Photographing the Milky Way and stars at night has become very popular. New cameras make it easier than ever to photograph at night. And improved ISO performance and long exposure noise reduction result in clean images that are sharp. With some of the technical camera craft issues out of the way, the real question becomes Read More
Shooting Tips
Mirrorless Back Button or Shutter Button Autofocus?
Last night I was stalking red winged blackbirds in a marsh near my house. As is often the case, I had both a mirrorless and DSLR camera with me. For mirrorless I was shooting my Z6II, 70-20mm F2.8 with the 2x teleconverter for a total 400mm at F5.6 (2x review coming soon!). I like the Read More
Nikon Z6/7II Auto Focus Modes
With more and more folks trying out the new Nikon mirrorless system, I am getting a lot of great questions about autofocus. This is one feature that is very different than shooting your DSLR. With my D850 I use single point as my default, and use Group Area Autofocus (the diamond pattern) for moving subjects Read More
Negative Space Compositions
We’re in the middle of teaching an online travel photography class right now, and one topic we are exploring is negative and positive space in compositions. What is negative space? The simplest way to think about it is the large unoccupied space around your subject. The smaller subject would be the positive space in the Read More
Two Approaches to Street Photography
Right now we have started up our online travel photography class, and I have to say it was one class I was really excited about teaching. Why? Because good travel photography is spontaneous, unplanned, fluid and diverse. In other words, you need to have a lot of technical skills and be very fast with your Read More
Nikon 3D Tracking
Right now there is a lot of excitement about predictive autofocus. Mirrorless cameras have been ushering in this technology in a big way, but it has actually been around awhile in DSLRs. The basic idea is you focus on a subject using a predictive autofocus pattern or mode, and then the camera will stay focused Read More
Travel photography speedlight solutions
I’m working on our online travel photography class right now, pulling and editing 500 new images from travels around the globe. It has been really interesting looking through a database of a million images and reliving some of my favorite travels and most memorable shoots. How could I forget traveling to Northern Ireland on a Read More
Puffy Birds
Ten below zero this morning….and that is a perfect time to photograph puffy birds. What are puffy birds? One thing we teach in our online bird photography class is understanding a little about bird behavior, and how that can improve your wildlife photography. Birds trap air in their feathers to stay warm. If it is Read More
Customizing Camera Buttons
One thing cameras offer today is the option to customize buttons on the camera body. Each new camera seems to give us more choices to assign different functions to different buttons. Things like focus peaking, level and metering modes can all be assigned to different buttons. But for me the most obvious is setting a Read More
How many megapixels do you really need?
We get this question a lot. Should I get the 24MP or 45MP new camera? One criteria that is often mentioned is how big of a print you can make from your native file size. This is especially of interest to those who print at home. Some photographers have ink jet printers that make 17×22″ Read More