One of life’s simple truths: you can’t walk past a waterfall without taking a photo of it. That would just be wrong! But you don’t often get a chance to go back and do it over again, either, so you’d better make sure you get it right. Waterfalls are elusive creatures – and by that [...]

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Hey guys. I just want to start by thanking you so much for your feedback on all of my articles. I’m excited that they’re helping you out as much you say they are. Over the last few years, I’ve gotten a bunch of fairly common questions. More than one of you has wondered why I [...]

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If there’s one point I keep mentioning over and over again, it’s this. Automatic mode doesn’t always give you the best images. It can get very close to what you want, but because it can’t gauge the light perfectly, you sometimes end up with images that are either too bright or too dark. Your subject [...]

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What would HAL do if he could take a picture? He’d probably look me straight in the face and say, “I’m sorry Dave, but I can’t let you do that.” In all seriousness, your camera is a lot like HAL. It’s got all this technical gobbledygook and sophisticated light metering algorithms built into it, but [...]

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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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Cameras these days offer a bevy of different modes, so many that it can easily become a confusing ordeal for someone who is just getting into it. You’ve got aperture priority mode, shutter priority mode, programmed automatic mode, and of course, manual mode. How do you know when to use which one? Does one particular [...]

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Have you ever heard of the sunny 16 rule? It seems to have all but disappeared in most modern discussions of photography. As a matter of fact, it’s one of many rules that photographers seem to have forgotten. That’s a shame because the sunny 16 rule serves as a nice way to check your current [...]

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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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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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Your camera is so full of settings that it often takes years for most amateur photographers to figure them all out. One of those is bulb mode. It’s hidden deep within the recesses of your camera’s shutter speed settings, and it can help you take some amazing pictures of the stars at night. In this [...]

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There are a lot of myths and rumors spreading around the photography community, and none is more popular than the myth that you should expose for the sky on a bright sunny day. Doing so can lead to some pretty disastrous consequences. In this short article, I’ll show you why.

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I only have one word for this shot. WOW! Of course, I am a sucker for a great sunset photo. The way the bright orange just bursts forth and diffuses itself through the clouds will always take my breath away. We discussed how you can take pictures like this in a previous tutorial, but I [...]

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Sequence photos provide a truly amazing perspective for action shots. They allow the viewer to see the progression of something as it is happening. Unlike video, all of the important parts are frozen, so we can see every step. There a lot of sports where action sequences bring out the true character of the athletes. [...]

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