Words

There are lots of “rules” to think about when composing an image. At its simplest, effective composition is mostly about arranging shapes.  When you are thinking about a composition in front of your camera, it helps to remove the labels and view the scene in terms of just those shapes: the “shapes” that make up […]

Shooting to a theme is one way to keep your mind quietly alert to photographic opportunities.  In the context of photography, a theme is simply a coherent set of subject matter.  A theme could centre around a set of objects, (Doors, Abstracts, Hands) or it could be a concept (Contrasts, Sorrow, Joy, Indifference).  Photographing to […]

Texture overlays are a great way to add additional depth and dimension to your images. It’s not for everyone, and it doesn’t work with every image. The technique though, has been around long before Photoshop: in the past you might have sandwiched two transparencies (or two negatives) together and printed them as a single image. […]

Taming Lightroom’s Local Adjustment Tools Lightroom has several local adjustment tools you can use to work on specific areas in your images, including the Adjustment Brush and the Graduated filter. Both have been criticized for been somewhat blunt instruments: lacking the precision of carefully masked adjustment layers in Photoshop. While it’s true that Photoshop offers […]

The Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis is an awesome sight to behold. If you live in the northern reaches of the globe, or even if you are in areas as far south as the northern tier of US states or anywhere in Canada or northern Europe, chances are good that the Aurora will visible to […]

As a group, wide-angle lenses are seemingly the hardest for beginning photographers to master. Why is that? Well, for two reasons actually, both tied to their wide field of view. We generally think of “wide-angle” as referring to lenses for full frame cameras of about 35mm or less (about 24mm or less for reduced frame, […]