PJ. Morley

So you’ve got a compact camera and it has a dozen scene modes to choose from one of which is the portrait mode but there are others such as landscape, fireworks etc. They’re OK aren’t they? Generally they work quite well even if they don’t allow for much in the way of fine tuning.

And then you make the transition from digital compact to digital SLR and suddenly, your choices are much more limited. You might get portrait, landscape, sports and macro but anything beyond that means you need to know a thing or two about setting your camera for a particular type of photo and of course, you want to get a little more creative and go beyond the formulaic settings that make all your images look like everyone else’s. What’s worse is you spend a good chunk of money on your digital SLR and the results from your compact look better. Surely that can’t be right. A digital SLR should give results much better than a compact.

Well it will give better results as soon as you have an understanding of how all those scene modes work. Once you get that, you can play with the settings on your SLR to recreate them but of course you want to do more than that. And you will, once you understand the scene modes you can apply those settings to your digital SLR but with an unparalleled level of control to take your photography to the next level.

So let’s get started. Continue Reading »

Manipulating the depth of field when you take an image is a useful skill to learn whether you want to achieve front to back sharpness for a landscape or whether you are after an artistic effect or want to direct attention to one particular part of an image with distracting background or foreground elements artistically blurred. When you are trying to lean the relationships between factors that affect depth of field, there’s nothing more guaranteed to confuse you than an in depth tutorial. Does the thought of juggling formulae like

H=(f x f/Nc)+f

and

Dn=s(H-f)/(H+s-2f)

and

Df=s(H-f)/(H-s)

put you off completely? Well read on to learn a much simpler approach.

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If you’ve been interested in photography for any length of time, especially landscape photography then you will have no doubt come across the term hyperfocal distance and its usefulness in obtaining maximum depth of field or front to back sharpness in any given photo.In simple and photographic terms, the hyperfocal distance is the focus distance of your lens when the nearest object in a scene remains acceptably sharp whilst still keeping everything in front of that all the way to infinity (or at least as far as you can see) acceptably sharp also. So you can see that for landscape photography, it’s very useful technique or method to have at your disposal to ensure as much of the scene is in focus as possible. Here’s how to achieve it easily with any lens. Continue Reading »

Not so much a tutorial as an information site for finding places to sell your photos and video online. Still worth a look.

www.photostocker.net 

As I explained in my previous Convert to Black and White tutorial, using the channel mixer is the technique that offers the most control. But what if your software doesn’t have a channel mixer? This method is effective and works in Adobe Elements, Photoshop and will work in other software that supports the use of adjustment layers.

This fellow has an interesting face and he was kind enough to let me photograph him at a recent reenactment event I attended.

The weather that day was dull, extremely overcast and the light was very flat as you can see but that’s OK because it made the contrast very low in this image. Ideal for converting to black and white. This method shows how to achieve effective black and white conversions without the use of the channel mixer.

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