Portrait Photography How To

Formal portraits and other people pictures are typically most compelling when precise focus is attained on a subject’s eyes, but that’s not always easy to accomplish depending upon your camera settings. Even if you switch from multi- to single-point focus, there’s often a better way to get the job done.

Richard Bell began photographing for his book, The Last Veterans of World War II, early in 2016 and completed the photography a little over a year later. But for the origin of the book, you have to go back to Bell’s childhood.

When Shutterbug reader Lucia Staykov noticed her husband was neglecting his Nikon DSLR four years ago, she started using it herself to take pictures of their six children, which includes sets of twins and triplets.

Let’s say you open an image on the computer, the focus is perfect, you nailed the exposure, and composition is fine. But wait: the colors look awful. So you trash it, right? Not so fast.

So you sit down behind the computer, open what you thought was a great shot, and the image quality is unexpectedly really bad. Time to move it to the trash and try again, right? Well, not so fast.

Regardless of the type of images you shoot you've likely captured photos with ugly, unnatural color casts. There are various ways to correct this unfortunate problem during the editing process, and today you'll discover a quick and oft-ignored technique In Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

Noted photographer and online educator Elena Shumilova has a great new video offering four expert tips on how to take the best photos of children. You can watch the child photography how-to video, which was produced by SmugMug, at the bottom of this post.