Jon Sienkiewicz Blog

Looking for great holiday photo gifts that are affordable and sure to be appreciated? Here’s our lineup of sub-$50 swag.  From prints to printers, from pillows to penholders, we’ve prepared a panoply of photo presents you’ll be positively proud to proffer—or possess.

As a Shutterbug reader, you know how to shoot fireworks. But what do you say to your friends and kinfolk when they ask you for advice? Simple—just send them the link to this article. It’s a nice, relatively short list of 10 tips for photographing aerial pyrotechnics. Because after all, there’s more to fireworks than what meets the sky. 

Carpenters are known to say things like, “Measure twice and cut once.” It’s hard to argue with that advice. But what about photographers? Should we trust the words of folks who deal mainly with images? 

To our younger readers, film is how we used to take pictures. We called them “photographs” and had to wait (a long time) to see how they turned out. To our not-so-young readers, here’s a quiz to test how much you remember. We also sneaked in a couple questions about current film products because after all, film is not dead. Ready? 

We haven’t had a photography quiz since July, so everyone’s brain should be rested and fresh. Here are 13 fun questions to probe the depth of your capacity for frivolous information about our favorite pastime. Let us know how you score!

Photography relies on science as much as art, and to be successful, photographers have to know a lot of things. Some of the requisite knowledge falls into the category of common sense and some is acquired through the indispensable combination of training and practice. And every once in awhile we stumble upon a nugget that can only be described as dumb luck. It was dumb luck that led me a few years ago to a website I want to share with you.