You may have heard, nature and natural light photographers often say this – you must head out at least an hour before the sun peeks behind the trees. These photographers who have made a career out of shooting in natural light understand the tremendous significance of the early morning light. The early morning light (and for that matter the late afternoon light as well) is slanted, it comes at an angle that is almost parallel to the surface of the earth. What it does is it highlights textures, brings to life details like no other light can. Read more...
Growing up you would no doubt be advised that the best way to shoot portrait images is to place your subject facing the sun. While that approach does have some merits, because it tends to properly illuminate your subject, it has some serious downsides as well. For starters direct light can be unflattering. Plus, if you have carefully inspected your images half the time your subjects are squinting which is not a good thing for portrait photography.
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A technical term that you are likely to hear a lot is lens vignetting. Lens vignetting (sometimes also referred to as light fall-off) is a phenomenon that causes light to not reach the entire sensor after travelling through the lens aperture. A number of reasons are attributed to the phenomenon of lens vignetting. They are mainly segregated into two – mechanical and optical. The result however is the same, dark shadows in the shape of a circle at the corner of the image. Read more...
In one of the previous articles on this website I discussed in detail the many different metering modes and their advantages. Metering modes are what tells the camera what exposure value to use for a right exposure of a given scene. As you are already aware, there are any different types of metering modes. None of these are suitable for all situations though. Some photographers are particularly biased about certain metering modes. I in particular like the spot metering mode and normally my camera is always set to shoot on spot metering. The main reason is that being I can accurately select a spot that is middle-grey in the scene and set my exposure based on that. Read more...
Portrait photography, especially when we talk about studio portrait photography, as a genre, is heavily dependent on lighting. Though there are two different aspects to shooting portraits, first lighting and then posing, they evidently both strive to make the subject look at his/her best. In this tutorial we shall be looking at the basic setups for a studio portrait session using artificial lights. Read more...
One of things that you must learn is how to use off-camera flash. Or if I may recompose that statement, you must get the habit of using on-camera flash out of your system as early as you can. Of course those without the money to buy lights or those who prefer to shoot mainly with natural lights would disagree with me here. They would argue natural light is the best possible light for shooting weddings. I would agree, if I could have a way to ensure consistent natural light all through the day and during the evening. On many occasions you would find yourself in a desperate situation trying to complete a shoot because the sun is going behind the horizon. Read more...
Wildlife photographers are faced with a unique set of challenges. Not only do they often have to travel long distances to find their subject matter, but their success is dependent upon whether or not they have the understanding of the animal and the patience to wait for just the right moment. And yet ask any photographer what is the toughest part of shooting wildlife, and you'll likely get a response that falls somewhere along the lines of dealing with low light. The majority of animals, and especially those where I shoot in Africa, are most active once the sun begins to go down, making early evening the perfect time to snap a great photograph. This is when the predators are hunting (or at least doing more than cat-napping), and the watering holes are flush with the harder-to-spot animals such as rhinos, big cats, and hyenas, to name but a few. Read more...
You may have heard, nature and natural light photographers often say this – you must head out at least an hour before the sun peeks behind the trees. These photographers who have made a career out of shooting in natural light understand the tremendous significance of the early morning light. The early morning light (and for that matter the late afternoon light as well) is slanted, it comes at an angle that is almost parallel to the surface of the earth. What it does is it highlights textures, brings to life details like no other light can. Read more... 
