Discover Digital Photography

When you think about wildlife photography, most people would think of visiting a wildlife reserve, national park, or just getting out in the wilds. However, you can take great wildlife photos much closer to home.

Being a photographer is a constant learning experience. But we all have to start somewhere. In this article I want to share seven tips aimed particularly at relatively new photographers, but they should also act as good reminders even if you've been photographing a long time.

Dappled light is often found in woodland, or any time you are shooting under tree cover. As the light from the sun comes down through the trees, it gets broken into areas of light and shadow by the leaves. Depending on how dense the foliage is, the leaves can act like lenses, making spots of out of focus light on the forest floor.

There are a couple of issues when photographing in dappled light that can be difficult to deal with. The first is that the difference in tone between the shadow and highlight areas can be very large. This results in photos where the highlight areas are blown out and overexposed. The other issue is that the uneven pattern of dappled light typically doesn't work well for portraits. In this article we'll look at how you can overcome these issues.

When considering setting up a home studio for photography, whether it be for portrait, product, or food photography, the most important decision is typically regarding the lighting. Should you go for continuous lighting or strobes? And if going for strobes, should you go for speedlight flashguns or studio strobes?

I've covered the differences between continuous lighting and flash in the article LED Light panel vs. Flash. So in today's article I want to look at the choice between speedlight flashguns and studio strobes. We'll look at the benefits and disadvantages of each system, to help you make the decision as to which will work best for your purposes.

Canon 600EX-RT Speedlite Flash and Elinchrom D-Lite RX 4 Studio Strobe

Continuing on from the previous article 5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Photography, here are five more tips that are simple to implement. Thinking about these things before you press the shutter button can help you produce a stronger composition that really holds the viewer's attention.

In this article I'll cover five simple tips that you can implement to help you improve your photography skills and capture better photos. They are mostly things that are easy to implement, just we don't really think about them. Hopefully these tips will spur you on to really think when taking a photo, and so end up with a much more compelling shot.

Low key photographs are those that are overall quite dark, often with just a small patch of light picking out the subject. Basically, it's the opposite of a high key image.

Whereas a brightly lit high key image appears bright and airy, a low key image appears dark and moody. The lack of light can be used to give a sense of foreboding or fear, or just to create a dramatic image. In this article we'll look at some tips to help you create low key images.

Highlighting a small part of a photo with flash can be used to help draw the viewer's attention to that part of the image. When this technique is combined with an overall lack of light over the rest of the image, this can create a very dramatic photo, with the highlighted area really standing out.

However, with a standard speedlight flash this technique can be difficult to achieve as the light from the flash spreads out too much, covering most of the frame. You can reduce the coverage of the flash by moving it closer to the subject, but depending on how small an area you want highlighted, this could result in the flash having to be so close that it appears in the frame.

A cheap and simple solution to this problem is a grid. A grid attaches in front of your flash, and creates a narrow, focused beam of light. This allows you to have your flash positioned further away from your subject, while highlighting just a small area with the flash. In this article we'll look particularly at how to create your own DIY grid for your speedlight flash, and how different variations affect the light.

A High key photo is where the majority of the photo is quite bright. Most of the tones fall in the upper-midtones and highlight range, and often a large area of the image will be white or almost white. This type of image can appear quite clean and clinical, or more often, soft and dreamy.

High key images can work well for portraits, product photography, and flower photography. It's not always the best choice for those subjects, but if you want to go for a feeling of delicacy and lightness, then a high key image is a good choice. For landscapes, creating a high key image can be a bit more tricky, but sand and snow scenes can lend themselves well to high key images.

In this article we'll look at four different lighting setups you can use to create beautiful portraits. These techniques all involve using multiple off-camera light sources. For a couple of the techniques you may be able to get away with just using natural light and a reflector, but really these setups work best if you are using controllable light sources such as speedlights or studio lights.