It’s a simple fact of life for many photographers that excessive contrast sometimes ruins a photo. If you’re photographing a scene with bright highlights and deep shadows, it can be a nightmare to expose your image properly – not losing any details on either side of the histogram. Here’s how I dealt with such a situation while taking pictures during an amazing sunrise, and how you can apply the same lessons to your own photography.
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How to Take Better Photos at Night
How does one take better photos at night? Creating technically excellent images at night can be a challenge, especially for novice photographers who may rely on automatic camera settings to get the shot. During the day, there is usually an abundance of light which makes it easy to take a sharp, properly exposed photo. At night, the photographer must alter their mindset in accordance with a new set of challenges posed by the absence of light. This article will provide…
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Great Blue Herons In-Flight – Same Day, Different Times
People who enjoy bird photography can attest to the fact that patience is a virtue when it comes to capturing images of birds-in-flight. We simply never know when nature will present photo opportunities. As a result we need to keep aware of our surroundings, and our finger on the shutter release! During the past couple of months I’ve been out doing some field work for an upcoming eBook about hand-held bird photography.
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Best DSLR Cameras You Can Buy in 2018, Ranked
What are the best DSLR cameras to consider today? With so many different DSLR options on the market, it might be tough to pick the model that has the features you need that also fits your budget. Without a doubt, DSLR cameras have been a popular choice among photographers for many years now. Thanks to their excellent image quality, incredibly fast autofocus performance, superb ergonomics, rugged body build, excellent battery life and bright optical viewfinder, DSLRs have proven themselves to…
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What to Photograph in Morocco
What are the best places to photograph in Morocco? Having visited this picturesque country earlier this year, I made a detailed plan about the locations I wanted to visit that I have been wanting to sightsee and photograph for many years now. After spending a bit less than two weeks in Morocco and coming back with many images from a number of locations, I thought it would be a good idea to showcase the images, as well as share detailed…
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Best Camera Settings for Astrophotography
Anyone who has ever tried to take pictures of the night sky knows that it can be a challenge. If your camera settings aren’t optimal, you may end up with a dark photo, motion blur, or unsharp corners. Things get even more difficult if you want a sharp foreground, or if you try to capture deep-sky pictures of distant interstellar objects. Hopefully, this article will give you a good idea of how to set your camera properly for astrophotography.
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11 Travel Photography Tips When Traveling with Young Children
Let’s face it: it can be hard to pursue a hobby when you’re in the throes of raising children of a certain age (newborn to school-age). Photography is no exception. Add to that the challenges of traveling with children and travel photography starts to look like an impossible task. I’ve met so many people who told me that they gave up on photography because of these very hurdles. I picked up photography when I bought a DSLR to take better…
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A Professional’s Retrospective: Exploring The Fine Art of Nature
I was talking to someone recently who asked me what kind of photographs I make. I paused for a moment to ponder this basic but critical question, then answered that I specialize in photographing the details of nature. Although I revel in capturing the majestic grand scene when the elements all come together, I prefer focusing on the intimate landscape. Rather than describing the full scene in front of me, I zoom in tightly, attempting to imbue my images with…
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How to Increase the Resolution of an Image
Photographers love chasing after image quality, including maximum sharpness, detail, and resolution. Most likely, you’ve wondered at some point how to take higher-resolution photos, or increase the resolution of images you already have (whether photographs or digital illustrations). This article explains step-by-step how to increase resolution quickly and easily in common post-processing software. It also includes a comparison of five popular options for upsampling images to find which one yields the best results.
