Incident Light Meter, Sekonic L-358
There’s no question that in some complex metering situations, an incident light meter can be quicker, faster, simpler, and more accurate than the meter in your camera. Many incident light meters can also measure light from an electronic flash, a huge bonus when you are using a flash in the manual mode.
RØDE warning and registration page.
If you aren’t careful, you could end up with a fake RØDE Microphone. If you already bought one, here’s how to tell if it is fake. If you don’t have a RØDE mic, here’s how to avoid buying a fake.
Really Right Stuff makes an excellent, simple to use panorama set up that won’t take up a lot of room in your camera bag. After using bigger, more awkward panorama gear, switching to Really Right Stuff’s set up was like being in panorama heaven. It is compatible with the Arca-Swiss-System.
Two ball heads and two 3-way heads.
A good tripod head will save you lots of frustration. For still photography I recommend two types of tripod heads. If you do a little of everything you will want a quality ball head for the quick and easy aiming of the camera. If you only do landscape or architectural photography and you want precise separate controls in each axis of motion, you will want a 3-way head.
Looking for a tripod? Choose wisely. Other than a camera and a good lens, nothing can make a bigger difference in your photography than a good tripod. This is the place to find information, recommended models, and links to more information.
Forget-Me-Nots, Thorne-Swift Nature Preserve, Michigan
There are several ways to do closeup photography. Closeup filters, extension tubes, and macro lenses are the most commonly used options. The best gear for you depends on your preferences, how you want to work, the subjects you are after, how much stuff you want to carry, and how much you want to spend. I cover your best options.
Lens Calibration Tools
A lot of photographers have discovered their almost sharp lens was actually a very sharp lens once they tweaked the micro-adjustment settings. You will get sharper images if you adjust the settings for your specific camera and lens combinations. You do this using the micro-adjustment settings in the camera menu along with a lens calibration tool which you can buy or make yourself.
GoPro HERO12 Black. Click image for a larger version.
Looking for a small, mountable, “ideal for sports and action”, inexpensive, high definition video and still camera with a waterproof housing and image quality that Lucasfilm (the Star Wars people) calls “amazing”? This camera will go anywhere and mount just about anywhere. Prices range from $279 to $399 (which is a lot less than your typical DSLR with HiDef video).
Just a few of many Canon refurbished cameras and lenses from the Canon USA web site.
Do you want to buy a Canon DSLR and/or lenses on a budget? Is video quality important to you? This article is for you.
Canon T7 refurbished kit with camera and two lenses.
Yes, you can get a quality, name brand DLSR with two lenses for under $500 at Canon USA. I found this particular special this afternoon for $440.
Painting with light is an interesting technique that gives you a different kind of look from using a flash unit or ambient light. As with other kinds of light you can make your subject as light or dark as you want. For these images I went with a darker, low key look.
Welcome to my online buying guide for photographers. With over 75 articles it is one of the most comprehensive buyer’s guides on the web.
I get lots of photo questions, and many of them begin with “What is the best . . . .” They usually come from photographers or someone who is shopping for a photographer.
My “best of the best” series recommends the best photo gear, accessories, software, books, DVDs, online photo labs, and a whole lot more. Thanks to the information in these articles I get emails from photographers thanking me for saving them time, frustration, and a lot of money.
This article is published annually in November with regular updates. Most recent update: November 17, 2023.
It is that time of year and Halloween activities abound. Go out and create colorful images. This collage was created from images taken at Trunk or Treat last year in Lamoni Iowa.
Thursday evening, October 14, 2021, you can photograph Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon all in one frame, and Venus too provided you have a really wide angle lens. This photo was taken October 13 at 8:11 pm local time and Venus is getting pretty low in the sky. On October 14, the moon will be in between and below Jupiter and Saturn, forming a triangle.
Beth is a concert violinist, who, in her own words “lives for art”. Our first outdoor photo shoot was in a cold and windy snowstorm with her playing her violin. Our second shoot was also in the snow (links below). For this autumn shoot we went with water.
Continue reading
Marshall Pass is a beautiful fall color drive in southern Colorado, and still pretty much a secret. It does not turn up on most lists of the most beautiful fall color drives in Colorado. It is a beautiful drive with a lot of fall color photo opportunities.
