Last week, I had posted a landscape photograph for installment #8 of our How Was This Picture Taken? series. Judging from the comments, many of our readers took this exercise very seriously and posted deliberate and insightful remarks on how this photograph was visualized and constructed. I enjoyed both the aesthetic and...
Nikon 200-500mm f/5.6 vs 500mm f/4 at Block Creek Ranch
Recently, my wife and I headed to the Texas hill country near San Antonio for a brief getaway at the Block Creek Bed and Breakfast. This trip offered me a chance to spend some time using the new Nikon 200-500mm f/5.6E VR zoom and it has changed my opinion of it....
Different Lenses for Different Landscapes
For the past couple years, I have thought of myself primarily as a “telephoto” landscape photographer. A majority of scenes that catch my attention look best with a telephoto lens, and I tend to keep a 105mm or 70-200mm on my camera most of the time. However, a recent trip...
Photographing Birds at Hendrie Valley Sanctuary
I recently spent a very enjoyable morning photographing birds at Hendrie Valley Sanctuary at the Royal Botanical Gardens in the Hamilton Ontario area. Photography Life reader Ray Miller suggested this location to me, and since I'm relatively new to bird photography I jumped at the chance to join him during...
Dell XPS 13 Review
After reviewing Microsoft's Surface machines, a number of our readers requested us to also review other competing products that sport enough processing power to run photo applications like Lightroom and Photoshop. Since in my past corporate life I spent quite a bit of time with Dell PCs and servers, it...
How to Choose the Sharpest Aperture
Photographers have a dilemma. If you want a photo to have the largest possible depth of field – from the foreground to infinity in a single photo – a small aperture is absolutely necessary. At the same time, though, a small aperture causes your photograph to lose sharpness from diffraction....
How Was This Picture Made #08?
For Part 8 of our How Was This Picture Taken? series, I have chosen the following photograph to share. On two recent road trips into the desert near my home base in Southern California, I had the pleasure of going on two landscape photo shoots, both of which I plan to write a...
What is Lens Compression and How to Use It In Your Photos
Have you ever heard someone say that a telephoto lens “compresses” the background or “flattens” an image? What exactly does this mean? The perceived distance between your subject and the rest of the scene is dependent on two things: where you stand relative to your subject to take the photo...
Nikon D5 Preview with Sample Photos
I got my Nikon D5 a week and a half ago and have been itching to try it out on some real world wildlife photography, but this time of year is tough for wildlife where I live and also the weather here has been insanely difficult the last week or...
How Was This Picture Made #07: The Answer
Last week I posted a portrait as the next installment to our How Was This Picture Taken series. There were a lot of great guesses and a few people even guessed the exact technique that I used to create the image! (more…)