Histogram eBook
The Histogram eBook is free to download and offers photographers a detailed explanation of what a histogram is, why it exists and how it is useful.
Learn the basics of Photoshop with simple exposure blending - Part #1
Photoshop is built upon one fundamental concept, the idea of layers and masks, and there is no better way to learn about this crucial concept than with a staple of landscape photography photo editing, a simple exposure blend.
Exposure Bracketing from the ground up.
The rationale behind the multiple-exposures method is that each photo with its unique EV recovers some or other detail in the scene that its bracketed kin do not.
The four basic exposure strategies.
So you have stumbles across world’s finest example of the ‘rule of thirds’; What do you do? What is your strategy when it comes to exposing for this compositional marvel?
Back to Basics: the camera’s internal light meter and metering modes – what landscape photographers need to know.
Understanding how the metering system works and why the camera sometimes gets it wrong is possibly all you need; it’s the first step towards guaranteeing that you always come home from a shoot with a card full of correctly exposed photos
Back to Basics: What is the difference between zoom lenses and prime lenses?
The reality is that zoom lenses and prime lenses both have a place in the modern camera bag. There is little that a prime lens can do to surpass the versatility of a zoom lens; however, there is also no better way to experiment with large apertures than to own a fast prime.
Adobe Color, taking the frustration out of colour theory and, best of all, it's free!
Adobe Color is an entirely free web-based application designed to help creatives, even landscape photographers, in applying colour theory to their work.
The mysterious depth-of-field preview button; why is it still with us?
Even if we don’t use the depth-of-field preview button an awful lot these days, it would be an unspeakable injustice if a scientific apparatus such as the modern DSLR left any one of its settings entirely up to trial and error.
The Inverse-Square Law - There is just no escaping how light decays!
Whether you are taking photos of a model in a studio or designing the inner workings of a lens, there is just no escaping the manner in which light chooses to decay.
The Fundamentals of the Mighty Curves Adjustment
No matter how many points you lay down or how you go about working out where those points should be, they all behave in precisely the same manner. Each adjustment marker simply maps some existing input pixel luminance value to some new, adjusted output value.
Four of the most useful shortcut keys in Lightroom!
If you plan on spending any time at all in front of your computer editing photos, then the humble shortcut key may well be the closest thing that you have to an elixir of youth.
Focal length, the simplest and most important number of them all!
In a world where we are familiar with camera lenses that comprise numerous aspherical elements glazed with Super Spectra coatings, one can be forgiven for asking precisely what focal length is.
The Three Stages of Sharpening
There are very few – if any – award-winning landscape photos about where the photographer didn’t painstakingly address sharpness at each of the stages mentioned here
Back to Basics: The Camera Modes that Count!
The step up from fully automatic shooting is nowhere near as daunting as it might seem. All one needs is a rudimentary understanding of exposure value and the related exposure compensation and you’re set.
Rethinking Contrast
The trouble is that RGB is an excellent tool for engineers but far less useful if you are grappling with the intricacies of contrast. Instead, a decidedly more intuitive way to think about colour is as a combination of hue, saturation and luminance (HSL).
The Exposure Slider, Friend or Foe?
Noise always steals a march when something other than the presence of more photons is responsible for making a picture brighter. In some sense, the humble slider and the camera’s ISO are in the business of artificially influencing brightness.
Basic Lightroom – Introduction & White Balance
In this series of articles, I am going to deal with the editing portion of Lightroom and walk you through the elementary steps that I follow with almost every one of my images.
On Angle of View, Focal Length & Crop Factor
Buy a lens today, and its barrel will almost certainly come marked with a focal length. To establish what the angle of view is, though, one would have to either whip out that old scientific calculator for a little trigonometry or, alternatively, locate the manufacturer's detailed specifications.
Angle of View Calculation
Angle of View (AoV) describes the angular extent of a scene captured by a camera. It is represented by the lowercase Greek symbol for alpha – α. The formula for calculating the AoV is written as follows where d = the diagonal dimension of a camera's image sensor and f = the focal length of the lens.
Crop Factor Basics
The first thing to know in the pursuit of crop factor enlightenment is that the entire system is based, rather arbitrarily, on the old 35 mm film standard. I say “arbitrarily” because a crop factor is simply a ratio, one that can just as easily be calculated using an 8" × 10" large-format camera or the tiny iPhone 7 camera as a reference.