Lighting How To

Photographer Gary Daniels captured this epic image during this year’s July 4th celebrations in Addison, Texas. The plane is a World War II-era B-25H Mitchell bomber from the Cavanaugh Flight Museum, which was taxiing on the runway just as fireworks were going off behind it. 

If you want to make photographs with impact, it’s important that they tell a story, and “speak” to the viewer. No matter how beautiful an image appears, if it doesn’t provoke an emotional response, you haven’t quite finished the job.

One of the most powerful yet frequently overlooked menu options in even the most basic digital camera enables photographers to select a white balance setting that matches the color temperature of the scene being photographed.

We all love working with available light, but sometimes a bit of illumination from a simple flash can make a world of difference in an image, even when shooting outdoors. If you’re relatively new to flash photography, this tutorial is for you.

One of the many joys of photography is travelling to unfamiliar locations and capturing images of unique scenes you can’t find at home. But what if you arrive at a location amidst poor weather conditions, or at the wrong time of day with nothing but “bad light”? 

How often have you captured what you thought was a great photograph, only to learn later that your “money shot” was soft and destined for the trash? We all miss focus on occasion, especially in low light, but the quick video below will help you keep those mistakes to a minimum.

Photographers inexperienced at portraiture often shy away from the task, with the mistaken notion that it requires specialized skill and sophisticated equipment to capture beautiful images. In the video below, a top pro refutes that myth by demonstrating how to make striking portraits outdoors under available light with a minimum of gear.