Photo How To

Today’s digital cameras have become so adept at almost any shooting situation that, paradoxically, they can inhibit creativity by always delivering a technically perfect result. With little effort, a photographer can produce a sharp, clear, well-exposed image, color balanced and, well, a bit too perfect.

Whether you’re shooting indoor portraits by window light or using available light outdoors, an inexpensive reflector is one of best tools for dramatically improving your results. In the five-minute video below, photographer Mark Cleghorn demonstrates everything you need to know to get the job done.

Photographers feast on early morning and early evening illumination. Summer brings us more hours of daylight and consequently more shooting time. But exactly when does the sun come up in your town? And how can you determine what time the sun sets in a city you are about to visit? 

If you use anything more capable than a smartphone for making photos, then you know all about sharpening. Well, at least you can find a menu item that, in a fraction of a second, turns “acceptable” photos into snappier snaps. It’s like flush toilets: you may not understand exactly how they work, but you know how to use them.

One way to avoid unnecessary processing time is to set the optimum white balance for your scene before shooting a photograph. That typically involves selecting one of the camera’s pre-set modes, or taking time to create a custom white balance setting yourself.

Josh Katz is a young photographer with great skills and an ability to teach them to others. In this tutorial he provides eight steps for adding impact to action photos with a simple camera panning technique.

If you’re too young to have ever used a manual focus camera (or too old to remember), it’s easy to take autofocus technology for granted. But most of us appreciate how this vital capability makes photography easier, faster, and far more precise.