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.
It seems easy to create a black and white from a digital image. At its most basic level all that is required is selecting “Convert to Grayscale,” which is found in almost every image-editing program on the market.
If you love black and white photography you should check out the tools and techniques that allow you to make customized “conversions” from your RGB digital image files.
The photographs of Philip Perkis come from his own inner world; they are quiet images that speak to us intimately. Presented in a recent show at the Alan Klotz Gallery in New York, many of them grace the pages of his new book The Sadness of Men, published by The Quantuck Lane Press.
Currently a teacher at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts...
In many ways, Florida seems like a thoroughly modern state. New developments and towering skyscrapers dot the urban contemporary landscape. Tourism display racks contain dozens of the latest amusement and attraction brochures. Each year, millions of visitors descend upon Florida to experience the beaches, theme parks, major cities, and golf courses.
When scene contrast is high there may be a danger of overexposure, particularly when you do not take care to read the highlight values to keep them well within the dynamic range capability of the sensor. When overexposure is extreme you lose detail in the subject, cause the image to look harsh, and may eliminate the possibility of making a good print from the photo, despite your best processing...
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...
Camera metering systems are great. No doubt about it. But there are times when you might want to expand your metering options, such as for flash or strobe studio and outdoor photography, for really tricky light and when you want to make a number of measurements within a scene, that a handheld meter will come in, well, handy.
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...
Google “photographer” and you get, as of this writing, about 140 million (!) possible URLs; do the same for “photographer web pages” and you get over 25 million! The motivation for creating a web page with your photographs is legion: it can be used to display your work to a worldwide audience; showcase work to potential clients; license images for sale in publications and...
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...
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...
The brilliant, ever-elusive emerald green and red quetzal. Mist enshrouded cloud forests that evoke a mysterious and eerie beauty. The melodic song of the bellbird. Howler monkeys calling to each other in their distinctive, bellowing way. These are just some of the images that describe the lovely Central American country of Costa Rica.
“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...
I recently had the opportunity to photograph poison dart frogs, and I was excited to do so because these unique creatures have brilliant colors and are endlessly fascinating. While they make for amazing pictures, they also present significant technical challenges. I had to do some thoughtful planning before I attempted to shoot them. I started out by buying several tropical plants...