Pro Techniques

Tonality does not exist in a vacuum; the tones form a visual impression in terms of both their intrinsic value and their relationship to one another. The context in which they relate is called contrast, simply the difference and relationship between the light and dark values in the scene. Contrast determines the “look” of the image, and has a profound effect upon visual effects.

Last fall I got an e-mail and a few JPEG attachments from Jody Dole, a commercial and advertising photographer whose career adventures I’ve chronicled over the years in these and other pages. “I’ve been having a good time making 19th-century cyanotype look-alike images,” Jody wrote.

Turns out, Jody had been up to more than cyanotypes. He also had a...

Making photographs for a model's portfolio involves much more than just using the proper posing and lighting techniques and includes all of the less glamorous and business-oriented aspects of creating these kinds of images. The...

A large percentage of the population has always had a love affair with the automobile. We own more cars per capita than any other culture and we have a genuine fascination with older models. When "classic" vehicles reach a certain age, some will spend small...

One of the challenges to home or professional photographersthese days is trying to keep every portrait set from looking the same. In a world where “freshness” counts a lot, being able to mix things up from one session to another, from season to season, all without jumping through too many hoops to change the set, is an advantage for many. A current trend is the ability to not only change backdrops but flooring as well, and with that in mind we recently had the opportunity to work with products from a division of the pro lab White House Custom Colour called “Backdrops by WHCC.” They have a wide range of interesting offerings in both fabric backdrops and rugged “rubberized” studio flooring.

When our resident digital guru's Digital Darkroom Resource CD appeared in 2003 it debuted to much fanfare. The first volume included 11 chapters; shortly thereafter, Brooks released a second volume containing 16 chapters. He's now outdone himself with a new, third volume that contains 26 chapters, totaling 318 pages in PDF format plus a folder of images for print test...

One of the primary differences between a photograph and the real world is that reality has three dimensions: height, width, and depth. Your photos, of course, only have two—height and width. Any depth that exists in a photograph is purely an optical illusion. Even if you were able to create a print that was the exact same size as the scene (and wouldn’t that be fun) it would still pale beside the real thing because of the lack of that third dimension.