Photo How To

Shutterbug columnist Scott Kelby recently gave a great lecture on the ethics of portrait retouching, and offered some valuable tips on how to improve your people pictures without making your subjects look fake.

Peter McKinnon is an award-winning Canadian photographer, and like many pros he’s often had to rig something up in the field to solve a problem. In the quick video below, McKinnon shares eight simple hacks that can get you out of a bind in a hurry.

Depending on your photographic interests, depth of field—the range of distances over which your lens will be sharp—can affect you in either propitious or problematic ways. If you’re trying to isolate one face in a group, a shallow depth of field is just what you need. If you’re hoping to capture the drama of a racehorse beating down the track in your direction, then shallow depth of field can turn much of the equine into a befuddling brown blur, no matter how high your shutter speed.

About five years ago, travel photographer Jack Hollingsworth was on a resort shoot in the Caribbean. There’d be stills and video, lots of locations, and the client keeping an eye on everything. Nine cases of gear loaded on the plane.

If the name Mark Levoy sounds familiar, it’s because Levoy is the guy behind the Frankencamera, and he helped launch Google Street View. He’s also a former Stanford University Professor and has just put his entire digital photography course online for free.

I’ve been taking pictures for so long that when I began, practically all cameras were made in Japan or Germany, ISO was spelled ASA and image files were paper folders where sleeves of negatives were stored.

Despite my ample experience, there are mistakes that I make over and over again—not every time I go out, thankfully, and not even every week—but often enough. Do you do these too?

The “Back to School” bug bit me and I volunteered to teach a digital photography workshop at my local library. You may have had the same inclination at one time or another, but never got around to putting together a syllabus and some example images. Here are a few tips that will help you create an informative, worthwhile photo class for your community.