Pro Techniques

There’s nothing more discouraging than making great shots in the field only to discover that they are nowhere to be found on your memory card when you get to your home or studio. That’s why we were happy to receive this list of mistakes to avoid when dealing with memory cards from David Zimmerman, CEO of LC Technology, a company that supplies data management and recovery solutions to a wide variety of companies within the field.—Editor

Many photographers will walk out the door for a portrait shoot with little more than a camera and a reflector. They do so based on the common belief that flash photography is meant exclusively for indoor shooting, that flash is only used when there isn’t enough light to achieve a perfect exposure. However, based on my experience, a flash combined with a few affordable accessories has tremendous...

Given that the physical and perceptual experience of making a photograph is shaped by technology, and that technology is also embedded in the resulting images, one of the chief and perhaps most profound changes in how we make an image has been the changes in focusing—and recently autofocusing—technology. There’s a reason that the documentary photojournalism of Lewis W. Hine (shot with a ponderous 5x7 view camera or a 4x5 Graflex SLR) has a qualitatively different feel from that of Alfred Eisenstaedt or Henri Cartier-Bresson (shot with pocket-sized 35mm rangefinder cameras). It’s not only framing—it’s responsiveness, spontaneity, and, perhaps, repose, that underlies what these image-makers showed us.

Anyone who's watched Mark Steines co-anchor Entertainment Tonight knows he's remarkably at ease in front of the camera. Thing is, he may be even more comfortable behind it, especially if that camera is his digital SLR.

Not only that, he may be happier back there.

It is, after all, where he began. "Photography's...

Judy Host (www.judyhost.com) only started her business 12 years ago but today you can find her working either in the home of a celebrity creating her award-winning portraits or in Africa documenting conditions in Rwanda and Uganda. By the time you read this, she may be in Ghana and Kenya or traveling to Cape Town, South Africa.

I went into this determined not to portray fine art photographer Chris Faust as some sort of oddity because, lo and behold, he still goes into the darkroom. And as a photography teacher, he encourages others to do it, too.

But when I said, "I'm not going to approach this story as if you were an oddity in the age of digital," he stopped me with...

I'm a zoom lens man. I use zooms in virtually all my travel work, making exceptions when I need a macro or super telephoto shot.

This was not always the case. Back in...