Pro Techniques

Who: Robert Beck, staff photographer for Sports Illustrated.
What: Infrared (IR) photography.
When: “The editors give me some leeway,” Robert says, “but I’m not going to be using it for a decisive putt.”
Where: Golf courses all over the world.
Why: Although the job calls for capture of the peak moment, the turning point, the key play, the tense concentration, the moment when the athlete’s body language gives it all away, there’s always the professional and personal challenge to do something different.
How: With a Nikon D700 modified for infrared photography.

Every digital image starts out as a color image, an RGB that, when shot in Raw format and loaded as a 16-bit file, contains millions of color and brightness codes. These codes, or pixel addresses, can be manipulated in many ways using presets or “manual” adjustments to create looks that range from “true” to highly stylistic interpretations of the content within the image.

Computer viruses are small, invasive programs written by malevolent and misanthropic misfits that are designed to create havoc within your computer system. You get computer viruses in the same way that you catch the human variety; through contact with...

Fast, super high-capacity SSD (Solid State Drive) storage devices have become essential tools for content creators, videographers and studio photographers. Storage drives that are immensely portable and durable, like the 8TB* Sandisk Extreme® Portable SSD, provide the ideal platform to store, back up and help preserve precious data while on location in the field, in the studio and at the workstation.

“Understanding the genres, history, and style of the music is a huge part of my success,” John Scarpati observes. “I work very closely with the bands and artists to make sure the cover art reflects what they want to say.” Scarpati (www.scarpati.com), as he prefers to be called (“when someone yells Scarpati on set...

As a newspaper photographer, you never know when you show up in the morning what you're going to be working on--sometimes it's an environmental portrait, other times a feature, or a documentary image that is posed," San Francisco-based Peter DaSilva says.

"Whatever it is, I need to produce a picture of quality every time I'm sent...

Filing the frame with the critter isn’t required for great wildlife photography. Reflecting on how I first slanted my wildlife photography in this direction, it has its roots in the first lens I had to shoot wildlife. I started with a Vivitar 400mm f/5.6 on an old Minolta that was soon replaced with a Nikon 400mm f/5.6 on an F2. That 400mm was my main lens for a long time and it taught me lessons about wildlife photography that I still depend on to this day.