Videos

If there’s one bit of advice we’ve all heard a million times, it’s “Be sure and use a tripod.” Yet, despite the fact that sharp images are the goal of just about everyone, it’s sort of amazing how many times photographers “forget” to bring along a tripod.

Achieving a correct exposure is the first step toward capturing a great image, and on Monday we explained how to do that by bracketing your shots. In today’s tutorial, you’ll learn another way to get things right, by using your camera’s histogram.

The autofocus system in a modern DSLR camera is truly a wonder of technology. And there’s a lot going on under the hood that you may not totally understand. But fear not, because the quick video below explains everything you need to know to achieve optimum results.

One way to make sure you nail a perfectly exposed image under difficult lighting conditions is to bracket shots by making what you think is a “correct” exposure, followed by a few more that are incrementally lighter and darker. As you’ll see in the four-minute video below, there’s a bit more to precise bracketing than you may think.

You’ve probably heard the term “lens diffraction” to describe how image sharpness suffers as you use smaller and smaller aperture settings. While depth of field increases as you stop down a lens, the amount of fine detail a lens can resolve decreases at smaller f/stops.

Many of the image-editing tutorials we post involve working with layer masks in Photoshop. This quick video reveals 10 helpful shortcuts that enable you to speed up your workflow by using layer masks more efficiently.

The term “bokeh” is a common buzzword among photographers these days, used to describe the subjective quality of defocused areas in an scene—either behind or in front of the main subject. A popular misconception is that it’s all as simple as “a faster aperture or a longer lens gives you better bokeh.” But as you’ll see in the video below, there’s a bit more to pleasing bokeh than that.