If you like taking landscape photos at night, you’ll surely be familiar with one of the main challenges: successfully focusing on the stars. Often, you can’t use autofocus, since there isn’t enough light for your camera’s focusing system to lock onto anything. Unfortunately, even manual focus doesn’t always work, which...
Photography Techniques Category Archive - Page 14
Photographing Birds Using Slower Shutter Speeds
Making a change to one's camera kit is always a good reason to go out to get some practice using it outside and indoors. I went out to Bird Kingdom in Niagara Falls Ontario a few days ago with my Nikon 1 V3 and CX 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 lens to practice my...
Five Hidden Landscape Photography Tips
I've heard a lot of "hidden tips" for landscape photography over the years. Most of them weren’t helpful at all. But, along the way, I have collected a handful that really are useful — nuggets of wisdom that I still use today, and that I recommend to other photographers as often...
How to Reduce Camera Shake on a Tripod
Camera shake can be a real hassle and pain when shooing off a tripod. Sometimes camera shake can be completely eliminated with a couple of simple steps and other times, it can be quite painful and sometimes even impossible to deal with. How does one reduce camera shake? Are remote...
How to Improve Your Photography
Among the many articles I have read here, at Photography Life, the most controversial are the ones that especially call my attention. Despite being against the polemics, I am in favor of sincere dialogue, because through dialogue we can grow internally too. In my opinion, there are several steps that...
DIY: Reliable and Cheap Universal White Balance Reference Device
DIY projects are always popular, so we’ve decided to throw another one into the mix. This particular little idea comes from a problem that many photographers have – where do you get a good, small, white/gray surface to use for white balancing your RAW shots in conversion? (more…)
Sports Photography at CMU
Earlier this summer I posted an article about cityscape and architecture photography in the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am extremely grateful for the positive response that article received; thank you! Many photographers specialize in one genre, but urban environments make up less than half of my subjects. Sports photography...
Aquarium Macro Photography of Ornamental Shrimp
“There’s such a thing as ornamental shrimp?” This is the typical response of family and friends when I speak to them about my recent hobby of keeping ornamental shrimp. Believe it or not, there is growing interest around the world about breeding and keeping these little freshwater critters as pets....
Using Extension Tubes in Strong Wind
As photographers we often try to anticipate the weather when planning to capture specific images. Sometimes Mother Nature cooperates, and sometimes not. I was out today using some extension tubes to capture a few images of insects and flowers. Ideally I would have preferred a nice calm day, rather than...
Technicolor Black and White
Recently I returned to one of my enduring passions: shooting film. I'm Italian and I recently moved to California. In Italy, it's really hard to find a good lab to develop film and it's even more difficult to find rolls of film of the brands I like. Here in the...