If you have experimented with long exposure photography, you may have seen light leakage issues in your images. For the uninitiated – your camera is a light tight body that is intended to allow light from one end only, and that’s the front of the lens. Light only enters when you press the shutter release. Normally, your camera wouldn’t allow light to enter through any other opening in the camera. However, unless you have a badly manufactured camera, there is typically only one source that could potentially harm your images, and that’s your camera’s viewfinder. Let’s talk about what you can do to mitigate light leaks during those long exposures.
High Magnification Macro Photography on a Budget
Hey folks, my name is Siddhant Sahu, I am a 16 years old aspiring photographer from India. I have been shooting macro photographs for about a year now and I would try to encapsulate all I have learnt along my way in this short article. I believe that macro photography has the power of entering in a whole new world of tiny creatures. In fact with only modest piece of equipment you can shoot high magnification macro photographs. It’s good to mark the behavior of insects and how close you can approach some of them, but then again these are wild animals and there is no way to predict how exactly they will behave, each subject can be different, each background can be different. But with digital photography there is no penalty to shoot thousands and thousands of photos, and eventually someday among those thousands photos one particular would be usable enough. Anyone is capable of doing this, you don’t need the greatest lens or the newest camera out there. Macro photography is physically exhausting, challenging and requires a lot of patience and time consuming but you can get amazing results with fair piece of equipment.
Gorilla Photography Tips
I have been fortunate over the years to see a few of the many great apes in the wild. My work includes photographs of some of the highly endangered species such as the mountain gorillas. In this article, I will present my thoughts on the best places to capture these wonderful animals on camera as well as some of the issues I have faced doing so. Finally, I will outline my suggestions for camera and lens selections.
How to Edit Videos in Photoshop
With almost all of our cameras featuring video capabilities (I’m looking at you, Nikon Df), most of you have probably considered going beyond the occasional family video. However, like photography, video requires post-processing for best results, and the prospect of buying After Effects, Premiere Pro, and SpeedGrade just to get your toes wet is daunting for many photographers. What you may not know is that you already have a powerful video-editing program in Adobe Photoshop CC, or CS6 Extended. This is an easy way for photographers to play around with film without purchasing hundreds of dollars worth of software, and is surprisingly effective. I’m certainly not a professional videographer as my example video will show, but I have enjoyed editing a few shorts, just for fun. The two most critical aspects of editing for video (not including cuts/sequencing) are color-grading and sharpening, both of which can be done relatively painlessly in Photoshop using tools you’re already experienced with.
Waterfall Photography Tips
Most landscape photographers, myself included, love to photograph gigantic, thunderous, raging waterfalls, quiet little babbling brooks, and just about everything in between. Successfully photographing them is not always easy, though. Here are some tips that I am constantly reminding both myself and tour participants alike while in the field:
Using Telephoto Lenses for Landscape Photography
When one thinks of landscape photography, one more often than not imagines dramatic, sweeping grand landscape scenes, which are almost exclusively taken with ultra wide-angle lenses. While these scenes can be quite stunning (and beautiful… and a lot of fun to shoot!), it is nice to make use of the drastically different perspective afforded by a telephoto lens. A telephoto lens, as you may know, is used to capture frame-filling images of faraway subject matter. This is because it has a much narrower angle of view than a wide-angle lens. While a wide-angle lens exaggerates differences in both the size of and the distance between near and far objects, a telephoto lens effectively reduces those differences. This means that a telephoto lens causes a close object to appear more similar in size relative to a further away object, even if the closer object would actually appear larger in person, and it means that a telephoto lens can cause the apparent distance between near and far objects to appear smaller, which creates a nice compression effect.
Tips for Photographing Small Lizards
If you live in a warm sub-tropical or tropical climate, or holiday in one, you’ve likely seen many small lizards scurrying about and you may have tried to photograph them. Often times this is not as easy as it first appears as these small critters tend to be quite skittish and can disappear in a blink of an eye. In addition, they tend to be quite small so unless you can get close enough to them these lizards can end up as minor subjects in your overall image.
Photographing Birds on the Niagara River with Nikon 1 70-300mm Lens
As a brief follow up to my Photographing Tundra Swans with Tamron 150-600 article, this piece features a small selection of bird-in-flight images taken along the Niagara River with a Nikon 1 V2 with the Nikon 1 CX 70-300 f/4.5-5.6 lens.
It is important that I state up front that I really struggled deciding to even write this article as the image quality is not up to the standard that I prefer to show to readers. Unfortunately trying to shoot white birds on greyish backgrounds accentuated the Nikon 1 system weaknesses and the lack of dynamic range is very apparent. I finally decided that since the images represent what can be expected under these particular shooting conditions that the images (hopefully) would still be of value to readers. As I stated in my review of the Nikon 1 CX 70-300 lens shooting birds in flight can be a challenge with the Nikon 1 system. People buying a super telephoto lens with the express intent of shooting primarily birds-in-flight are likely to be better served by using a DSLR combination. [Read more…]
How to Use a Tripod
When dealing with slow shutter speeds, a solid tripod is a must-have tool for eliminating camera shake and capturing sharp photographs. Although setting up a tripod and effectively utilizing it for photography needs at first sounds simple and self-explanatory, I often come across photographers that do not know how to properly use a tripod. Even though you could own the most expensive tripod on the market and know exactly what to do to yield razor sharp images, your images could still be suffering from poor framing choices. In this article, I want to explore the proper techniques for setting up, handling and using tripods.
Concert Photography Tips
I was recently asked how many concerts I’ve photographed, and realized that it is coming up on thousand in the last 15 years. Any given week you can find me shooting anything from a 20 person house concert to The Who in a 30,000 seat arena, and anywhere in between. Tonight, it will be an up-and-coming band called The Spring Standards, who I’ve shot 7 times in the past. They are a dynamic, high-energy band with a lot of emotion, character and flying hair to capture.
