Photography Masterclass

Carrie Sandoval shares tips on how to shoot babies. She uses a prime 50 mm lens.

The baby can be undressed or dressed in something very simple of a solid color.
Have an uncluttered background - it is very important. You may simply hang a sheet to hide the clutter.
Try to get eye contact with the infant.
Laugh and the baby will laugh with you too.
When the baby looses interest, bring in some toys or even cover your camera in a soft toy.
If they start crawling, you may use buskets.
Lighting from the above.
Stay down at the baby’s level.
Use macro lens for shooting [...] Continue Reading…

Learn how to take great birthday photos. A birthday happens once a year and you do not want to miss this occasion by producing bad photographs.

You need to be always prepared for the shoot. Get extra batteries and memory cards.

Work with the existing light as much as you can. To get some more light into your picture, use the popup flash for fill light.
Increase the ISO settings.
Try telling a story about your party by capturing important moments like guest arrival, birthday cake candels, kids’ playing.
Be creative: use different aperture settings on your camera, shoot through a balloon, try different [...] Continue Reading…

Basically low light photography can be split into four branches:

Hand help;
Sky;
Street and cars;
Indoor and interior.

For each of these situations you need to special eqipment and settings.

Hand held photography requires the manual mode in your camera and high ISO. Unless you plan to sell your image or print it in larger format, higher ISO settings like 3200 should not become a problem. You can always reduce the noise produced by higher ISO in post processing of your photos, Lightroom or Photoshop. See Photoshop tutorials on how to reduce noise. It is also important to have a good lens. Your kit [...] Continue Reading…

The light comes from the front element of your lens to the back element and then to the sensor. The distance between the digital sensor and the back element is called the a Focal Length. It is usually measured in mm. If this distance is small, you have a very wide field of view.

14 mm - 28 mm : wide angle
50 mm : standard
100+ mm : telephoto (compressed or maginified field of view)

These numbers refer to crop factor 1 (35 mm film size sensor).

See this online calculator to determine the required lens focal length to take a picture in [...] Continue Reading…

Camille Seaman tries to make people connected with the planet. It is not enough to have the viewer see what he or she has not seen before. It is important to make him or her feel an emotional connection. She never photographs when it is a bright blue sky. She is looking for a particular quality of light. Camille likes storming skies. Once she sees the natural light she feels appropriate, she is looking into the scene. Her advice is to see classical paintings that were made with natural light. When you are at home making a portrait of [...] Continue Reading…

You do not clean the sensor, you clean the filter that is attached to the sensor. But to keep it simple everybody refers it as a sensor.

Some people clean their camera sensor every day while others do it annually. It really depends on the environment you are using your camera in, how often you change your lens, etc. If you do not see dust spots on your images, do not clean it. However, if you have an important shooting ahead, make sure you do a sensor inspection beforehand and if necessary - clean it.

When actually doing the cleaning, do [...] Continue Reading…

Like an eye the camera uses a lens to focus on an image recording area. Aperture is adjusted to control the quantity of light coming through. Underexposed or overexposed image will be mostly black or white. Our aim is to capture between these black and white extremes.

A shutter speed is the other way to control how long each exposure takes. Doubling the sutter speed is one unit in the measurement called F-stop.

Aperture and shutter speed must be combined correctly to capute just the right amount of light and record the full range tones. Too much light causes overexposure and [...] Continue Reading…

The best pet photos are those that capute unique pet personality. However taking photos of pets is quite challenging because they are constantly moving, changing. They wil not pose for you so you have to follow them and catch them in action.

Shoot a lot of photos so that you can delete bad ones and still have a good chance to get a good shot.
Try to show your pet’s personality.
Use Action (or Sport) shooting mode in your camera which gives shorter shutter speed.
Anticipate where your subject is heading so you will be ready to shoot when he gets there.
Press your [...] Continue Reading…

You need to decide on your own if working in RAW is right for you. There is a number of advantages of working in RAW.

First of all RAW is not simply and equivalent of a digital negative as some used to say. In short, your camera does whole bunch of things just moments after you pressed the shutter release button. It automatically applies various filters to the image like: saturation, contrast, sharpening. It changes the white balance either trying to figure out what suits best (Auto white balance) or uses the one you specified. Then the camera compresses your [...] Continue Reading…

In this video tutorial Scott Smith shows how to use one light source in a studio for shooting black and white and then color portraits. A strip light is very narrow and soft, it comes from a soft box. It brings very soft shadowing to your photos. He uses black background because it will eat all the light coming in and that way he does not have to worry about reflections. This particular strip soft box has the light flashed back and then reflected to the model. There are other models in which the light comes directly to the [...] Continue Reading…