Photo How To

It’s amazing how cityscapes that appear drab during the day are transformed into sparkling scenes at night—just begging to be photographed. And this time of the year, when festive holiday lights often adorn the urban landscape, nighttime photography in the city can be more interesting than ever.

Remember f-stops? Not everyone does. Millennials shoot their selfies with automated smartphones that have sent f-stops to steampunk heaven. Old-timers who began with box cameras were spared the fear factor of f-stops until later in life, and may never have fully adjusted to these adjustments.

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.

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.

Let’s say you want to try your hand at close-up photography, but you can’t afford an expensive macro lens. Or maybe you’re not short of cash, but you don’t plan on doing enough macro work to justify the investment. 

Earlier this week we featured a video demonstrating how to customize your camera by tweaking its AUTO default settings. Today’s helpful tutorial takes things a step further by explaining how to shoot in the Manual exposure mode for maximum creative control.