Yet hue, or color, and its shades, often determine what tones, or grayscale values, will be seen in black and white. If one were always to see the world only in black and white it would be considered a deficiency of vision. But to see that way occasionally, and to be able to render what we see in a monochrome fashion, opens the door to different perceptions and feelings about the world, and yields a unique form of expression in the bargain.