Single-Serving Photo

To the right of your histogram that is. You do remember how to read one, yes? Slightly, ever so slightly exposing all of your photographs to the right of the histogram, which is to say slightly overexposing them, should be your goal, 100% of the time.

Why? Because there is more data in the brightest few stops of sensor attenuation than in the rest of the entire range, which is to say that there will be more detail, less banding, less noise, and so forth, within the brightest areas than there will be in the darkest ones. But you’ve observed that before, right? You’ve seen how terrible shadow areas can look when you try to brighten them up.

“It’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.“—Will Greenwald

Then there’s this guy Will Greenwald. He just posted a whole article about this in which he says “it’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” Awesome, I agree. But neither of us are saying you should “blow out” any of your image; definitely don’t do that.

Strangely, most of the people who commented on Will’s article disagreed with him. Those people are amateurs. (more…)

To say that photographing the fireworks display in Washington, D.C. is a challenge might be hyperbole. Compared to those in Boston and New York City, which I’ve photographed two times each, getting a reasonable spot to shoot from is a cakewalk.

The National Mall opens at around 10 AM, but even at 3 PM there are still plenty of good spots by the Lincoln Memorial, so there’s no need to hurry. The real challenge, it would seem, is the complete and total lack of information about the strategy and considerations of shooting in the heart of the nation’s capital. (more…)

Buchstabensuppe, by tillwe

For those of you Nikon shooters out there who ritualistically browse the B&H catalog and wonder What on Earth is a f/4.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S VR DX lens, anyway?, now there is an answer for you, straight from our favorite bringer-of-technological-clarity, Bob Johnson at Earthbound Light.

In his post Nikon Lens Designation Alphabet Soup, Bob explains the meaning of all of those little acronyms that Nikon seems to throw around like confetti. At last, an understandable answer!

In my instruction I get asked a lot about how the five most fundamentally important settings of the camera work together to achieve the effects you desire. It can be hard to penetrate the curtain of photographic jargon, some of which can seem counterintuitive, so I decided to take a minute to explain all of this stuff at a very high level. If you have specific questions of your own, please leave a comment below and I promise that I will answer them.

The only five settings that you need to know are:

• Shooting mode
• Aperture (or f-stop)
• Shutter speed
• ISO sensitivity
• Exposure value (EV)

After the jump I will explain in detail. (more…)

I’ve read at least one account of how to move photos from one Lightroom catalog to another, which is pretty common if you travel with a laptop and make edits in the field (as I do). It’s a tremendous help to be able to spend hours on the flight home organizing and even editing images, but all of that work would be for naught if there wasn’t a nice, easy way to move those images and their corresponding metadata onto your primary computer.

Fortunately, there is! I will tell you how! (more…)