A Starter’s Guide to Film Photography: What You Need to Know

Photography has never been more accessible than it is now in the digital age. Every cell phone features a camera, and those cameras are quickly becoming more advanced.

DSLRs are becoming more affordable while offering increasingly higher quality and functionality. And the advent of mirrorless cameras are packing more photo punch into smaller and easier to use packages. So why would anyone consider using an outdated medium like film? You might be surprised.

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Using Low Key Lighting in Your Portraits: Getting Moody On the Down Low

So you’ve been shooting for a while and you want to add a little more visual oomph to your shots, why not try a little low key?

Low key lighting is a classic technique, a la where you use shadow and high contrast to show the shape of your model. Making the background dark can be super complicated or super easy, your choice.

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How to Use Triangles to Improve Your Portraits Composition

Do you ever look at a picture and absolutely love it, but you don’t know why? There are a lot of elements that can go into a great shot, but the hardest thing to see/ easiest thing to pick up on are triangles, which are leading lines that frame your subject, drawing your eye deeper into their inner lives.

The more triangles in a picture, the more compelling the shot is.

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How to Capture Fantastic Photos in Low Light

It is a simple, unavoidable fact that light is necessary for photography.

Life, however, doesn’t restrict itself to times when the sun is bright and plentiful. Unless you only shoot in a controlled environment, chances are you’re going to want to takes photos when the lighting is less than ideal.

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Shooting Winter Wonderland: How to Take Great Snow Images

Shoot what you love. The Amazing Images Will Follow. That’s my motto.

Above, you can see a shot of my daughters, Zoe and Tenley, on their first day of snow ever. Zoe wanted to hold the snow in her hands and blow it, Tenley agreed, and just as Zoe was blowing, Tenley reached up and whitewashed her face with the snow. I think that the resulting image is my favorite I’ve taken in a long time.

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Winter Wedding Photography Tips: All You Need to Know

Winter weddings bring a lot of photography challenges because of weather, chilly winds and dark skies even in the day time. But still, many couples decide to have a winter wedding to enjoy the special discounts on venues, catering and accommodation.

The first thing that comes to our mind with winter weddings is bad weather– snowfall, temperatures below zero and chilly breezes. Ooh! The mere thought of it causes goose bumps. The days are much shorter, it gets dark very soon and sometimes daylight is also not very bright. But, you can have your dream wedding in winters too, if you plan it well.

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What to Wear for a Photo Shoot: Clothing for Portraits

What to wear? It’s an age old question. One that never goes away. And what to wear for a photo shoot even gets harder. Two weeks ago, Santa brought my oldest daughter, Zoe, ten BILLION outfits from across the globe.

Knit sweaters, lace sweaters, casual sweaters, fringed sweaters…if there was a sweater being made, she got it, in addition to thousands of jeans, leggings, skirts, cords, leg warmers, earmuffs, coats, camisoles, yoga wear and basketball shorts. She got so much clothing that it literally took her four hours just to try it all on.

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Got Color? No Way! The Whys of a Monochromatic Image

Ansel Adams, master of black and white photography, once said; “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” So many people take pictures of just whatever… people eating, in awkward positions, with distracting things in the background, etc.,

Then, because that shot took a long time to make, or was hard, even though it’s a bad shot, they feel like they can save it by making it into a black and white. But taking a bad shot and turning it black and white isn’t making it any better, it’s just making a bad black and white shot.

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Home for the Holidays: Christmas Photography Tips

Ahhh, the Holidays. Millions of normally civilized people overextending their budgets and sometimes their left hooks in the pursuit of the perfect gift, stretching their culinary skills (and their smoke alarms) to their furthest heights, and begging and cajoling their extended families into family pictures, lots of them, so that they can forget the stressful, over-emotional, exhausting, sleep deprived knock down, drag out fights and focus on the memories of beauty of the season.

I photograph a ton of families during the month of December, and truth be told, it’s pretty stressful getting people in the perfect outfits when they are balancing a head full of thousands of dancing sugarplums.

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The Ultimate Guide to Depth of Field in Photography

Depth of field basically means how much of your picture, from foreground to background is sharp. So there you have it, see you next week, bye, byeeeeee….Oh, are you still here? That wasn’t enough? Ok, so depth of field depends on several things, all centering arount the f stop of your camera, one of a triumvirate of things that allow you to let light in, the other two of which are shutter speed and ISO.

Your fstop is how big the hole that lets the light in is. The smaller the number, the bigger the hole, so at f32, the hole is a tiny pinhole and at 1.2 it’s pretty gosh darned huge. . It lets you determine what in your picture is sharp and what isn’t…it draws focus to what you find important about the picture.

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