Pro Techniques

There are plenty of reasons to eschew perfect sharpness. A classic application was to suppress lines and wrinkles, or just for a light, airy mood: as Tallulah Bankhead once said, “They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.” Another reason is to create the sense of something half-remembered, imperfectly limned in the picture as in...

To photograph the wild horses of the Outer Banks of North Carolina you have to deal with the fact that they are indeed wild and thus not particularly welcoming of a photographer’s attention.
But first you have to deal with the Outer Banks, a 200-mile stretch of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina. “It’s important to have an awareness of time, tide, and weather,” Lisa Cueman says of the location. “You can get into your photography, but not so much that you lose a sense of your surroundings.”

My favorite scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia is when Peter O'Toole, as Lawrence, looks out onto the desert landscape and watches a rider riding slowly toward him. It turns out to be Omar Sharif but the encounter is made more dramatic by the widescreen format.

There are a lot of ways to make panoramic images, including cropping standard...