Discover Digital Photography

Photographing a family, particularly when young children are involved, can be a daunting task. The most important thing you can do to make things go smoothly is to plan as much as possible before the actual shoot.

Pre-planned shots can be executed quickly, which is important with young children, who can get bored easily. By planning everything in advance you can make sure the shoot happens quickly, and you won't have too many photos with the kids looking bored or distracted.

IMG_0064 by thebaphotography on flickr (licensed CC-BY)

Landscape photography must be one of the most popular forms of photography. But it can be difficult to do justice to the beautiful world we live in. In this article I'll share five tips for capturing landscape photos. Remember, there are no hard and fast rules to photography, but I hope these tips will give you some ideas and inspiration.

When taking photos in busy places such as cities, it is a good idea to be aware of your rights as a photographer. Do you have the legal right to photograph strangers on the streets, or impressive buildings in the business district?

The law varies between different countries, but most countries have reasonably similar laws. The advice given in this article is not legal advice, and you would be advised to check the laws of the specific country you are photographing in.

Sunday at St. Peter's, Dec 2009 - 19 by Ed Yourdon on flickr (licensed CC-BY-SA)

With digital photography it is quite easy for us to manipulate our photos using image editing software. Some of us make some adjustments to nearly all our photos. This is often known as post processing - processing applied to the photo after it was captured.

But just how much post processing is it 'acceptable' to apply? The answer to this question lies partly in what you yourself are comfortable with, but also what the image is to be used for.

A Little of This a Little of That Processing by fauxto_digit on flickr (licensed CC-BY-ND)

In landscape photography, the vast majority of photos will look better if the horizon is straight. This is particularly true if there is a long flat horizon that we know should be straight, for example the sea or a lake.

In this article we'll look at how you can make sure the horizon is straight when taking a photo, and also how to fix an existing photo with a crooked horizon.

In the last article we looked at ideas of all the great things you can photograph on rainy days. In this article we'll look at some tips on how to combat certain problems that the rain brings (such as keeping your camera dry).

Running for cover by Joseph Jayanth on flickr (licensed CC-BY)

The main problem when shooting in the rain is that you don't want your camera to get wet. The vast majority of cameras can survive a little rain okay. More expensive weather sealed cameras, such as the Pentax K-30, can survive harsher weather, but even so, it is still best to keep your camera as dry as possible.

If it's raining, it can be very tempting to stay inside rather than go out and take some photos. Who wants to take photos in the rain anyway?

Well, actually, photographing in the rain can produce some great photos. One of the reasons rainy photos can seem so striking is just because we are not used to seeing photos taken in the rain.

Shinjuku by pietrozuco on flickr (licensed CC-BY)

In this article I'll cover some of the reasons why rainy weather can be a great time for photography. Then in a follow-up article, I'll cover some tips on keeping safe and dry in rainy weather.

In this post we'll look at how to apply a realistic looking texture to a person's face using a displacement map in Adobe Photoshop.

The end result we will be working towards in this tutorial

The process is exactly the same in the full version of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, they both feature the displace filter and work in the same way. GIMP also features the displace filter, as does Paint Shop Pro. This tutorial focuses on Photoshop, but the process is similar in GIMP and PSP.

In the previous article we looked at examples of when you might want to use manual focus instead of autofocus. In this article we'll cover how you can focus manually, with some tips to help you make sure that your focus is accurate.

The autofocus systems in modern cameras can usually focus a lot faster than we can focus the camera / lens manually. But there are some situations where using manual focus may be preferable. In this article we'll look at some examples of where using manual focus can give better results than autofocus. (Tips on the actual process of focusing manually will be covered in a separate upcoming article).

cannon ball by fRandi-Shooters on flickr (licensed CC-BY)

The most obvious situation when you'd want to use manual focus is when autofocus isn't working. When the camera can't autofocus correctly, or is finding it difficult to autofocus, you'll often find that the autofocus will 'hunt'. This is where the focus is racked back and forth between infinity and the closest focus of the camera, in an effort by the camera to try and find the point where the subject is in focus.

Most cameras will flash the active focus area in the viewfinder or on the LCD and beep when focus has been successfully achieved. If your camera is having trouble autofocusing, then switching to manual focusing would be advisable.