Single-Serving Photo

Remember when I told you about that crazy remote-controlled robot carting a DSLR that these two British brothers would drive around Africa, taking up-close-and-personal photos of wild animals? It was called the BeetleCam, and it was the brainchild of William and Matthew Burrard-Lucas, two swiftly burgeoning wildlife photographers from the UK.

Well, they’re at it again, only this time they’re not using a remote-controlled dune buggy and they’re not photographing lions or elephants. They’re using an ingenious tabletop lighting setup and capturing the births of mosquito larvae.

See all of the amazing macro photos and read about the brothers’ technical process on their guest post on Digital Photography School!

Via Digital Photography School, via Burrard-Lucas.com

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…)

In my workshops I teach people how to organize their photos, both the physical files on disk as well as their Photoshop Lightroom catalogs. Although I’ve been teaching these classes for years, I realized that I’ve never once written about it.

Well, that’s coming to an end.

What you’re about to read is a totally inclusive, top-to-bottom, front-to-back workflow for organizing, sorting, and managing your digital photos using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Similar techniques will, I’m sure, apply to Apple Aperture, though all keyboard shortcuts and terminology will be Lightroom-specific.

For the record, I use Lightroom on a Mac and chose it because of Adobe’s openness to beta testing and feedback from the photography community, which I believe has made Lightroom the best tool for the job. Let’s get to it. (more…)

Have you heard of the fabled “neutral density” filter before? Whether or not you know what one is, I’m about to blow the lid off this mysterious piece of kit, totally demystify the nineteen (well, four…) ways their strengths are measured, and give you some awesome tips for using them effectively in the field.

Starting from the top, what exactly is an ND filter, anyway? (more…)