outdoor photography

I admit it; I want the latest and the greatest camera.  The only problem is that camera costs $7000 and I don't really need it.  Now don't get me wrong; there are benefits for getting the latest and the greatest, but most photographers can get by with much less.  There are some basic principles to keep in mind that will help you choose the right camera for your needs. You need to know ahead of time 1) what kind of photography you're going to do and 2) how you're going to use your photos.  You need the feature set that matches your photographic interests, and you need image quality sufficient for your printing needs.  Let me say this on the second point.  Unless you need to crop your images a lot (like in many bird photos, etc), pretty much any current, entry level SLR will let you print large prints, assuming you're using a decent quality lens. Bottom Line. If you have a digital SLR made in the last 4 years or so, it's probably just fine for most ...

Needham's Skimmer One of the most disappointing feelings in photography is when you come home, load your pictures onto your computer, and realize that the photographs you thought were going to be so good are actually blurry. There are four basic causes for blurry photos, and there are ways you can correct for these causes in the future. Camera Movement --No one can hold a camera perfectly still, so camera movement can cause motion blur in an image.  To solve this, you can use a tripod , a lens with image stabilization (IS), or adjust your aperture/ISO  to get a fast shutter speed.  The faster the shutter speed, sharper you image will be.  The best solution for most photographic situations is a tripod.  I admit, though, that sometimes tripods aren't practical, so lenses with good IS can be a big advantage. Beware, though, raising your ISO may give you noisier images. And even with IS lenses, you can have blurry photographs if your shutter speed i...

Using a tripod is a discipline often shunned even by very experienced photographers.  "It slows me down, I have to lug it with me, and I have an image stabilized lens, so why do I even need it?" Okay, I'm going to admit it.  For some types of photography, I've said the same thing.  My recent passion is bird photography, and I'm hand holding a 400mm lens most of the time, especially after the sun is up.  Using a tripod is a great way to miss photographs of birds.  They just don't stick around long enough for me to get my tripod set. And for birds in flight, a tripod is often useless unless I already have it set when I see the bird flying.  So there are legitimate reasons not to use a tripod.  There, I said it. But for much of outdoor photography, it's better to use a tripod, even if you're using great, image stabilized (IS) lenses.  There are a number of very important advantages: It slows you down.  Yes, that's an advantage.  By s...

We all take pictures, and we can often recognize that some photographs are "better" than others.  But what makes a photograph good?  There's a lot that goes into this question, and certainly to some extent, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  But at the same time, there are many things that distinguish photographs as being "good." There are at least three things that photographers should take into account: Exposure   is the amount of light that is recorded by your camera's sensor.  If too much light comes in, the photo will be too bright, and if not enough comes in, it will be too dark.  Proper exposure is the amount of light that gives you the results you want.  Your exposure is controlled by three factors:  the length of time the shutter is open ( shutter speed ), the size of the opening in your lens ( aperture ), and the speed of your camera sensor ( ISO ).  You can change any of these settings manually and balance that change by a...

People come to a blog like this for many reasons.  But among beginning photographers, I suspect two are more common than all the rest together.  On the one hand, perhaps you're taking lots of pictures with your camera. You take pictures of your kids, the places that you go on vacation, and the great events in your lives.  But perhaps you would like to do more--you would like for photography to become a means of artistic expression.  On the other hand, perhaps you bought your digital SLR because you want to make photography a serious hobby and learn the craft.  You want to use the manual settings on the camera, and not just rely on the automatic shooting modes that do much of the thinking for you. Of course, these two reasons are not unrelated.  They are intimately connected to each other.  Photography is a nexus of craft and art.  We must engage the right side of our brains to create artistic images, and we must use the left side of our brains...

Unless you've trained your eyes to do so, you may not notice the differences in the color of light in differing situations.  But different light sources actually have different "color temperatues."  Indoor lighting varies in color temperature--tungsten lights are redder than fluorescent.  The above photograph was lit entirely by my daughter's night light--look how red the tungsten light looks on her face. Outdoors, the color of sunlight will change based on the amount of cloud cover and even the time of day.  Most of us go through life blissfully unaware of this unless we're impacted by the beauty of a sunrise or sunset and notice that the colors we see then aren't the same as what we see during the day. A pure white object will have a different color cast when lit by different kinds of light (like my daughter's pacifier in the above photo lit by a tungsten night light).  "White balance" allows you to correct for light of different color temp...

That's a good question, and it's one without an easy answer.  You can find very good photographers that have strong beliefs on either side of the issue.  But we should begin by answering a more basic question--what the heck is a RAW file anyway? Somewhere in the menu system of your dSLR, you'll find an option to shoot RAW files instead of JPEG files (or to shoot both).  Technically speaking, RAW files are not image files--they are simply files that contain the data recorded by your camera's sensor when you took your picture.  Because of this, you can't just open the file in any application like you can a JPEG file (which is a true image file).  The file must be interpreted by software to generate an image from the file.  And RAW formats are specific for each camera model, so you have to have software that has been updated after your camera was released or you may not be able to edit your files.  Without any work done to them, RAW files often look les...