Archive For The “Technique” Category
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…
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…
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,…