I knew they were there. I’d seen them out there before. It’s home for them, the kind of habitat they love: woody marshland, with lots of places to hide. But time and again when I’d go out there to shoot them, they were elusive, like an acquaintance who owes you money. Wood ducks are among...
A couple years ago, I started to put together a blog site about photography, very cleverly named CosynPhoto. The intention was for it to be a combination of basic tutorials and informational blog entries for people who were interested in exploring photography as a craft (with the strong caveat that I’m far from being an...
Essentially, exposure is the light your camera turns into an image. It’s determined by the brightness of the light, the amount of time it hits the camera’s sensor, and the ISO “sensitivity” of the sensor. Every exposure is controlled by aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. These three settings together are sometimes called the “exposure triangle”....
When shooting hand-held, camera shake is your enemy. You should always be conscious of how stable and firm you’re able to keep the camera. Look for ways to keep your camera as still as you possibly can. Support the camera/lens with your left hand underneath, palm up, rather than from the side. If you’re sitting,...
Today, I present a lesson. I can’t call it a lesson learned, because I’m still learning it. The lesson is: pay attention to your aperture, and choose it wisely. On this particular day, I forgot about that, and I’m still kicking myself over it. I was on a vacation, staying on the coast of Maine....
One day this summer I got up well before dawn, to load gear into the car and drive down to a favorite location in the Killbuck Marsh area, some twenty miles south. I parked the car just off the side of the dirt road, strapped gear onto my back, and headed into a field of...
I haven’t posted in awhile, but I come bearing an excuse from home: I was on vacation in September, a driving trip with my wife to Nova Scotia (via the Canadian route on the way up, and coming back down on the American side), and then my mother broke her kneecap, which at her advanced...
In simplified terms, your camera’s shutter is like a little door that opens and closes. Closed most of the time, it opens briefly when you snap a picture, to let light coming through the lens fall on the camera’s sensor, which turns the light into electrical signals and captures the picture. I’ll be posting about...
For beginners, one of the more slippery concepts in photography is the f-stop. What the heck is it, why are the numbers so weird, why do they seemingly run backward, what’s it do, and what should you set yours to? First, what the heck is it? It’s just a number, representing the relative size of...
What are wide angle, prime, telephoto, or zoom lenses? The names can sometimes be confusing to a beginner, because you hear them tossed around a lot in generic ways (sometimes inaccurately), and there’s some overlap in the terms. So here’s a summary. Different types of lenses are defined, in part, by their focal length, which...
