How to Take Better Photos With Your EOS Camera

How to Take Better Photos With Your EOS Camera
Sunburned Photographs: An Experiment in Alternative Analog
Yoga Photography Techniques at Dusk

Posted: 26 May 2013 09:33 PM PDT

Final Reminder: Only 1 Day Left! in the deal on the: Understanding Canon EOS Guide

The marketing departments of the camera manufacturers would like you to believe that buying the latest versions of their digital cameras will make you a better photographer. That’s not true. All you are doing is buying a better tool.

Becoming a better photographer is something different. It requires a deeper understanding of light, composition, and your subject matter. It also requires good craft skills – a mastery of your camera and an understanding of photography’s technical aspects.

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Luckily, all this stuff is learnable as none of it is terribly complicated. In that spirit, here are seven things you can do right away to start taking better photos with your EOS camera.

1. Use the Creative Zone.

If you own any of EOS Digital Rebel series (called the xxxD and xxxD ranges in Europe) then you will know that your camera comes with multiple exposure modes. That includes fully automatic modes such as scene intelligent auto, portrait, landscape, and so on.

Try to familiarize yourself with the manual mode.

Avoid using your cameras “Auto” settings.

These modes are unnecessary. Worse, they will hold you back and prevent you from developing as a creative photographer. There are a number of reasons for that, but here are the key ones:

* You can’t use the RAW format or set white balance or Picture Style.

* The camera selects the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings. To become a creative photographer, you need to control those settings yourself.

There are only four exposure modes that you need. They are Program, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority and Manual. They occupy what Canon calls the ‘creative zone’. If you don’t already, learn to use these four modes as quickly as you can. Your photography will improve.

2. Use the RAW format.

If you’re not doing so already, then please start using the Raw format for all your photography. RAW files contain much more highlight and shadow detail than JPEG files. There is much more you can do with them in post-processing.

Regardless of what anyone tells you, there are virtually no good reasons to use the JPEG format. Wedding photographers and photojournalists or sports photographers who shoot extreme high volume or photos that need to be sent to a picture editor’s desk as rapidly as possible may prefer JPEG for the speed. But everybody else should use RAW.

Many photographers prefer to work in Lightroom instead of Photoshop because of it’s ease of use.

3. Definitely Consider Lightroom 4.

Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) is an excellent piece of software and is more than good enough to get you started with Raw processing if you are new to this aspect of post-processing. But Lightroom 4 is much better.

Lightroom is so good now that it might well be the only processing software you ever need. The days of Photoshop CS being the must-have software for photographers are over. Lightroom is quicker, easier, more intuitive to use and far cheaper.

If you have any doubts, download the Lightroom 4 trial or the Lightroom 5 Beta (it’s free) and test it out.

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4. Demand beautiful light.

Some photographers will tell you that there is no such thing as bad light. That’s nonsense. There’s ugly light, mediocre light, and beautiful light. Learn what beautiful light is and how to use it.

Light Matters

5. Get a prime lens.

I regard a prime lens as an essential purchase for any photographer. Here’s why:

* Prime lenses have excellent image quality.

* Prime lenses have wider apertures. They let you take photos in low light and use wide apertures for creative composition.

* Prime lenses teach you how to get the most out of a single focal length.

They don’t have to expensive either. The EF 50mm f1.8 lens costs less than $100 and the EF 40mm f2.8 pancake lens is not far behind. Or spend more if you want a lens with better build quality and autofocus performance.

Learn how to read the histogram to help you get better exposed photos.

6. Get to grips with the histogram.

The histogram is your friend. It tells you every time whether the exposure of your photos is accurate or not. Your camera often gets exposure wrong, and when it does it’s up to you to use exposure compensation to put it right. Good exposure leads to good quality Raw files that are easy to process. It also keeps noise levels to a minimum.

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7. Shoot black and white.

