Sometimes it just isn’t practical to carry a big bag o’ gear, or to change lenses in the middle of what you’re doing. Sometimes, too, there are the shots you miss because you have your short zoom on your camera, when you needed something with more reach (or vice-versa). I didn’t used to take the idea of an all-in-one lens

I first came across Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New while I was in college. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Here I was, a budding English major, surrounded by all kinds of academic theories and approaches for analyzing and deconstructing texts, some of which made sense, and quite a few of which didn’t. At the time, I

Okay, quick review time. Let’s throw composition out the window (for today, anyway) and take up exposure for a minute. If you’ll recall, exposure is all about light: the amount, duration, and intensity of the light hitting your medium, whether it’s film or a sensor. These things are covered by your aperture, shutter speed, and ISO respectively. With all of

Sometimes I let enthusiasm get the best of me. Case in point: yesterday, I hit three cemeteries in one afternoon, ’cause, hey, I love a good cemetery. There was only one small issue: Well into shooting at the third cemetery, I realized that the shutter speed was suspiciously high, even taking into account the broad daylight on gray and stark

Very few words today… mostly photos, and goosebumps. I was fortunate enough to be in Hoboken as the shuttle Enterprise, atop its SCA 747, made its last flight. Needless to say, if you’re old enough to remember the beginnings of the shuttle program — and to have seen the tragedies that befell the Challenger and Columbia — it was one

  No, you haven’t wandered onto the wrong blog, and no, I haven’t lost my mind (yet). There’s a reason that the battered short story collection on the left is on a photography blog, and a reason it’s one of my favorite books in my whole collection. Sudden Fiction isn’t just a title, it’s also a genre unto itself. They’re sometimes called

In a post a couple of days ago (Rule 32: Don’t Take Unnecessary Photos), I briefly touched on the time we waste on photos that just aren’t worth it. I chalked it up, at least in part, to the fact that quite a few of us hate to head out with a camera, only to return with an empty memory

Let’s start off by explaining what Portrait and Landscape are, exactly, for anyone reading this that doesn’t know. Portrait orientation is a more  generally reserved for… well, portraits, like Figure 1. Landscape orientation for landscapes, as in Figure 2. Makes sense, right? So what’s with Figure 3, which shows a portrait (of sorts) in Landscape orientation? This is worth thinking

So you’re finally on your way to figuring out this whole photography thing. You already know you should have your camera with you; you’ve shot photos by the hundreds, if not the thousands, always working to hone your craft; and you’ve trained your eye to look for a photo opportunity in nearly everything you see. All well and good, right?

Some photo opportunities come up fairly regularly, whether it’s your favorite park or an event that takes place around the same time every year. As it turns out, there are some events in the offing that will make for some very interesting photography. The first of these is a once-in-a-lifetime event. The flight of the shuttle Discovery to Washington D.C.