Pro Techniques

There are many kinds of white light. At first this statement seems like it doesn’t make sense, but if you look closely at a typical light bulb in your living room (the old kind, not the new florescent type of bulbs) and compare it with, say, a daylight florescent fixture, the light bulb is much more yellow than the florescent light. Similarly, if you compare sunrise and sunset lighting to the light from an overcast sky at noon, the lighting from low angled sunlight is very yellow—it looks golden, in fact—and the cloudy sky produces a white light that is more bluish.

If you love black and white photography you should check out the tools and techniques that allow you to make customized “conversions” from your RGB digital image files.

A few years ago I was reorganizing a closet and discovered cardboard boxes tucked into a dark corner. Much to my surprise, I found dress boxes and shoeboxes filled with photographs from the 1940s and early ’50s. I had forgotten that when my father died I inherited his personal photographs. That afternoon and long into the night, I sat on the hallway floor looking at the pictures and reliving some of those moments. It was like discovering buried treasure, a forgotten family heirloom.

Jim Karageorge has been an eyewitness to the changing face of corporate photography over the years. “Today, the stories that corporate clients want to tell are different from those we told in the past,” Karageorge, a corporate/industrial photographer, observes. “They are geared more toward the human factor than the technologies.”

One of the things that many good photographers struggle with is sharpness. I have spent years of my life working on getting the most tack-sharp images, and have even written a few stories for your favorite magazine explaining some of the things that I do...

Putting two or more captures on top of each other in a single image multiplies the potential for impact and opens up new avenues to creative expression. Whether you want to inject motion into a static shot, add moody atmosphere or dreamy nostalgia, or enhance one subject with the texture of another, multiple exposure offers a myriad of possibilities. The techniques complement...

In June 2009, Sigma Pro director Dave Metz contacted me, requesting some wildlife images for full-page Sigma advertisements. He knew that I had been working on my first book, Animals of Ohio’s Ponds and Vernal Pools (Kent State University Press, July 2011), so he figured I could send him images fairly easily. He then made an interesting—and at the time slightly disconcerting—request: would I please photograph the animals not within their natural settings but against white backgrounds?