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Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM OSS Review
Announced alongside the Sony Alpha 9 body last year, the Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM is a crucial addition to Sony’s expanding full-frame E-mount lineup. The last couple of years has seen Sony release some beautiful lenses for their full-frame mirrorless cameras, but a glaring hole remained at the telephoto range of the lineup. With the introduction of the Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM, Sony has released a lens that covers a very useful focal range that can appeal to…
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Photographing Chile and Argentina
Sometimes you get to choose your holiday destination, sometimes circumstances choose it for you. I’ve had quite a lot of the latter over the years. Whenever my wife (a university professor) has a conference or research trip somewhere interesting, she tries to keep my wanderlust satisfied by tagging a holiday onto it. This was the case for our second trip to Chile a few weeks ago, though with the added bonus of visiting Argentina as part of the trip. I’m…
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Nikon’s New Lens Mount Probably Won’t Glow, But Maybe It Should
Hear me out on this. Maybe you’ve happened upon the news that Nikon is working on a new camera – and it seems like a pretty big deal. After all, it’s been almost five years since Sony’s full-frame mirrorless cameras were announced, and we all suspected Nikon would hit back eventually. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to the glowing lens mount shown in one of Nikon’s teaser videos.
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Nikon Mirrorless Camera Wishlist
It has been a year now since Nikon hinted at an upcoming Nikon full-frame mirrorless camera and the news are somewhat official now, with the launch of a Nikon special event page and its countdown, along with a press release that said absolutely nothing about the upcoming camera (which is why we never bothered publishing it at PL). But we know one thing for sure – the camera is supposed to be released on August 23 of 2018, about a…
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Complete Guide to Black and White Photography
Do you ever feel the need to shoot one of your photographs in black and white, even if you can’t pinpoint why? The art of black and white photography is surprisingly difficult to master, and most images don’t make the cut. This article explains why some B&W photos succeed and others fail, including the seven critical elements of the best black and white work. It also covers how to convert monochrome images properly in software like Lightroom and Photoshop.
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Sony A9 Review
In the camera world, real innovation is hard to come by and indeed more elusive than the camera manufacturers would like us to believe. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the field of professional sports, wedding, and action photography where Canon and Nikon’s hegemony has created a field of highly competent cameras whose qualities are tied to their reliability and consistency more so than their innovation. Based on the decades-old DSLR design, these cameras rely on having accurate focusing…
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Photographing Wildlife with the Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR
In this article, I will approach the specific advantages and disadvantages of the older Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR lens when photographing wildlife. Photography Life already has an in-depth review on the lens by Nasim, as well as a review of the newer AF-P version as well. In the article below, we shall look into exploiting the pros and managing the cons of the lens on the field.
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Hiking the Laugavegur in Iceland: What Worked, What Didn’t
I’ve always preferred hiking more than any other method of finding landscapes to photograph. There’s something to be said for stopping at any point you see something interesting, knowing that only a small percentage of other travelers have taken pictures at the same spot. I recently dragged that philosophy to the extreme, spending nine days on Iceland’s Laugavegur trail and several side hikes. Here, I’ll summarize the best and worst equipment I used along the way.
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Life After Being Discontinued
As many folks are already aware, Nikon has confirmed that the Nikon 1 system has been discontinued. This isn’t the first time a camera line has been discontinued and it won’t be the last, especially given the fact that the digital camera market continues to shrink in size. Whether you are a current Nikon 1 owner or not, there are some things you can do if you feel your camera gear is at risk of being discontinued, or already has…
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Visual Storytelling in Portraiture
If you feel that your portraits lack the “wow” factor or that your viewers don’t feel the excitement you felt while making the image, then you might be just showing a situation rather than telling a story. Showing something that happened might do the job for a news photographer. But for the rest of us, this usually makes for dull, boring images. Today’s viewers are bombarded with visuals every day – they want more than just pure documentation of a…
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Going Lightweight for Photography Expeditions
It’s the middle of the night and still bright outside. I’m in Iceland a few weeks after the summer solstice, and I just finished the longest hike of my life – a nine-day version of the Laugavegur. I’ll have several photos and articles to publish now that it’s done, including this first post about the process of going lightweight on such a long hike. How do you trim your camera setup for such an ordeal?
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