Photo How To

Shutterbug columnist Scott Kelby recently gave a great lecture on the ethics of portrait retouching, and offered some valuable tips on how to improve your people pictures without making your subjects look fake.

While the video below is billed as an “advanced” tutorial, using a camera’s built-in spot metering mode is actually very simple. And once you master this technique, exposure mistakes will be a thing of the past. 

Most of us photograph birds on occasion, regardless of our favorite genre, because these colorful and accessible subjects are just about everywhere you look—including in your own backyard. Inexperienced shooters typically concentrate on stationary subjects perched on a branch because of a common misconception that capturing birds in flight is far beyond their skills.

Have you ever captured a photo, looked at it on your camera’s LCD, and said to yourself, “Wow! This looks perfect,” only to view the image closely on the computer and find a bunch of distracting imperfections? If that’s a familiar scenario, this tutorial is for you.

Inexperienced photographers typically strive for maximum sharpness from foreground to background in every image they shoot. A more sophisticated approach often involves strategically adding lens blur to accentuate a key subject within frame. And you'll learn an effective way to do exactly that in this tutorial from the Park Cameras YouTube channel.

"Lens diffraction" is a term you've likely heard before, but do you really understand the concept and how it can impact your photos? If not, it's time to get up to speed, and this lesson from the Visual Education YouTube channel will do exactly that in less than nine minutes.

There was a time when lens flare was considered a negative attribute of photos shot outdoors. Often caused by using a lens with inferior coatings (or no coatings at all), flare can also result from failing to use a lens hood when shooting on sunny days (depending on your position relative to the sun).