This is Rembrandt lighting. The best clue is the triangle shaped light on her right cheek.
Category Archives: Using Equipment
RGB vs Luminance Histogram
If your camera offers both RGB and luminance histograms, choose RGB. An RGB histogram is one of your most valuable exposure tools. A luminance histogram can lead to bad exposures and poor colors.
How to Use Your Camera’s Exposure Compensation Scale
The exposure compensation scale on your camera is one of the keys to mastering exposures, getting better images, and ending up with professional quality colors. This means taking your camera off of full auto mode and taking control of your own exposures.
How to Photograph a Musician in the Cold and Snow

It was my happy privilege to do winter portraits of Beth Presler who is a superb violinist. This article has suggestions for photographing any musician on a cold, snowy winter day.
Winter Photography Safety Essentials

Some of the winter travel items I carry in the trunk of my car. This is the “kitchen” and “furnace”.
I grew up in Colorado where strange weather can strand you in any month of the year. Even though it is rare, I’ve seen blizzards in the Colorado high country in July. So I learned to carry some safety essentials when doing winter photography in remote locations. You never know when you might be stranded for several hours, a whole day, or longer, until the blizzard abates and someone can come find you. This is what I carry in my car when I hit the road in the winter and pretty much any time I am going to be in the High Rockies. I include a few winter travel tips, too.
How to Protect Your Camera Gear in the Cold and Snow
Cold and snow can cause a lot of damage to your camera gear. Something as simple as shooting outside and taking your camera inside your house or car can cause hidden damage that won’t show up until days or weeks later. The simple steps in this article could save you hundreds of dollars in repair bills.
How To Work With A Model (or Anybody Else) When The Windchill is 4°
You would think a windchill of 4° Fahrenheit (-16°C) would be too cold for a photo shoot, but not with some models. Selina and I booked this January shoot weeks in advance so we knew it would be cold, but we had no idea how cold until the day arrived. Despite the frigid temperatures, Selina did no want to reschedule for later. When we created the image above the windchill was 4°. By the end of the shoot the windchill was 3°. Incidentally, this image made it into my photography book (page 217). Here’s the story behind this image and how to work with a model (or anybody else) when it is so cold.
The Sunny f16 Rule Isn’t Reliable in Winter
The Sunny f16 rule is really useful on bright sunny days in the spring, summer, and fall, but you can’t rely on it for accurate exposures on bright, snowy winter days. It will often lead you astray and you will have seriously blown out highlights. There are much more accurate ways to meter in the winter.
Testing Your Camera’s Snow Exposure Latitude
The “snow exposure latitude” for every camera is different. You won’t find it in your camera’s manual but it is easy to determine with a do-it-yourself test. Why does it matter? If you don’t know the snow exposure latitude for your camera and how to apply it to your images, the color and quality of your winter photos will suffer.
How to Photograph a Nude Model in the Cold and Snow
It is difficult enough to create a beautiful nude image under normal circumstances, much less in the cold and snow. You need to bring some significant skills and experience to the task. So does your model.
Metering Nighttime Winter Scenes

