Professional Critique

There might come a point in your photography that you feel that you would like to have your work viewed by persons other than those on your Facebook friends list or your Instagram following. This is an excellent decision. Making the decision to have your work graded by a professional means that you feel that you are producing work of a certain quality that is good enough to be graded. There are a few sites that you can use for this, the one I use is Guru Shots  You just sign up with them and upload your photos for it to be critiqued. There is a small fee however after it is a professional photographer doing the work and you are paying for their time. The good thing is that when the critique is returned to you they give you a breakdown of all the things you did correct and areas that you could have improved. I would urge that you use these suggestions to better your technique. 

Photography At Night

Undertaking photography at night brings its own set of challenges and rewards. Night hours lack the one thing that is so crucial in photography and that is light, however this lack of light has the ability to produce the most amazing results, if you have the patience and knowledge of your equipment. With night photography you can perform, light trails of cars on roads, star trails and even astro-photography. Each bring with it challenges and equipment specifications. All require you to have a tripod and a lens that has a really wide aperture, at least an f 2.0 I would say. Some like the light trails you can do from bridges or cross walks, or even on the shoulder of the road way (safely of course). The star trails is better done in areas away from the bright lights of cities as well as their light pollution, this also applies to the astro photography. It would be helpful if you had a telescope for the astro-photography also. Some key things to remember with photography at night:

You usually need a tripod.

An overly high ISO setting is going to cause problems and make you image look grainy.

A lens with a wide aperture is always a good thing to have. I tried night photos at an event with a lens that had a small aperture and no speedlite, was a disaster.

A speedlite may be necessary depending on what you are shooting.

What are some examples of night photography you like?

Lens Assignment

One exercise to improve your photography technique as well as the knowledge of your equipment is to attach one lens to your camera and use that lens only for a week or two weeks. Shooting everything and anything. This really expands your abilities, also if you use a prime lens such as the nifty 50mm, with its fixed aperture of 1.8 and better you really have to move around to get the best angle sometimes, even moving closer to your subject because you do not have a zoom lens. Now suppose you only have the kit lens or two kit lenses that came with the camera, these would usually be a short zoom and a telephoto lens, (sadly of variable aperture) What you can do is adjust the zoom ring to a specific focal length and leave it there, no matter how tempting it is to adjust your zoom don't! Practice this and it should really open up a new set of options for you.