Archive For August 28, 2017
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…
There is apparently a school of thought among some hobby photographers that you pretty much always want to have your camera on a tripod. I see people out shooting birds in flight (or trying to) in full daylight, with their camera sitting snugly on a tripod. And I think: why? A tripod is an essential…
On a weekend photo shoot & camping trip, I was talking with my camp neighbors, who saw me lurking along the bank of the river, shooting birds. They asked about my photos, and of course I was happy to show them some of my favorites from a previous outing. Looking through shots on my phone,…
I began working my way into photography as a hobby fairly late in life. Oh, I had a definite interest much earlier, but didn’t do much about it, for any number of reasons. Back in the days of film photography, getting seriously into it took some pretty serious financial commitment; I was deeply involved in…