Create Striking Photos with Good Color Contrast

Many photographers know how to use contrast to benefit their photos. Contrast makes photos eye catching and can even make the most basic looking photos look great. There are two types of contrast:

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8 Tips for Shooting Landscapes with Horizons

Improve your landscape photography skills with these must-know tips for breathtaking landscape photos.

1. Shoot about 30 minutes before and after sunset.

A sunset is a great thing to capture, but even if you’re not shooting the sunset but instead shooting at a 90-degree angle to the sunset or even shooting with the sunset at your back, having that subtle light brings out the colors in landscape photos. Most outdoor photography magazines won’t even consider shots that haven’t been shot around this time, as well as before/after sunrise.

2. Shoot about 30 minutes before and after sunrise.

As well as before and after sunset, shooting before and after sunrise causes a lot of detail and tone to be seen. The lighting avoids being overexposed, which happens many times when shooting in the middle of the day with harsh light. For portraits, you can shoot in the shade for subtle light even during the middle of the day, but with landscapes, you can’t put the entire landscape into the shade. You have to rely on the weather for that. You can shoot a little longer after sunrise if there’s some slight cloud cover, but usually an hour or two after sunrise and it’s already really bright.

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Tips for Exhibiting Your Work

If you want to exhibit your work, here’s an article for you! Find out what to expect from exhibitions, when and when not to exhibit your work, and how to promote yourself.











Although photographers often work hard so that they can eventually exhibit their work, some actually lack the experience and the knowledge of how to show their work professionally. To be honest, there are no hard-and-fast rules on how to exhibit your work correctly and hit the jack pot. There is, however, a set of guidelines and principles to follow and those to stay away from and this is what we will be talking about today. Of course, in the end, every photographer (or artist for that matter) should go with what suits them, their needs, their goals, and their work best.

So, what is an exhibition?

Most simply put, an exhibition is an organized presentation and display of a carefully selected number of items. Exhibitions have vastly become the medium to show art, gain recognition, and move forward with your career, and are mostly held in museums, galleries, and exhibition halls. Exhibitions fall in either one of two categories. An exhibition could be permanent, or it could be temporary opening and closing on a pre-scheduled date which is mostly the case. Exhibitions can be held in one venue, or they can be thrown in multiple locations, which is commonly referred to as a traveling exhibition.

AIPAD Photo Show New York
© Shiningcolors | Dreamstime.com

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7 Tips for Great Photos in the Dark

Follow these seven helpful tips to improve your night photographs.

Shoot During Dusk

Some of the best night photos are taken during dusk; when the sky isn't completely black. Taking pictures during dusk will show more colors and details in the distance and will let you use a faster shutter speed.

Use High ISO

Use a high ISO if required. It is better to get recognizable photos of your friends that are grainy than blurry photos. You can reduce noise with image editing software but you can't remove blur.

Keep it Steady

Taking photos at night requires slow shutter speed. To shoot bright pictures without the blur at night, use a tripod or monopod to keep your camera steady.
In addition to using a tripod or monopod, enable your cameras mirror lockup setting and gently press the shutter. If your camera doesn't have mirror lockup, you can use the self timer mode instead.
If you don't have a tripod or monopod with you, find some support objects to keep your body and arms stable. For example, you can lean on a wall or place your elbows on a table to keep your arms steady. If there's nothing to help keep you steady, stand with your legs far apart from each other and hold your breath while taking the picture.

Motion Blurs

Not all blurs are bad. Some blurs such as motion blur can add interest. Try shooting photos of moving objects, or deliberatly move your camera to create a motion blur. Zooming in while the shutter is still open will also add an interesting forward-motion effect.

Freeze your Friends

When taking photos of your friends at night, combine flash with a long exposure. The flash will freeze the foreground and the long exposure will reveal the background. Because people tend to move right after they see the flash, set the shutter curtain sync to the second curtain (Usually in the custom functions settings). This will fire a flash just before the shutter closes instead of in the beginning. Using second curtain sync will also put your friends in front of any motion blur so nothing is covering their faces. Second curtain sync is available in most new digital SLR cameras but rarely seen in point and shoot cameras.

Shoot for High Dynamic Range (HDR)

Place your camera on a tripod and shoot three exposures: one darker, one lighter, and one just in the middle. Your camera may have auto exposure bracketing to help you with this. Load the images into Photoshop and create HDR file out of the three exposures. Now you have a HDR image that you can apply tone mapping to to reveal more details. Tone mapped night photos can give results similar to shooting during twilight with more post-processing control.

Shoot Several and Stack

Sometimes when you shoot long exposures, noise and hot pixels will appear even at the lowest ISO setting. To overcome this problem, shoot the same photo a few times (more is better), and use Photoshop CS3 image stacking to combine the analyze the image to remove noise and hot pixels.

1. Start Photoshop CS3.
2. Open the File> Scripts menu and choose Load files into Stack
3. Click the Browse button and load all the images.
4. Checkmark the "Create Smart Object after Loading Layers" and click OK.
5. Open the Layers> Smart Objects> Stack Mode menu and choose Median

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