In celebration of spring, I’m sharing with my blog readers some tips from my e-book series: The Photographer’s Eye. There are three books on shooting landscapes, wildlife and people. Each book includes ten images that serve as examples of various techniques  along with extensive shooting information. Each book ends with ten tips to make your shooting more effective.
If you’re shooting landscapes, one of the most effective means of adding interest and impact is to include a foreground element. A strong foreground helps bring scale and perspective to a scene. It can …

Here’s another photo tip from my eBook Photographing People in my The Photographer’s Eye series. I call it: Get a Picture, Give a Print.
This is always a fun thing to do, if you intend to visit a location again, OR if you use one of the tiny new portable printers now on the market.
 
Once you get a subject to agree to allow you to take their picture- and often I end up making some great friends that way- I either send a print to that person once I get home or …

In giving you some photo tips from my e-books over the past two weeks, I had a regular visitor write to me asking about tripods. The question was mostly about which tripod would be best for his circumstances, but the conversation reminded me that I’d better slip in one of my most talked about tips and one that I revisit pretty regularly. Stated simply, if you want the Number One secret to improving your landscape images it is to simply use a tripod. Every pro landscape photographer I know uses …

In honor of spring, when you will undoubtedly be out there trying to make up for lost camera time, here is another tip, a simple but critical one, taken from one of my The Photographer’s Eye e-books. This one is from my photographing wildlife e-book.
The most critical aspect of photographing wildlife is that you have the eyes in focus.  The fact is that an animal shot can be mediocre, but if the eyes are sharp, chances are people will probably like it. If the eyes are out of focus, no …

To kick off spring photo season, here’s another tip from my The Photographer’s Eye Series of e-books, this one about photographing people. This is a question I get often, during workshops that I offer, during Q&A in lectures, even in casual conversation with other photographers. Do you get permission from people before photographing them?
As pros we have it drilled into our heads that we need permission to use an image of a person for commercial purposes. But for the amateur the situation is different. Or is it?
I firmly believe that it is a matter …

As part of my Spring Into Action month, I’m sharing some tips with you from my The Photographer’s Eye series. This one is from The Photographer’s Eye: Landscapes.
Today’s cameras are incredible miracles, really. In essence you are holding in your little hand a computer that would have filled a good part of a room just a few decades ago. One of the most miraculous capabilities of digital cameras is their ability to capture pretty decent images in low light. They do that by making the sensor extremely sensitive to light, …

Spring means outdoors, which to me means being outdoors capturing images without going hypothermic. Spring also means that those wonderful, photogenic critters that have been holed up all winter come out to play, eat, sniff, eat, observe and eat some more.
In my wildlife e-book, The Photographer’s Eye: Wildlife, I share ten wildlife images that illustrate important photographic principles and explain how I got those shots. I also give ten tips that I feel are critical when attempting to snag images of wildlife that are keepers. Here’s #1 fro0m that collection of tips.
Be …

“As ye judge, so shall ye be judged.” I recall listening to a preacher ranting about this one night many years ago as I drove home from a late night dinner meeting with a client group. The preacher, obviously possessed by some otherworldly force, admonished us sinners about not judging others because we, in turn, would be judged by them.
I got to thinking about that a couple of days ago as I sat here in Maui, reviewing a previous day’s shoot. Trust me when I say that not very many …

Maui, Hawaii in February can mean only one thing- the whales are in town. Specifically, this is the time that thousands of humpbacks are in full force in Maui, frolicking in the protected area between Maui and the nearby islands of Lanai and Molokai (as well as others). And what a sight they are to behold.
Stand on any beach from Kapalua to Wailea for more than five minutes and if you don’t see at least a dozen blows, fin slaps, and breeches you are facing away from the ocean. This …

I found a really sweet stream on Maui, about an hour from my hotel. But when I visited it this morning, it started to rain just as I got set up, so I’ll return at least once more to try again. The challenge is that this stream is in a generally wet part of the island and today the stream was swollen. I had to wade into it to get the shot, but if it’s much higher on my next visit I’m not sure I’ll be able to access the …