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This article is excerpted from “Creating HDR Photos, The Complete Guide To High Dynamic Range Photography” (ISBN 978-0-8230-8586-6, Amphoto Books, 2012, $29.99). In this comprehensive guide, Davis covers a wide range of exposure, composition and processing strategies for creating great HDR images, including both bracketed and single shot HDR images. He also covers a wide range of processing programs and how to get the most from them. This guide is one of the best and most current HDR how-to’s we’ve seen.—Editor

Green screens (and blue screens) are used to make it easy to blend in another background to a portrait or model shoot, anything from a plain backdrop to a scenic or cityscape. Many of us, myself included, have photographed models on a green screen background. The expectation is that it should be quick and easy to remove the green screen in Photoshop and drop in another image or color. Unfortunately, when you’re working with software, things don’t always turn out the way you planned.

The visual arts world has lost a rare visionary with the recent passing of renowned photographer, educator, essayist and critic Allan Sekula. Acclaimed for his unique, multidisciplinary approach, Sekula devoted his life to writing, photography and film, and encouraging scholars and students to think critically about how the visual arts interact with the social and political realities of our time.

Lighting fair-skinned subjects can be a challenge, but when working outdoors or indoors, controlling the flash, managing external illumination or simply shading the areas you don’t want highlighted can yield great results. Here are some tips on lighting that also includes groups where skin tone varies. As we’ll see, fair-skinned people have a beauty all their own that can easily be brought out in correctly exposed portraits. Play around with the color temperature and see what can be done with a little extra warmth or coolness.

OnOne Software’s Perfect Effects 3 (www.ononesoftware.com) offers more than 300 effects in 14 categories: Vintage, Darkroom, Borders, Portrait, Color and Tone, Film, Glow, Detail, Black and White, Landscape, Movie Looks, Photo Filters, Textures and Vignettes. For maximum flexibility in your workflow, Perfect Effects 3 works as a standalone program, or as a plug-in. Perfect Effects 3 integrates as an external editor for Lightroom and Aperture or as a plug-in for Elements or Photoshop. If you are using PE3 as a Photoshop plug-in, the effects appear under the File>Automate menu.

All the photographic effects you select are now previewed full screen before you decide to apply them—they draw in seconds. Further, the program offers the ability to stack multiple effects together to create your own unique look, with the option of selective masking on each layer. Advanced tools allow you to change the Blending mode options of the layers, as well as to control which tonal regions and/or colors of the image the effect is applied to. With new manual controls, you can adjust every element of an effect—not just the strength but also the color, tone and texture—to fine tune and customize your personal look. Here’s a look at some of the magic you can perform with this program.

Digital cameras allow photographers to stretch the boundaries of what we can capture like never before. Using extremely high ISO settings like 25000, in-camera noise reduction algorithms, and expanded dynamic range capability, we can now photograph in low light situations and expect to use shutter speeds fast enough to take sharp pictures. This is truly revolutionary. However, there is a price to be paid, and that price is image quality. You just can’t expect a picture taken at ISO 25000 to be as sharp and to show fine detail with tack sharp clarity like a picture taken at ISO 200. There are limits to what advanced technology can deliver.

Photogenic Professional Lighting is one of the classic names in portrait lighting and has been making studio equipment for more than 100 years. A lot has changed in technology since 1903 but one thing that hasn’t is Photogenic’s manufacturing their lighting gear for studio or location portrait photography here in the USA. I chose the AKC55K 640 WS Soft Box Portrait kit for this review because it was a 2-light system that includes a soft box on a boom, something beginning portrait photographers sometimes overlook because they think this particular lighting tool is too expensive and too complex to use. My experience with this kit demonstrated otherwise.