Outdoor Tips

Photo opportunities are abundant during the fall. You can shoot great pictures of autumn color, carved pumpkins, or children dressed in an array of Halloween costumes. Days become shorter and the light becomes warmer, which accentuates the changing fall foliage. Besides photographing colorful leaves...

There are lots of special-effects accessories on camera-store shelves, and they are well worth checking out if you're into special effects. But you don't need a lot of fancy accessories to create some interesting and unusual photographic effects. In fact, if you have a basic SLR (single-lens reflex) camera—film or digital—there are several special effects you can produce with no...

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.

For over 30 years Petersen's Photographic Magazine has been recognized as the leading instructional magazine for photo enthusiasts. Our goal has been to inspire readers with dramatic imagery, and to offer clear and simple instructional articles to help photographers improve their skills.

To further this mission, we have created the Photographic Faculty; a team of seven...

Always artistic, Judith Pishnery was a natural choice to be her high school's yearbook photographer--an initial foray that resulted in her becoming "hooked" on photography. And, because one of her science teachers also taught photography on the side, "I would hang out in the biology department," she recalls.

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Every photographer has a personal vision and a particular taste in composition, light, color and so on. For example, many photographers chose nature’s details simply to abstract the color and form they find. Others like to use extremely shallow depth of field—also called selective focus—so only a sliver of the subject is sharp while the rest of it is soft. People who are intrigued by the beauty, intricacy and complexity of nature usually shoot with the opposite approach. They want to reveal as much detail in the subjects as possible so those who view their work can appreciate the designs and the patterns in the images with tack sharp clarity.

Shooting good photos in dim light is challenging, but can also be quite rewarding, because capturing the feel of the existing light generally produces a more pleasant picture than using on-camera flash.

The basic problems facing the low-light photographer are being able to use a fast enough shutter speed to permit hand-held shooting, and being able to use a small enough lens aperture to...