Twilight, Rocky Mountain National Park. Sirius, Canis Major, Orion, Taurus, the Hyades star cluster, and the Pleiades star cluster are all visible in the fading light. Click for a larger version.
You can photograph the night sky year around, but winter brings an added bonus: SNOW! When you don’t have the benefit of moonlight, most of the year land forms a dark to black silhouetted skyline against the night sky. In winter you have the possibility of including the highly reflective snow. You can see both in this photo. Any place not covered with snow is very dark to black. Having reflective snow is why winter is the favorite time of year for a lot of photographers to go out and photograph the night sky.
Metering Evening Winter Scenes
Just like metering daytime winter scenes, the key to metering evening winter scenes is knowing what to meter and deciding how much exposure compensation to use.
Metering Wildlife in the Snow, Part Two
Most wildlife are medium to dark in tone, making them a challenge to meter properly in the bright, white tones of winter. If you trust one of your camera’s automatic exposure modes, the odds are good you won’t get the best exposure. If you switch over to manual exposure and make the right decisions, you can get great exposures and better quality photos (more about that later).
Metering Wildlife in the Snow, Part One
Metering dark toned wildlife in the snow is a major exposure challenge. It is usually best to avoid large “burned out” areas (washed out, featureless white) in a nature or landscape photograph, but with properly exposed snow, the wildlife can be so dark as to lose all texture. On other hand, metering for the wildlife can burn out the snow. So what do you do? And what about the complications of metering white animals?
Metering People in the Snow
The white snow in a winter scene can and often does fool a camera meter into underexposing a portrait, so here are the steps to take to get the right exposure. I throw in a few portrait suggestions too.
Metering Daytime Winter Scenes
Metering for scenes with a lot of snow can be tricky since the bright snow fools the camera meter. I see a lot of winter photos with gray snow, which means the camera meter did exactly what it was designed to do. The solution is quite simple provided you know what to do.
How To Series: Winter Photography
In addition to all of the usual photographic challenges, winter provides some extra complications, especially in terms of metering. So I began this series of articles on winter photography. Check out the links below. The articles will help you meet the unique challenges of winter photography. So get out there, have fun, and create some great winter images!
Jewel Box Lighting, The Basics
Jewel Box Lighting is a name given to photos taken in the evening when lighted buildings, monuments, bridges, and Christmas lights look so nice against the deepening sky colors. This article will show you how to do it with a digital camera. If you are using a film camera, read this article.
How To: “Jewel Box Lighting” at the Franklin Park Conservatory
Jewel Box Lighting is the art of combining lights, lighted buildings, or lighted objects with a deep blue evening sky. It is a great way to do photography and the exhibit this week at the Franklin Park Observatory is a wonderful opportunity to practice this technique and come away with some unique and memorable images.
How To Mix Flash and Ambient Light for a Christmas Portrait
On Christmas eve I found myself doing Christmas portraits for Kristina’s portfolio. She is a friend of mine who is a model and actress in L.A. I had to improvise a bit with the lighting and I needed to get the right mix of flash and ambient light for the look I wanted.
How to Photograph Christmas Lights with Your DSLR, Mirrorless Camera, or Smartphone
‘Tis the season and there are a lot of Christmas lights out there to photograph. It is fun and easy, and with a few tricks up your sleeve there are creative things you can do. Many of these techniques can be used on other lights throughout the year, so this is a good time to practice your skills for photographing lights.
How to Protect Your Camera Gear in the Cold and Snow
It is still really cold out there so be careful to protect your camera gear. Cold and snow can cause a lot of damage to your camera gear. Something as simple as shooting outside and taking your camera inside your house or car can cause hidden damage that won’t show up until days or weeks later. The simple steps in this article could save you hundreds of dollars in repair bills.
Sarah
Sarah was is town Thanksgiving weekend so we squeezed in enough time for a photo shoot. November 27 was the only date that worked for both of us. I had a special project in mind. Early November through late February is the only time of year that the sun is low enough in the sky to shine in the south facing window in my studio. I put a set of window blinds in the window for this part of the photo shoot and opened the blinds half way. Alignment was critical. It took quite a bit of doing to get the bands of sunlight to line up with the pupils of her brown eyes.
How to Find and Photograph Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS
Comet C/2023 A3 over Lake La Shane, Iowa. Venus is at the lower left. A jet left a vapor trail that is slowly dissolving. This is cropped from the original image. The whole image is next. Continue reading
How to Choose, Correct, and ID Football Photos for the Newspaper
When I photograph a football game, the local newspaper doesn’t want dozens, much less hundreds of photos. I usually select 6 – 12 images to send to the Lamoni Chronicle and they choose the ones they want to publish.
Why (and How) You Should Optimize Your Digital Images!
This article is about why you should optimize your digital images, with a brief example as to how to do it.
No camera, no matter how expensive, can capture the full range of light and dark tonalities that your incredible eyes can see. No camera, no matter how expensive, can capture the full range of colors that your eyes can see. But you can make up for some of the differences by optimizing your images using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).
My Great Horned Owl Adventure
Yesterday my dog and I were on our daily tour of our local lakes. We got an unusually late start and it was after sunset when we left the first lake. We were in a hurry to get to our second lake when I spotted something out of the corner of my eye on a rooftop corner of Tess Morgan, a college campus building. From a distance it looked like a vent pipe, but a vent pipe should not be located at the corner of the roof. To get a lot closer, I pulled into the parking for a better look. I am so glad I did. It was an owl (photo above).
Take a Lot of Photographs
If your first 10,000 photos are your worst, you want to get them out of the way as soon as possible so you can get to the good ones, right?! So take a lot of photographs!
How to See and Photograph the Perseid Meteor Shower Tonight

Perseid Meteor photographed from Rose Hill Cemetery west of Lamoni, Iowa. 4:55 am CDT, August 13, 2018. Cropped from the original image.
Tonight, August 11-12, is the predicted peak night of the Perseid Meteor Shower this year. But you can also look for the next few nights. This article will tell you what you need to know to see and photograph the most popular meteor shower of the year.
Great Blue Heron: iPhone vs DSLR at 130 Yards
I was driving along a country road at one of my favorite local lakes and spotted a Great Blue Heron straight north of me near the shoreline. I got the crazy idea to do comparison photos between my DSLR and my iPhone. The heron was too far away to get a high quality image with either camera, but I decided to do it anyway. I also wanted to check on the quality of the iPhone’s built in digital zoom versus cropping the original image and resizing it later in the computer.