Lighting How To

The trend of using continuous light sources for portraiture that I saw at last year’s WPPI show continues unabated with Westcott’s Two-Light Daylight D5 Softbox Kit being the latest offering. The kit uses fluorescent bulbs as a light source, although that word barely appears in Westcott’s early press material for the kit. Part of the reason may be that when it comes to photographs of people, fluorescent has a negative connotation but nothing could be further from the truth.

For decades, soft light has been the bee’s knees for portrait photography. It’s flattering, pleasant to look at, and undistracting.

There are a multitude of reasons why what you observe in the field may appear vastly different than the image you capture unless you make adjustments while shooting or do so later during the editing process. The quick video below from the Hoffman Photography YouTube channel explores an "enlightening" oft-ignored fact.

It’s not uncommon for photographers to adopt a “set-it-and-forget it” mentality when configuring their cameras, thereby ending up with photographs that aren’t as good as possible. Whether you call this habit lazy or uninformed, there are times when the choice of a custom setting results in more creative images.

The quick tutorial below from the Adorama TV YouTube channel is all about the basics of using ISO when selecting your camera settings, and when choosing the sensitivity setting should be the first thing you do. Then, depending upon light levels and the scene at hand, you can modify shutter speed and f/stop if need be.

One of the primary goals of landscape photographers is to arrive at a “correct” exposure, and we regularly post tutorials on this subject to help get the job done. But in the quick tutorial below you’ll see why certain types of scenes look much better by adding a bit of intentional overexposure during the editing process.

I have wanted to photograph some of nature’s details with x-rays, but I just never got around to doing it. In writing this issue of the Petersen’s Photographic Digital Photography Guide, I thought it would be interesting for you to see what can be done with this unique way of capturing images. So, I decided to put the extra effort into taking the pictures in this section.