Picture This

We're seeing red. We received so many great entries for this month's Picture This! assignment that we have red images everywhere--on our desks and picture wall. Clearly red holds a great deal of attraction for photographers, and we received lots of images of nature, painted buildings and signs, uniforms, fire engines, cars, birds, and more. Honing down to our...

Light informs the content of an image. It shapes and creates volume out of a two-dimensional image, and leads the viewer's eye into and through the scene. Indeed, the literal definition of photography is "drawing with light." This month we asked readers to send us images under the heading "Directional Light," and the response was overwhelming, and...

Judging from the number of entries we received, readers really enjoy getting down…low, that is. We received images made in the middle of the road, on forest floors, and inside city parks and palaces. All the images share a low vantage point and look up at a world not often seen. This point of view can be quite startling, especially with deep depth of field employed.

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Whether it's adding light to shadows to create a good balance of tones, or brightening color on overcast days, fill flash provides an extra burst of light that can do the job. Close-up fill can be done with the built-in flash that comes with many cameras, or auxiliary flash that mounts on the camera's hot shoe. In either case, fill can be modified using the power...

When subjects fall within their own shadows, when an overcast sky makes color dull, or when we need to add a slight kick of light to more brightly illuminate what's before us, fill flash comes to the rescue. It's called "fill" because it is a supplementary light source, but we like the nickname "sunshine synchro" even better. Call it what you...

This month's Picture This! assignment, Found Montage, will not be running. The photographs submitted for Picture This! were sent from our collection point to review a few days before Hurricane Katrina struck and never arrived for review. After extensive efforts at tracing the review package we can only conclude that the package was lost within the chaos of the storm and its...

Our Picture This! assignment for this month was "From Above," images made from a vantage point looking down onto a scene. Many times our best pictures come from making the effort to scale heights that allow us to consider the subject from a different point of view, one not ordinarily seen. Readers climbed stairs, looked over the railing of bridges or out windows...