Pro Techniques

You stumble into your favorite Starbucks half-awake as you do every morning and WHAM! There's Elvis standing at the end of the counter — fringed shirt, sequined guitar strap and all. You do a quick draw from your iPhone holster while The King patiently waits for his venti peanut butter banana flat white with an extra three pumps of funnel cake syrup, but — damn! — the battery is dead. What do you do? You're missing your chance to join the annals of consumer photojournalism and a shot at certain Instagram history. That's about a zillion Likes being blown to tarnation.

Twenty years in business together, the team of Bohm-Marrazzo (Montclair, New Jersey-- www.bohm-marrazzo.com) comes well equipped to tackle the challenge of photographing kids and animals for their advertising clients. Experience has taught them to incorporate these highly animated subjects into the picture to make an...

Bruce Myren, photographer, digital guru, and dedicated artist, is often cast in the role of the assistant who doesn't carry lights or equipment. He quietly trails into a shoot behind some of the area's top pros who don't happen to shoot...

If you still think of portraits in terms of main light, fill light, and key light, I think you're missing out on some fresh and exciting techniques. While the classic studio portrait is still practiced by lots of amateurs and practically every...

Ever since I was a kid, I have been fascinated with 3D viewing of photographs. In grade school, in the 1960s, the school library had a simple viewer with pairs of black-and-white stereo images. I loved to look at those over and over again.

Surreal Composites--A great technique is to take a collection of original images and combine them to create a fanciful and surreal final image. For this other-worldly desert scene I took four original film shots of...

As photo businesses go, David Alan Wolters (www.DavidAlanWolters.com) started out as many of our readers--a 12-year-old kid with a camera trying to find a place for himself in the world. Again, like many of us, Wolters went on to work on the high school yearbook as a photographer. Raised in the small town of Spring...