Your camera does a lot more to your images than you think. Just as you take a picture, your camera adjusts the white balance and the sharpness for you. How much it does this depends on the settings you give it. With that, many readers have wondered if they should even bother setting the sharpness [...]

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Do you remember when you were a kid and totally afraid to jump in the water and swim? We’ve all been there. In life, some things just freak us out, and it’s no different in photography. I know it sounds strange, but we all need to be pushed sometimes. We need someone to force us [...]

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Have you ever wanted your pictures just a little bit brighter or darker than what your camera gives you? Sure, you can always go into Photoshop Elements and adjust it after the fact, but shouldn’t the camera allow you to do it as you’re taking the photo? Why can’t you just pick an exact shutter [...]

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Shooting in low light situations is difficult. It presents a combination of problems for which there is no single quick fix. You can decrease the shutter speed, but if you don’t have a tripod, your image will be blurry. You can bring a flash with you, but if you’re too close to your subject, you’ll [...]

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Stop right now! Wherever your photography is right now, it doesn’t matter. You could have ten years of experience with your camera, or you could be a total beginner. I am about to show you five simple steps you can take to get a good photo right now. If you follow them every time you’re [...]

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Flash is a very powerful tool in photography, but it only works as well as the person behind the camera. Great pictures are destroyed with flash as easily as they are created. Most of time, I advise you to avoid flash altogether. This time, I’m going to show you an alternative that might just allow [...]

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Here’s a handy one for you point-and-shoot photographers. Have you ever wanted to get one part of the scene just right, but you could never get the colors to pop out? Sometimes you know more about the thing you want to photograph than your camera does. You know you want the sky to be blue, [...]

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This question comes from reader Rick Bergesio. He’s tried the red eye flash setting on his camera, and it hasn’t done much to reduce red eye in his night shots. If the system isn’t working as advertised, then what’s going on? Why do his photos still have problems with red eye?

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In the Christian religion, the father, the son, and the holy spirit are three distinct parts of one and the same interconnected thing. One is an aspect of the other, and that’s really how I want you to start thinking about photography’s Holy Trinity: the aperture, the shutter speed, and ISO. Whenever you make a [...]

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Your digital camera comes equipped with an arsenal of automatic and semi-automatic modes designed to make your life as a photographer easier. Aside from the fully automatic mode, aperture priority mode, and shutter priority mode, your camera gives you a variety of scene-specific modes. Each mode has a specific purpose. You can easily switch between [...]

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Insects are a subject with boundless possibilities, and you can find them everywhere you look. With summer upon us (and spring really close for those in the southern hemisphere), now is the time to get out there and take some amazing insect images. You don’t need the most expensive camera setup to take these interesting [...]

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Have you tried out slow sync flash yet? Well you should. It’s a really fun digital photography trick that never fails to produce some interesting results. I like to think of it like extended exposure with a few extras. You can create a neat effect that combines the motion blur from the night lights with [...]

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When it comes to getting accurate colors, nothing is better than nailing your white balance settings right on the head. If the white balance is even slightly off,it can produce a highly noticeable bluish or reddish tinge. Sometimes the tinge is desirable. It can enhance the appeal of clouds or night time photography. But if [...]

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Camera technology just keeps improving year after year. It’s amazing where it’s gotten. Not too long ago, you had to tell your camera everything, and now there are more automatic scene modes than ever to make snapping pictures a breeze. You’ve seriously got to check out some of these new point-and-shoot models. They might not [...]

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It’s funny. You’d think that with all the technology we’ve invented, there would no longer be a need for manual mode in photography. We’ve got cameras that can detect faces, cameras that can get rid of red eye, and cameras with a gazillion different shooting settings. How hard could it be to make a single [...]

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