shooting photos Archives

Shooting portraits of strangers in an unknown land is probably one of the most difficult of challenges that a photographer can face. Notwithstanding the inherent challenges of having to work in an alien environment, one also has to tackle the problem of shooting absolute strangers and making good photos in the process. Read more...

Using Backlighting for your Portrait Images

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. Read more...

Advantages of a hand-held light meter over a built-in light meter

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...

11 Tips on How to Make Your Travel Photos Go From Average to Wow!

Having spent thousands of dollars on a dream vacation at some pristine holiday destination we come home thinking that the images we took would remain a constant source of reminder of that wonderful time spent together. That’s until we download the images on to the computer. A shocker awaits us. A number of under-exposed images, that mostly have our faces barely recognizable, welcome us. This to be only bettered by over-exposed photos where everything seems to be coated with a blinding flash light further depresses us. Not to mention the half-hearted compositions, that have everything going for them but for the background, cluttered, boring and plain shocking at times. Really our travel photos can be so depressing at times that the whole mood of coming back from a great vacation can be lost in just a few minutes. Most people would be inclined to think that it is their camera that should be blamed. “Boy, I wish I had a better camera!” Well, dear friend, that’s an excuse and nothing more. Your camera is only as good as you are with it. If you know how to shoot great pictures you would do a much better job with a simple 5 megapixel phone camera than someone who wields a 5D Mark III and knows nothing about how to use it. Read more...

Every Independence Day, or even Memorial or Labor Day, it’s common — a given, even — to see fireworks light up the night sky. They make for wonderful sights and sounds for large gatherings, but fireworks also make great photographs. Its just about knowing how to capture such colorful images.

Shooting fireworks is fairly simple, but it takes some planning and equipment to do so. However, follow these tips and you too can have wonderful photos of those sky rockets.