Autumn, Tahquamenon Falls, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Fall color will soon be sweeping the country (and already is up in Alaska). To make the most of it, you want to be at the right place at the right time. With some help from the internet, I will help you find the best fall color locations at the peak of the season.
The original of this photo was a mistake. A throw away. Anoush and I were doing soft light portraits, thanks to the canopy of leaves overhead. I had carefully metered for the existing shady light conditions. But when I clicked the shutter, thanks to a breeze or something, the sun broke through the leaves and a beam of sunlight hit Anoush’s face and washed over some of the rest of the scene. The result was most of the image ended up somewhere between properly to overexposed, and her face was the most overexposed. It looked bad. The kind of photo most people would discard. But I didn’t throw it away. I learned from one of my photo guru’s years ago never to throw away a photograph, even a bad one.
Last night I was looking at the folder with some of my “favorite photos” for August 23 (screen capture 1, below) and something did not look right. I knew I created the sunflower photo late in the afternoon on the way home from a retreat in Northern Michigan. I also knew I created the image of our grandson Drew in our front yard in central Ohio. So how could I have gotten home from the retreat in time to take a picture of Drew on the same date?
The first thing to do is to ask permission ahead of time. Some places do not allow photography during the performance or they limit the number of photographers. In this case, Beth asked me to photograph her recital and I was the official photographer. One of the keys to photographing an event is not to become a serious distraction from the main event. That means not doing a lot of wandering around, and certainly not getting in front of people who are watching the event. Be as discreet as possible. If you need to move during a performance, if at all possible do it during the applause between numbers.
“In-Camera Compositing with Canon Explorer of Light Lindsay Adler”
This is your chance to see how an exceptionally good portrait photographer works in the studio. Even if you don’t have expensive studio gear, you can learn a lot about using lights and working with your subject.
Big Bend National Park is one of my favorite places on the planet. My photography guide to Big Bend is here. March and April are good months to go. You will see more flowers in mid to late April but it will also be hotter. Fall is a prime time also. If you don’t mind the chance of a sudden cold spell and maybe some snow, I like winter in Big Bend too, but most people prefer spring and fall. Summer is ungodly hot.
Digital Photo magazine wrote an article on the top three ring lights for 2021. Ring lights are more flattering since they minimize shadows. And these are reasonably priced.
It was a week and a half after Valentine’s Day and most of the dozen Valentine’s Day roses in a vase on the dining room table were done and had been thrown away, but a few were still looking good. I asked Sami to lay on the floor, handed her a long stemmed rose, and I carefully arranged her hair. Then I stood up and pulled the best looking petals off of more roses and randomly dropped them on her. Some didn’t land quite right so I re-positioned a couple of them.
I was processing this image of Lyn Marie in Photoshop and the longer I looked at it the more I decided the color of the door frames, carpet, and walls took away from her colorful clothing. It made sense to me to remove all color from the image except Lyn Marie. In this tutorial I will show you how to do that. The simplest approach was to create a black and white layer on top, and remove part of that layer so you can see the color layer of Lyn Marie underneath.
I was aware of some of Peter Lindbergh’s famous images, like “5 Supermodels” but I did not know until recently that Peter Lindbergh is the photographer that created those images. This documentary is about Lindbergh and his work and you see a number of his stunning images.
Thanks to the recent Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC), photographing birds has been my thing lately. On a fine, chilly winter day with slightly diffused sunlight, I found this Cardinal in the snow.
I’ve been waiting for a sunny day for a while to photograph the Purple Finches that started coming to our bird feeders a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday I finally got my chance. This fellow landed on top of our deck umbrella before heading for one of the feeders.
Thanks to the weather and the recommendations from U.S. medical experts that this is not the time to be traveling, I have been doing much more photography than usual of the birds visiting our bird feeders. This male House Finch had just grabbed a black oil sunflower seed and was getting ready to eat it.
I was working in the studio with the beautiful Lela Rae. This is an example of cross lighting which creates nice contours and shadows. There is one light to her left and one to her right, almost directly opposite each other. I decided to use colored gels over the lights which I thought would enhance the look of the image..