Videos

Summer is over and the fall is here. The leaves are starting to turn their orange, red and golden hues but are you ready as a photographer?

It’s often necessary to use slow shutter speeds to get the results you want, even when shooting during the day. And editing images made with long exposures sometimes requires a different approach to post processing, depending upon the effect you’re after.

If you’re a regular on this page, you know that we don’t subscribe to the notion that Manual Mode is the only way to go if you’re serious about photography. In fact, we recently posted a tutorial in which one pro insisted that Aperture Priority Mode is often a better choice.

Do you constantly worry whether your photos are getting enough likes on Instagram and elsewhere on social media? Do you find yourself always trying to create images that appeal more to a general audience than your artistic vision?

Presets are timesaving files that enable Lightroom to apply predetermined enhancements to images, enabling you to quickly make changes to color, introduce special effects, and much more. By clicking on a preset you avoid the task of doing things manually, and you can always go back in and tweak the results.

One of the most important skills in the early development of all photographers is knowing how to interpret the light falling on a scene, and then choosing the camera settings that will result in a perfectly exposure photo. With a bit of knowledge and practice, this quickly becomes second nature—enabling you concentrate on other key variables that make up a great image.

One overlooked, so to speak, area of your camera that can get dirty is the viewfinder. Whether it's an optical viewfinder on a DSLR or an EVF on a mirrorless camera, that eye-sized window is prone to smudging, which can make it hard to see your subject.