Photography Tutorials — Tips and Tricks

By and far the easiest way to photograph hummingbirds is to place a hummingbird feeder in our backyard and wait for the little guys to start visiting.

As photographers, we are always looking for ways to stretch our creative limits. We want to create the most amazing photos possible, but sometimes we lack the motivation.

The fun and hectic days of summer are upon us, and that means taking lots of photos at backyard barbecues, days at the beach, camping trips, and other fun outdoor activities. But just because it’s bright and sunny out doesn’t mean every photo is guaranteed to turn out right. In fact, summer photography comes with challenges—a glaring sun, blinding reflections from the water, just to name a couple.

Imagine what your dreams would look like if you could photograph them. The mind has a unique, sometimes scary, often odd way of taking everyday life and turning into abstract dream sequences. Well, one artist has the amazing talent of consciously manipulating those dream sequences into surreal, abstract photo-manipulated works of art.

India’s amazing Western Ghats is one of the most bio-diverse wilderness areas in the world. It is home to the largest population of wild tigers in the world. Tigers are secretive by nature, and getting an accurate count of their population has been near impossible–until now.

White snapped four shots of his model using the Wescott Skylux LED Light and the Modern Vintage Backgrounds–each at a different f-stop. Most kit lenses have an aperture range of f/5.6 to f/3.5, so he took one photo at each of those. He also snapped a shot at f/2.8 and another at f/1.4 to demonstrate the f-stop capabilities of higher-end lenses.

Retouching is a labor of love. It takes time, focus, and the right mindset to turn good images into great ones. All of that time in front of the computer can drive anyone crazy, so we asked world-renowned retoucher Pratik Naik for his tips for staying loose and producing consistently beautiful final images.

Back in the days of film cameras, creating a panoramic photograph meant either buying a particular, expensive camera or hours in the darkroom stitching images together by overlapping exposures onto the finished photo paper. Today, making a panoramic photo is a simple and easy process. Creating a panorama is very useful if you don’t own super wide lenses, as you can often achieve a similar effect.

After finding a colorful sculpture, Peterson takes a shot with his Nikon D800E. He’s using a 24-85mm lens here.

An image does not just appear in front of your lens and you press the shutter button and there it is. Neither is it luck or pure chance. The perfect image starts long before you press the shutter. It starts when you are far away from the scene you are about to photograph. How to start that process and what route to take to get the image is what I am going to help you discover on this exciting journey as you learn digital photography.