Do you need to tweak your pictures in software? Yes you do. Don’t like sitting behind a computer? Nerd work? You will sit behind a computer to tweak your photos and yes you are a nerd.
Click here to see some pretty flowers and my recommendations for photo editing software.
Check out what you can shoot in just a few hours at your local arboretum. Butterflies and ponds.. woooohooooo, aren’t you getting excited.
Click here to see what all the raves are about.
What is better than looking at pictures of pretty women? Why reading about fill flash of course!
Click here for more of my nieces and how I used fill flash.
What does a crop sensor camera do for your zoom lens? What do beer, women, and pixels have to do with sensors?
Eagles stabbing fish with their bloody talons! Yea, get the gore here. I got some great shots at Conowingo Dam in Maryland and I like ’em! I also talk about getting the proper camera exposure for birds in flight.
I attended my niece’s wedding a few weeks ago where I shot some pictures with my Canon 5D Mk II and the Canon 24-105 L f/4.0 IS lens. So to prepare a bit, I checked out some of the on-line forums for professional wedding photographers and noticed that black and white (B&W) photos were usually part of their portfolios and they looked really cool. So, I thought I would give it a try.
What to do with my entire library of 35mm slides? I have roughly 3,000 slides in boxes, and loaded into Kodak carousels. I gotta get them into digital.
Here is how I did it, for low cost, and great results.
Click here to finally move those boxes of kids, pics at the shore, and bad fashion to your computer.
Boy, if only I had a home studio. Lights, reflectors, half-nude models walking around, paparazzi demanding my time, crappy Euro-disco music blasting….. oooooooh… that would be great. So I did my own home studio using nothing but a blanket.
Click here to learn about setting white balance in my new home studio!
How to backup your precious data and photos. Also, some tips on what technologies to buy and what to avoid. You need to read this as disaster is just behind you. Look out!!!! AHHSHAHHHAAAAHHAHAAA!
Here is a collection of tulips I shot over the last few years. Most were with my current Canon 5D Mk II, a truly amazing camera, but a few were with my first DSLR, a Canon XTi. Think about what is behind your subject before you push the shutter.
Getting some great shots of fireworks has always been on my photo to-do list for many many years. I just never could nail any good ones – until now. Here is how I did it.
Click here for the fireworks (and some tips how to learn with beer!).
You do need Megapixels: Some bloggers will say more megapixels don’t matter and are more about marketing and sales gimmicks; for the most part, they are absolutely correct. If you are shooting JPGs and not doing much tweaking, you are wasting your money thinking you need a new camera with more megapixels. However, if you are shooting birds like I do, then you will be doing a ton of cropping to turn a smudge in a frame into a picture of a bird.
Click here for Solitary Pipers and some before and after heavy crops.
Taking a different point of view often means just getting down to eye level with your subjects. This works especially well with waterfowl, wading birds and shorebirds. And you can do it no matter what equipment you are using! Sit on your haunches, lie on the ground, or, if using a tripod, don’t extend the legs, just spread them out and kneel down behind it to take your shots.
Change your point of view, I think you’ll like what you see!
Click here to view Ed’s point of view on changing your point of view.
Wanna make art? I gave a sure-fire tip for doing this in my blog about depth of field (DOF) here, but there are more little tricks to turning a typical photo into something special. Besides shallow DOF, another trick is backlighting. Backlighting is where your light source, say the sun, is actually in front of you and therefore behind your subject. This is tricky to pull off, but I will try and walk you through some tips so you can get started.
Click here to see some cool flower pics and learn how to do backlighting.
This is it. The Rosetta Stone. These are the instructions to get yourself off of Automatic mode. The purpose of this article is to give you a starting point for taking your camera off of Automatic, and getting you on your way to taking purposeful, artful pictures. You can’t do this on Automatic; you must take control of your camera. The good news is it is not difficult and if you use my approach, you will have a base for learning and framework to approach most situations.
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