Getting Started

Travel photography lesson 1: Learning your camera

Before you go on a trip – whether it is a family vacation, adventure travel, or one focused on photography – it is important to know how to use your camera before you go. While reading the manual is always helpful – if you can make it through the hundreds of pages – it doesn’t let you focus on the key features you’re likely to need most. We’ve picked out ten of the most important sets of skills you should try to learn before you go. Some may not apply to you, so feel free to pick and choose, but the list will at least give you a starting point:

New Book on How to Use Flash: Hot Shoe Diaries

Organizing your Digital Images: The Science and Art of Image Cataloging & Image Management

Every new digital photographer starts out b being excited at how easy it is to retrieve their images compared to digging them out of slide files or shoeboxes. Then, as the number of image files on their computer grows from hundreds to thousands and tens of thousands the sobering reality sets in. Just because it is on your disk doesn't mean you can find it again. The process of tagging and organizing your images is most often referred to as image cataloging. In this issue we'll speed you through the essentials of setting up a process for cataloging your images and also give you some quick tips about how to use the new image cataloging capability in DigitalPro3 (now even more is possible with !) to accomplish your goals.--David Cardinal

Profiling Your Printer

Leopard Hunting
Hunting Leopard Okavango Delta, Botswana Nikon D2H, 70-200mm AF-S/VR

Printing Great Color:
Profiling your Printer with Colorvision PrintFIX PRO

A crucial and too frequently overlooked step in every photographer's workflow is printing images with great color. Until now the process of profiling a printer has been somewhat arcane and very expensive. High end profiling packages like Profilemaker, when combined with the needed hardware, can cost several thousand dollars.

A Photographers' Guide to Image Resizing

By Dave Ryan, February, 2006

How big is my photo, or how big can I make it? Sounds like a simple enough question, but it’s among the most frequently asked questions by those new to digital imaging. And when the answer starts coming in terms of megapixels, megabytes and pixels per inch(ppi) it can leave the newcomer wondering why it all has to be so complicated.

Using Curves

by Mike Russell, exclusive to , March 2006

Curves are the most powerful way to alter the values of an image.  Most image editing programs, including Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and Picture Window Pro support curves.  In this article, I'll cover the basics of curves. Then I'd like to show you some things you can do with curves that will improve your images.

Understanding Dynamic Range

This article is a work in progress, as there is plenty more to say, but since this is a frequent topic in our forums and others I thought I'd start by reposting my reply to a question on the colortheory mailing list:

Landscape photography: It's all about contrast

I was fortunate to be the guest shooter at this week's Digital Landscape Workshop in Yosemite. The theme for the week wound up being contrast. Both the use of contrast in landscape images and the contrasting shooting styles of co-hosts and were showcased. Proper understanding and use of contrast--perhaps more familiar as tone or gamma, but in any case the relationship between light and dark in an image--is essential for mastering landscape photography. We'll spend some time in this issue of DigitalPro Shooter (DPS) helping you understand how it can work for and against you, as well as how you can learn to master it. We'll also provide some key practical information I've gleaned from extensive shooting with the D2H and a couple days with the D70.

CCD Cleaning by Moose Peterson

The instruction book is pretty firm on how the CCD in the D1, D1X, and D1H should be cleaned. I have never done it the way the instruction book describes. Here's how I do it; it's up to you to decide whether you want to take this route or not (which is NOT recommended by Nikon!). The authors of this website are not responsible for any damage caused to your CCD by using this procedure!