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Photography is a wide-ranging field that engenders passion in its practitioners, and like all great forms of expression creates opinions formed through experience and reflection. In its early days one of the great debates was: Is Photography Art? This was the subject of many essays and heated discussions among players and spectators. Today, issues such as film vs. digital, format...

Lots of people don't know that Pentax built the first Japanese-made Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera. In 1952 the Asahi Optical Company of Japan created the Pentax (PENTAprism refleX) line of cameras and were the first to incorporate a penta-prism viewfinder and reflex mirror system into a camera they called the Asahiflex I. This camera featured a cloth curtain focal plane...

One of the most frequent questions I'm asked is about the proper, or "best," way to sharpen images for printing or web use. Almost everyone has struggled with getting this right. Software has improved greatly over the past couple of years, both within Adobe's Photoshop, which recently added the Smart Sharpen filter, and with third-party tools like...

For years photographers have extolled the virtues of taking portraits on overcast days or during the "sweet light" that occurs near the beginning and end of every day. On cloudy days, the contrast range is reduced, allowing you to capture detail throughout the image, from the brightest area to the deepest shadow. Near sunset, you also get a reduced contrast range, with...