Cold climates
When you are taking your camera into cold conditions, it will be wise to follow a few simple precautions to protect you and your gear. Feet One of the most important thing to protect! They are, after all, what is going to get you out of potential danger. You need to think about protecting them first and foremost. Cold climates can present several different dangers to feet. The first is cold. It is important to keep your feet warm and dry as possible. It is worth investing in strong hiking boots which have good waterproof qualities. If you can, finger a bit of waterproof wax around all the...
Read MoreNight Photography 2 – overcoming the darkness
So you have the night photography bug. You sit twiddling your thumbs in the daylight hours waiting for the light to fade so that you can go out and leave your camera perfectly still with its shutter open for many tens of minutes. You are not...
Read MoreExposing to the right
Exposure is a critical element in photography. Until recently it was common practice for landscape photographers to slightly underexpose image to increase highlight detail and increase saturation. But there is a new school of thought which suggests over exposing just short of blowing out the highlights will actually give you a better range of colours. Film In the days of film, I used to consistently under-expose by half a stop because the slide would retain more colours and so the resulting image would have a richer saturation. Digital With digital images, it was commonly practiced to boost...
Read MorePhotoshop basics – simple colour correction
This is a quick and simple technique for correcting the colour of an image in photoshop. It is not always successful and will not give you the desired results 100% of the time. But as it is quick and easy it is definitely one to try first. My picture of Goðafoss has a dictinct blue cast. It was taken in low light and this is a common problem as my canon couldn’t really see well enough to decide on an appropriate white balance. I could have corrected this at the RAW stage, but for the benefit of this tutorial, I burned it as it came out of the camera. Duplicate the layer. Then apply an...
Read MorePhotography techniques – Hyperfocal distance
Hyperfocal distance is the art in photography of achieving as much sharpness as possible throughout the image. In other words, it involves careful focusing adjustments to ensure that objects close to the camera and objects in the distance all have the same sharp focus, but more accurately, the hyperfocal distance is that point of focus where things are in focus from a point half way between you and the focal point all the way onward to infinity. Hyper-focal distance is more of a landscape photographer’s concept. When shooting landscapes, I never use auto-focus. Although the Hyperfocal...
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