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 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 …

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, …

“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 …

For most of my life I’ve been a film photographer. In those days the mantra I followed was that when I pressed the shutter, my job was essentially done. I’d send my K64 film off to Kodak, get my transparencies back a week later, present them to my editors and cash my check. Done.
Not anymore. In today’s digital age, I figure my job is maybe 25-50% done when I press that shutter button. Even though I really do not do much post-processing, digitally captured images do need some tweaking, especially …

For the past few days, I’ve been battling severe windy conditions here in Iceland. By severe I’m talking gale force to hurricane force winds. If there is anything that a photographer hates most it is wind. The skies can be blue, the clouds picturesque, the scene illuminated with golden light. But if the wind is blowing, it’s hard to stay steady enough to capture a good image. How, then, do the pros do it.
The following image was taken, believe it or not, on a freezing cold beach on Iceland’s south …

A friend, Morgan Melekos, just sent me this image he took while I was photographing a Vermont stream scene. It was around 1 degree Fahrenheit that day. Although I sometimes have to get into a stream to photograph, I don’t do so lightly. I advise my readers to always take proper precautions (see the ScotteVest column I did entitled “Don’t Take The Plunge!”: http://www.scottevest.com/company/photography.shtml).
If you are curious, the camera is a Hasselblad H4D-50 with a 28mm lens and a Hasselblad tilt-shift mechanism between the lens and camera. Clothing includes my …

Let’s admit it, we’re now in one of photography’s seasonal doldrums. Fall foliage is over, the trees are bare and snow has not hit much of the area, at least not in the mid-Atlantic, USA, region. This is the perfect time for checking out new equipment, innovative techniques, even changes in attitude toward whatever area of photography you have up to now avoided. In my sporadic “Homework” series (use the search box to find others), I’d like to add the perfect assignment for that rainy Saturday morning.
Depth of Field
Manipulating depth …

Histograms! Sounds like a medical procedure or, worse yet, mathematics.
Well, if you’re a photographer, histograms are your friends. Don’t be intimidated by them. Learn how to use a histogram and your images will dramatically improve.
What Is a Histogram?
In digital photography a histogram is an electronic display of all the pixels, light-to-dark, recorded on the sensor when you press the shutter release. It appears as a graph on the rear LCD screen in DSLR cameras and even on many point-and-shoots, such as the Canon G12.
There is really no such thing as …