Pro Techniques

Recently, I attended several excellent Photoshop seminars presented by Software-Cinema.com. These were held in a large meeting room of a city hotel with some 200 people in attendance. Photographic images from the presenter's laptop were projected on an enormous screen, with great clarity and color saturation. They must be using a very expensive projector, I assumed. After...

The print completes the creative circle you began inscribing when you first viewed the image and snapped the shutter. The beauty of black and white printmaking is that you can share that vision through interpretive techniques that include expressive use of tonality, artful contrast and exposure control. Yes, digital images can be viewed on a screen and shared through the Internet to a worldwide audience. But nothing quite matches the intimate beauty of a carefully produced print, one that can be hung on a wall in your home or a gallery.

The legal issues of privacy rights and copyrights in photography are usually not covered thoroughly enough in photo schools. Many professionals don't take the time to learn the law. This often leads to confusion and chaos when photographers start selling their work. Whether you are part-time or full-time, amateur or pro, one of the most important legal issues you will...

Erik Almas is truly passionate about his photography and will go to great heights to shoot a picture—literally. He and his camera have gone mountain climbing, skydiving, and flying in microlight aircraft. That said, most of his images are shot on terra firma.

Beyond that, he will spend upward of $10,000 on a personal project to create images he strongly believes in for his portfolio. The project may involve travel with a crew and hired talent and renting gear where needed. He does not believe in limiting himself or his creative vision, and his clients appreciate that.

“Magic hour is a time that I always strive for and work around,” observes Memphis-based architectural photographer Jeffrey Jacobs (www.jeffreyjacobsphoto.com). “I arrive at the location before sunset (or before sunrise, as the situation warrants). After 10am, depending on the time of year, the usable light is pretty...

He figured he'd be one of the last of the holdouts. "When the whole digital revolution started, I thought I'd be the last guy to be shooting digital," David Alan Harvey says. Then along came an offer he didn't want to refuse. "Nikon was working on an ad campaign for their D100, and they asked me if I'd go down to Mexico and shoot with the...