Tag: How To

No matter what you like to photograph, chances are, at some point you’ll find yourself shooting a portrait. Imagine being in the middle of composing that stunning Patagonia landscape image, when a weathered gaucho on his horse gallops up, providing a rare shot of those rugged cowboys. Or maybe you’re walking in the French Quarter of New Orleans and a jazz musician on the street gives you a stoic pose. And who hasn’t taken a few shots of their family and friends? Knowing the basic principles of creating a strong portrait is a valuable skill for all photographers.

New York-based Dutch photographer Mirjam Evers has traveled and photographed in more than 50 countries, focusing her camera and her eyes on creating environmental portraits and travel, documentary and adventure photographs. She’s able to transcend cultural and language barriers with an intangible spirit that comes through in every portrait.

While black-and-white photography has enjoyed a rebirth of interest, color is still how the world appears and is mostly photographed. Yet colors you see and experience often don’t quite translate to the picture you compose. We also sometimes want to interpret the world’s colors in ways that better express how we felt about a subject.

I just love natural light,” remarks photographer David Stoecklein, whose modern yet timeless portfolio of the American West is proof he knows how to wrangle available light. Stoecklein is constantly on shoots in areas that don’t always have running electricity. No power usually means no studio lighting—but it isn’t only for practical reasons that Stoecklein has become a master at using available light to create stunning portraits.

Although digital camera sensor technology has made big strides in recent years, there still are limits to the range of tones sensors can capture. So we often end up with highlights that are too bright or dark, muddy shadows.

I had 30 seconds left. Running through the pitch-black desert night, I stumbled into a prickly pear cactus, but didn’t have time to worry about the quills embedded in my leg. I was in pursuit of a masterpiece! I quickly switched gels, aimed and fired. Twelve seconds left. I practically flattened a tripod leaping behind an old juniper. I had to get one more critical burst in...bang, bang, bang...two seconds left.

Q) A lot has been written about the amazing things that can be done with plug-ins. PCPhoto has given me a lot of great tips as I’ve been learning more and more about using layers in order to fine-tune my digital images. I’ve become fascinated by what I can do with filters when editing my images. So now I’m wondering about whether I even need any filters when I take my digital photographs.

I usually devote this column to fixing and enhancing pictures in Photoshop Elements or Photoshop CS3 and, more recently, Adobe Lightroom. For a change, I thought I’d share my digital start-to-finish process, covering what I do, and what you can do, in the quest to make a picture-perfect inkjet print.

The trouble with creativity in Photoshop—going beyond the basics to more imaginative, artistic changes—is knowing where to start. The possibilities are almost endless and therein lies the rub. That’s where Photoshop plug-ins like Nik Color Efex Pro 3 provide a launchpad for experimenting with a variety of effects that can add drama and graphic punch to your images.

I think most photographers have a somewhat love-hate relationship with Photoshop. It’s a great program, to be sure, and it offers the most comprehensive and expandable set of tools for photographers. But on the other hand, it takes time to learn and use, and working on a computer isn’t what most photographers wanted to do when they began photographing. There are ways to make your workflow in Photoshop go faster so that you can spend more time with photography and less time trying to work through software. Here’s how you can accomplish that.

Constructed in a remote area of Peru in the 15th century, the lost city of Machu Picchu, the grandest of all Inca sites, is truly one of the photographic wonders of the world. Adobe Photoshop and its little sister, Adobe Photoshop Elements, can be considered wonders of the photographic world, too—wonders for creative photographers who want to get the most out of their images. In fact, much like Hiram Bingham, who discovered the famous lost city, photographers can discover and recover seemingly lost details in their images.

Q) In Windows XP, I have many subfolders defined for basic photo organization; however, I like to rearrange thumbnails in the folders as one would in a photo album. But I find that Windows often rearranges the thumbnails after I’ve spent a lot of time organizing them. I’ve tried turning off auto arrange, but it seems to happen anyway. I’ve tried arranging on type, etc., instead of name, but that doesn’t seem to help. Turning off auto arrange also interferes with organizing the photos in the first place. Is there some way of stopping Windows XP from reorganizing subfolders after they have been organized? Thanks for your help.

Check out the opening image for this installment of Quick Fix. It’s the result of using both Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS3 on enhancing a photograph that I took in Cappadocia, Turkey, during a 2007 family vacation.

I’ll be the first to admit, old-school flash photography intimidated me. Just the thought of figuring out guide numbers and flash charts put me in a cold sweat. If I was in a spontaneous shooting situation, say, photographing a colorful market, I just put my flash away and shot using available light. This resulted in a lot of mediocre photographs.

The action, costumes, colors and performances at festivals, special events and reenactments make them a ton of fun to attend and photograph. Taking snapshots is easy, but if you want to turn your snapshots into great shots, you have to pay careful attention to everything that’s going on around you, as well as realize the importance of your camera settings and lens choice. After all, you may get only one chance to photograph the event.

Q) I’m trying to figure out how the exposure compensation works on my digital SLR. It doesn’t seem to affect the metering. Am I using it the right way, or is there a problem with my camera?

With a digital SLR, and even with many compact cameras, you can manually select the shutter speed and ƒ-stop for powerful creative control. Fast shutter speeds (1⁄500 sec. and higher) freeze most action, and slow shutter speeds (1⁄30 sec. and slower) blur action. Wide apertures (ƒ/4.5 and wider) can be selected for shallow depth of field, and small apertures (ƒ/8 and smaller) can be used for greater depth of field.

While recently critiquing the work of one of my students, I noticed that several of his images lacked sharpness, which I immediately attributed to camera shake. We looked at the images’ EXIF data to find out at what shutter speed he was shooting while using a 200mm lens. He had been shooting at 1⁄30 sec.—far too slow a shutter speed to use with a telephoto, particularly without the camera being mounted on a tripod. When I asked him why he didn’t increase the camera’s ISO for a more reasonable shutter speed, his response was an all too common one. 

Taking pictures in the snow is cool, literally and figuratively speaking, but snow scenes present certain photographic challenges. First, all that white can fool a camera’s exposure meter into thinking that the scene is brighter than it actually is, therefore setting the camera for an underexposed picture. The remedy: Set your exposure compensation dial to +1. The increase should give you a better exposure, which, of course, you can fine-tune further with exposure compensation and in the digital darkroom. 

From baseball to soccer, race cars to dance, flying birds to breaching dolphins, the world around us is filled with action that just demands to be photographed. In this article, we’ll give you tips and techniques on how you can improve your action photography and increase your percentage of great shots. And while it can be frustrating—everyone, even the pros, have their share of missed shots—you’ll get better with practice and experience, so hang in there if your first efforts aren’t perfect.