Pro Techniques

My friend wanted to begin shooting digital images of small objects for his company’s website, so he asked me to get him a deal on an expensive, full-frame D-SLR. The images were to be used primarily online at low resolution, and occasionally in an HTML e-mail newsletter. They were using a professional photographer to shoot the artwork for brochures, packaging, and their trade show booth.

The photographic career of Jody Gomez started off simply enough, as a spectator parent when her son began riding steers. Frustrated by the poor quality of the pictures snapped and sold by another parent, Gomez began taking her own photographs, starting off with an entry-level 35mm Canon Rebel. In short order, Gomez was installed as the official photographer for the California Junior Bull Riders...

Each month through the Digital Help column I receive many e-mail messages on how to get prints that match the on-screen image. I have included a sampling of some of these queries as well as some solutions to these problems so challenging to many photographers.

Questions
For years I have been printing with great success on a Canon i9900 inkjet...

Now we come to how exposure and creative photography go hand in hand.

Why would you need to change the aperture or shutter speed under different lighting conditions? Why would you want to use a fast shutter speed for one shot and a slow one for another? Why change apertures or ISO?

That goes to the heart of the photographic exposure system and is one of the most...

“You need to establish a connection with the food in front of the camera,” observes New York-based food photographer Francesco Tonelli (www.francescotonelli.com). “I can do a better job photographing a dish when I can picture myself eating it. That’s the frame of mind I need to be in so that I can capture the...

Stuck in traffic one day on Sunset Boulevard, Patrick Ecclesine got an idea. Thinking about the street—“twenty-four miles from the barrio to the beach,” he writes at his website (www.ecclesine.com), “through some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city to some of the richest neighborhoods in the world”—two...

As mentioned in the previous tutorials, the impact and success of a studio portrait is often the combined result of lighting, composition, body language, lens choice, camera angle, clothing, color, texture, and even luck. Armed with a few portrait techniques, however, your work will improve dramatically. There are many portrait-making methods that can help you develop your own...