Don’t shoot during the noon day hours on a sunny day! This is a rule we are told over and over: shoot only during the golden light of early morning and late afternoon. While this is generally good advice and can provide wonderful to light to shape and reveal texture and form, the opposite statement, […]
Removing Labels and Arranging Shapes
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 […]
Themes: answering the question, “What is There to Shoot?”
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 […]
Fun With Texture Overlays
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. […]
The Brush and the Grad
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 […]
Photographing the Aurora Borealis
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 […]