Photographer Coach

Spring and summer are the high season for weddings, and if you’re like most people, you’ll be invited to one. God forbid you’re asked to take the wedding photos, as this tends to produce high anxiety in most people–leave that to the pros. However, you might want to just take some snapshots of your own! The bride and groom will enjoy seeing informal snapshots of the day. In fact, they often place disposable cameras at each table at the reception to encourage people to do this! Read the rest

Unless you’re one of the unfortunates who summer where they winter, you’ll go on vacation this year. Simply EVERYONE takes vacation pictures to remember the good times. What kind of camera should you take and how do you ensure getting great shots?

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What IS this creature? And why would someone hold it? Regardless, it makes a fine photo, don’t you think? One of the most common things to do with a camera is photograph your pet. And if you don’t have one, shoot someone else’s pet. Pet photography is easy on one hand, yet difficult on the other. Read more to see why. 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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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

Holga 120CFN
Medium Format Fixed Focus Film Camera with Lens and Built-in Flash with Color Filter Wheel
Buy From Amazon.com

What’s a Holga?

A Holga is a cheap Chinese plastic medium format film camera. Essentially, a toy! Yes, I did say FILM camera! Why review this decidedly lo-tech dinosaur? Well, simply put, the Holga lets you express your creativity in ways that digital does not allow. Shoot a roll of color slide film and then have your photo processing people cross-process it as if it were negative film (For Kodak and similar films, that would be C-41 instead of the proper E-6). Check out my Holga shots here and see what you think!
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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

Black and white? Who would ever want to photograph a richly colored Autumn leaf in black and white? (That’s a rhetorical question). There was something about the way this wet maple looked the other morning on the hood of my car that just screamed “Monochrome!”

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So you want to buy a digital camera, and you don’t know where to begin. Well, based on my photographic experience– 25 years with film, three with digital- I shall present to you some major pitfalls along your path. This is just my opinion of course, but as Walter Cronkite said, everyone’s entitled to my opinion. Read the rest