Photographer Coach

Ed Snyder’s All-Holga Exhibition of Beach Imagery – High Point Café, Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia (602 W. Carpenter Lane, 215-849-5153). Runs June 15 to August 15, 2008.

Artist Reception Sunday, July 20, 2008 (4:30 – 6 pm).

What’s a Holga? Basically a plastic toy camera that uses 120 format film. Read the rest

This is one of my favorite photographs, a study of a statue of Eros and Psyche (Eros is kind of like a grown-up Cupid). Since I’m posting this around Valentine’s Day, I thought it an appropriate image for discussing statuary photography. The statue is a copy of the famous Antonio Canova sculpture, one of which resides at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The one I photographed was atop a tomb at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood California. If you like angels, a good place to shoot them is in a cemetery (pun intended).
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What the heck is this a photo of? Some sort of Photoshop digital montage? Actually, no, it’s a straight image I shot out my car window one morning last week! Ever consider keeping your camera at the ready on the front seat of your car? Read on to learn more about drive-by shooting!

What are the compositional elements of this photograph?

I made this image out the side window of my car while waiting for a light to change. The horizontal legs are part of a stationary statue, and these occupy the upper third of the frame. This helps us meet our compositional goal of the “Rule of Thirds.” The ladder truck and pedestrians helped balance the composition by placing themselves in the lower two-thirds of the frame! I happen to like the way the more distant pedestrian is slightly blurred—this gives a bit of depth to the image. Was there luck involved here? Of course. But you have to be well-practiced in the art of drive-by photography in order to take advantage of such situations. Read the rest

Someone once said that if your photos don’t seem interesting, that’s only because you weren’t close enough! Given physical limitations, we often resort to zoom lenses or print enlargement to get closer to the subject. However, digital image magnification now gives us another way to do this. This image of the bumblebee is actually a digitally magnified portion of the original. Let’s see the original and learn more about this technique.

One of the only good reasons to have a digital camera with high resolution (5 megapixels and above) is so that you can digitally zoom in on an area of the image and not have that zoomed in portion become all choppy or noisy. The lower the resolution of the original, the worse the magnified area will be. Realize, too, that with most digital cameras, you can choose low, medium, or high resolution. Best to use the highest setting if you think you’ll want to enlarge or edit the images later on. Read the rest

Concert shots look so easy when you see them in magazines, don’t they? Try to take one and you’ll see what the artist Georgia O’Keefe meant when she said, “The cliffs over there, you look at it and it’s almost painted for you, you think until you try.”

If you walk away from this article with one thing let it be this: Cameras need light in order to record an image. The less light there is, the more difficult time the camera will have.

Getting a good concert shot is all about the lighting.

However, you must choose between flash and available light. Let’s explore both. Read the rest

Happy Holidays! Christmas lights are very tempting to us photographers, aren’t they? Unless you have a “Xmas Lights” setting on your digital point-and-shoot, how are you going to make a photo like this?

First of all, you need to find a photo-worthy scene. This image was shot in Love Park (in front of City Hall) in Philadelphia. The Robert Indiana “Love” sculpture is a favorite destination photo site for tourists. Each year when they put up the 50-foot decorated tree behind it, the whole scene bursts into life! That is, at night. During the day it’s kind of mediocre. So how to photograph it at night? Read the rest

Someone asked me the other day, “How can you get great contrast in a color photograph?” My answer was (and still is), “Sunny day and bright, fully saturated contrasting colors.” Short of that, you’re going to have to do a lot of work with a photo editing computer program.

It’s quite easy to get great contrast in a black and white photograph, provided the image is made up of mostly black blacks and white whites (not innumerable shades of grey between). Upping the contrast is generally very easy to do with photo editing software, your main concerns being 1) loss of shadow detail and 2) burning out the highlights. Color is a bit more difficult, what with there being all those, uh, colors. When you stop and think about it, its kind of unusual to see much naturally occurring contrasting color. Perhaps this is why we find deciduous leaves so much more interesting in the Fall than at other times of the year! Read the rest

People portraits are tricky. What’s key to a successful one? Well, aside from technicalities, its all about respect and interest. Respect your subject and show interest in who they are and what they do. You’d be surprised how many people will let you photograph them!

I shot this image in a thrift shop. A very photogenic couple was testing out a sofa and I was hunting for people portraits for a book I’ve since written. I told them they looked great together and asked if I could photograph them for the book (it always helps the creative process if you carry your camera everywhere!). They gladly agreed and I came away with a great shot and an introduction to the band “Sunsplit,” in which the couple play. Read the rest

What’s Octoberfest without a pig roast? The woman ahead of me in the meat line was snapping a cell phone shot of her dinner, so I just shot her hand shooting her subject! Its kind of trendy to selectively desaturate a color image these days, and I get caught up in it too. Read on and I’ll tell you how I did it!

The original is just not a great looking photo, is it? Composition-wise, I liked it, but it has its problems. I shot it on the spur of the moment and didn’t have much time to set my controls (Canon Rebel XT with Canon 28-135 mm lens). I figured I could salvage it somehow in Adobe’s Photoshop. Read the rest

Happy Halloween! This is an image of an eight foot gargoyle that graces the entrance of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. I shot the original in black and white (Canon Rebel XT with Tamron 28-200 mm lens), then added sepia toning in Photoshop. Read the rest