If you’re new to digital photography you may be wondering why anyone would shoot in black and white. The answer is simple. It’s hard to create a good black and white image. You need to be aware of things like tonal contrast, line, texture, shape and form, and how they translate into a monochrome image. But once you master these things, it makes you a better photographer. Your colour images will benefit too.

The idea behind this article is to give you some good ideas to work on to improve your photography. Your EOS camera is an amazing machine. Photographers have never had it so good. The quality and spec of modern digital SLR’s far exceeds that available just a few years ago.

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Your camera is fantastic – but the next step is up to you.

For Further Training on Canon EOS Cameras:

The writer of this article, Andrew Gibson, is also the author of an in-depth Canon guide called Understanding EOS. He agreed to give our readers 36% off until Tuesday which ends in 1 day!

More details here: Understanding EOS Deal

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Article from: PictureCorrect Photography Tips

Sunburned Photographs: An Experiment in Alternative Analog

Posted: 26 May 2013 05:43 PM PDT

There has been a very real struggle in recent years between the two dominant methods of photography: digital or film? Pixels or grain? Lightroom or the darkroom? In all the hubub, it’s very easy to lose sight of what photography is at its most basic – the capturing of light to create an image, and the many, many ways to approach that task. Even film purists often forget about tintypes and glass plates, though solargraphs have made something of a resurgence. In this video, which is presented by the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, California, photographer Chris McCaw shows us how he has devised a process of burning his images into photo paper, using the camera’s lens to focus the sun’s rays into a beam which can sear the scene over a very extended exposure (for those of you reading this by email, the video can be seen here):

Using a massive 30 x 40 inch large format bellows camera, McCaw loads a sheet of photosensitive paper into the film holder and points the lens at the landscape, facing towards the arc of the sun. Over the course of a full day, the lens concentrates the sun’s light into a harsh beam which sears the scene in much the same way that a devilish child would use a magnifying glass to sear an ant. The effect is called solarization; it is a well-known phenomenon in which intense overexposure causes the tones in an image to reverse – the dark areas becoming light, and vice versa. The path of the sun itself gets so hot that the paper literally goes up in smoke, leaving a hole burned right through the paper.

analog photography

What results from this process is a photograph unlike any other – a product of pure experimentation and invention. As the world moves away from analog photography, it may seem as if the possibilities are exhausted and there is nothing left to learn, but the opposite is true. With only 150 years of history to the photographic medium, there are endless discoveries yet to be made in regards to what can be done with the recording of light, and they will be made by innovators who are able to think outside the camera.

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Next time you are looking for a challenge, you don’t simply have to replicate what others have done before you. Try asking yourself:

What materials are sensitive to light (film, photo paper, polaroids, liquid emulsion, silver, copper)?
How does light move? How does a camera work?
What new combinations can I make between materials, equipment, and light?

analog photography

“I think the main thing is to just realize that there’s still so much stuff that’s out there to do, that, you know, that we haven’t even thought of. And I think a lot of photographers are.. they’re getting excited again about going back to the darkroom and just rethinking, ‘What is a photograph?’”

Go to full article: Sunburned Photographs: An Experiment in Alternative Analog

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Article from: PictureCorrect Photography Tips

Yoga Photography Techniques at Dusk

Posted: 26 May 2013 11:52 AM PDT

Sun-drenched shades of red clay and pink granite combine with the brilliant hues of a desert sunset to make for a striking yoga-themed photo shoot in Enchanted Rock, Texas. Photographer Kurt Kronk used a unique lighting setup to present both his subject and the majestic natural surroundings to the best advantage (for those of you reading this by email, the video can be seen here):

Kronk used an Profoto AcuteB Two-head Split Cable to connect two heads to one AcuteB2 battery generator. Although this halved the amount of power available to each light head, it worked for Kronk’s purposes in balancing with the natural light source of the sunset. The resulting photos offer a very natural-looking effect:

yoga photo shoot at sunset