Discover Digital Photography

There are a wide range of different photographic filters available. These filters usually screw on to the end of your camera's lens, and alter the image in some way. There are filters for darkening the sky, filters for cutting down on the light level, and filters for changing the color of an image.

But some of these filters can be quite expensive, so in this article I want to look at some cheap alternatives. Of course the alternatives aren't as convenient or as high quality as a proper camera filter. But if you can't afford the full price of a proper filter, a cheap alternative may well do the job.

Macro and close-up photography provide a way to make the unseen visible. It can highlight details and show us beauty we would otherwise have missed. Essentially macro photography is taking photos that magnify these small items and details so that they can be seen easily.

Macro by Hachi Gatsu on flickr (licensed CC-BY)

If you want to learn more about macro photography, there are some common terms used when discussing it, which it can be helpful to understand what they mean. In articles about macro and close-up photography, and in online discussion forums, you will often come across terms such as:

• true macro
• magnification ratio
• life size
• ratios such as 1:1 and 1:2

In this article I want to explain what these terms mean how they relate to actual photographic practice.

Bulb mode is a special shooting mode that will let you take really long exposures. It allows you to keep the camera's shutter open for as long as you like (or until the camera's battery runs out). You're not likely to find it as feature of most point & shoot cameras, but it can be found on most more advanced cameras.

Most cameras that feature bulb mode allow up to 30 second exposure times in normal modes. This is more than enough for most situations. During the daytime a typical exposure time will be around 1/500s to 1/160s, a pretty quick shutter speed. But if you're out in the middle of nowhere at night, then a shutter speed of over 30 seconds may be necessary.

Taking photos around midday is often shunned by many photographers. Certainly it is more difficult to get nice photos at midday than it is around sunset or sunrise, but this doesn't mean you can't get great shots at this time of day as well.

The main problem with photographing at midday is the harsh overhead light of the sun. This causes strong highlights and shadows, and can be particularly unflattering for portraits. There are still plenty of photo opportunities about though.

There are very few photographers that work out the exposure settings for each photo manually in their head with no help from the camera. Whether you use your camera in manual mode or in fully automatic mode, almost undoubtedly you rely on your camera's metering system for setting the exposure.

Most more advanced cameras offer a range of exposure metering modes. Each one works in a slightly different way. It is worth understanding how these different modes work, which is what we'll look at in this article.

Adding a texture overlay to a photo can be a quick and easy way to create a distressed, vintage look. Depending on the texture and any other effects applied, you can achieve looks from a slightly old photo to a painting on canvas.

In this article I'll cover how to add a texture to a photo in Photoshop Elements / CS. The process is very similar in other image editing software as well, so if you don't have a copy of Photoshop, hopefully this guide will still give you a good idea of how the texturing process works.

If you've considered making money from your photography, licensing your photos can be a good way to do it. (Working on commissions and selling prints are the other popular ways of making money).

There is quite a high demand for stock photos. Businesses are looking for photos to use on their products, or for advertising their products. Magazines and websites want photos to illustrate their articles. And there are many other uses.

In the last two articles we've looked at how to use a shallow depth of field to blur the background using in-camera techniques, and how to replicate the effect using Photoshop or other image editing software. In this article I want to look at a couple of more advanced ways of blurring the background using image editing software.

We'll look at two specialist programs that can replicate the effect of a shallow depth of field, along with a large variety of other lens effects. First we have Lens Effects by Topaz Labs, then we have FocalPoint2 by onOne Software. We'll use the same two images used in the previous article so you can compare the results of each technique against each other.

In this article we'll look at how to use image editing software to blur the background of a photo while keeping the subject sharp. This is a good way to help draw viewer's attention to your subject, rather than the background.

Although it is best to achieve a blurred background in-camera (see previous article: How to take photos with a blurred background by using a shallow depth of field), this is not always possible. In this case we can use image editing software to simulate the effect of a shallow depth of field instead.

We've all seen beautiful photos where the subject is in focus but the background is blurred. These sorts of photos may seem difficult to create. But with an understanding of depth of field, you can make photos like this too.

In this article we'll look how you can achieve a shallow depth of field to create photos with a blurred background.

The Aggressive Black Drongo! by VinothChandar on flickr (licensed CC-BY)