John Watson is the original founder of Photodoto. If you're interested in what John has been up to, you can browse his personal blog.
Chernobyl Legacy is a heart-wrenching photo essay that reveals, in a series of stark, intimate and haunting portraits, the terrible human cost of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident. You’ll never be able to forget after you see it.
… Continue reading Chernobyl Legacy Photo Essay by Paul Fusco
In the previous two installments of this series, basic concepts and lines and curves, we covered how to control what is in your viewfinder and the use of lines in your compositions. In this third article, I want to talk a little more about framing because it is so important. In particular, a very simple concept that can have a profound impact on your photographs: filling the frame with your subject.
… Continue reading Learning composition: getting in close and filling the frame
I was planning on having the next post in the composition series up this morning, but life hath intervened. I’ll have it up later tonight. In the mean time, check out these interesting web morsels:
… Continue reading Life, it sneaks up on you when you’re not looking
Sometimes you want to shoot but you can’t seem to find any ideas. Or maybe you feel like every shot you take has been done before or you just want to try something new. It’s the photographer’s equivalent of writer’s block. Fortunately there a bunch of places you can go for help getting your creativity flowing:
I listen to music a lot. And it seems like lately I’ve come across a fair number of songs that have something to do with cameras. Just for fun, here’s a sampling, some classics, some questionable, and some newer ones, too.
In my last post on composition I covered the basics: what composition is, how you can control exactly what appears in a photo (and what doesn’t), and some tips to get your started. A photo with impact grabs the viewer’s attention right away and doesn’t let go. Subject matter certainly contributes to this. But composition is one of the most important factors. Two photographs of exactly the same subject can look completely different and evoke different feelings in the viewer simply by changing the composition. In this second article, I’ll talk a little bit about another concept: how lines and curves can make a composition stronger.
Imagine standing before a canvas of sky, your camera in hand as the sun dips below the horizon. That’s where my journey with silhouette photography began.
I learned early on that these shots are more than just pictures; they’re stories waiting to be told. They convey drama and emotion through stark contrast and simplicity.
In this piece, you’ll learn how to harness light sources like that dipping sun, tweak your camera settings for those crisp silhouetted subjects against bright backgrounds, and tap into post-processing tricks to polish off each shot. By the end, capturing gorgeous silhouette portraits or creative landscape outlines will seem less like luck—and more like second nature.
… Continue reading Techniques for Creating Eye-Catching Silhouettes
There are many things that go into the concept of “composition.” Composition is a defining characteristic that separates a forgettable snapshot from a photo that has a strong impact on the viewer. It’s more important than mega-pixels, more important than what equipment you use. This will be the first in an ongoing series to try and demystify this pretentious-sounding subject and show you how thinking about composition, even a little, can help you improve your photos. We’ll start with a few basic concepts and some guidelines you can follow that will help you start creating images with impact and that draw the viewer in.
… Continue reading Learning composition: basic concepts and framing
I recently finished a task that turned out to be undeserving of my procrastination and left me with a welcome sense of relief. I made a backup of every digital photograph in my collection, over 15,000 images, spanning nearly 6 years from early 2000. It had been far too long since my last backup. It was easy, didn’t take a long time, and now I know that these treasured memories will be safe if something catastrophic ever happens to the hard drive they are stored on. Here’s how I did it.
When your camera is set on automatic, making a photograph is as simple as pressing the shutter release button. Somehow, the camera magically records just the right amount of light to render an image of the scene before it. But what is really going on? How does the camera know how to do that?
Read on to find out how a little knowledge about what goes into making an exposure can open up new worlds of creative possibilities.
… Continue reading Understanding exposure: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO
