Pro Techniques

My biggest surprise in shooting the famous Carnival of Venice was how accommodating the costumed people were to be photographed. I had assumed that they would become quickly annoyed with all the photographers stopping them and wanting pictures, but the opposite was true. They came out just to be photographed. Some were out as early as 7am and in the sunrise lighting they posed in front of the...

Chances are you won’t be photographing in the negative numbers of extreme cold that Layne Kennedy often encounters—we’re talking -15 to -30 degrees Fahrenheit—but his experience with and guidelines for cold-weather shooting can provide you with a considerable degree of comfort no matter what the temperature.

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.

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 have been reading Shutterbug for some time, you're no doubt aware of the constant drumbeat of the digital photography industry. The products used to fall into two categories--expensive cameras that take frightfully bad pictures, or frightfully...

Tonality does not exist in a vacuum; the tones form a visual impression in terms of both their intrinsic value and their relationship to one another. The context in which they relate is called contrast, simply the difference and relationship between the light and dark values in the scene. Contrast determines the “look” of the image, and has a profound effect upon visual effects.

Last fall I got an e-mail and a few JPEG attachments from Jody Dole, a commercial and advertising photographer whose career adventures I’ve chronicled over the years in these and other pages. “I’ve been having a good time making 19th-century cyanotype look-alike images,” Jody wrote.

Turns out, Jody had been up to more than cyanotypes. He also had a...