Highly recommended books on photography

This is a list of books that I've come across in the years I've been teaching photography that I find to be great resources. I use them myself and recommend them to all my students.

Essential companions to the study of digital photography

These books are great for photographers of all levels and skill, for both point and shoot and SLR camera users.

The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby
Find it on Amazon here.

The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2 by Scott Kelby
Find it on Amazon here.

Buy them both as a boxed set on Amazon here.

KODAK Guide to Digital Photography by Rob Sheppard
Find it on Amazon here.

The Betterphoto Guide to Digital Photography (Amphoto Guide Series) by Jim Miotke
Find it on Amazon here.

This is a great book on nature photography

The BetterPhoto Guide to Digital Nature Photography (BetterPhoto Series) by Jim Miotke
Find it on Amazon here.

Digital Photography and Software

Digital photography and Photoshop go hand in hand. Photoshop is a difficult program to learn, but it can greatly enhance your experience with photography and digital technology. For most people, Photoshop Elements, a simplified version of Photoshop, is all you will need. It can do most of the same things that the full version of Photoshop can do, and costs a fraction of the price.

I've studied and used Photoshop regularly for the past ten years. Of all the books I've read about Photoshop, Scott Kelby's are by far the best. They are colorful, well designed and most importantly, Kelby explains concepts in a way that makes sense.

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, like most computer programs, have many versions. The most current version of Photoshop Elements, as of today, is 7. I'm figuring that most people don't have the most current version, so I recommend Kelby's book on Elements, version 6:

The Photoshop Elements 6 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)by Scott Kelby
Find it on Amazon here.

If you are in the photography, graphic or web design industry, or if you are planning on or are trying to start your own photography business, I strongly suggest that you purchase and learn the full version of Photoshop. The most current version of Photoshop is CS4. CS stands for "Creative Suite." Again, I am assuming that most people don't have the most current version of Photoshop, so I recommend Kelby's book on Photoshop CS3. I am currently using CS3 on my personal computer for all of my personal photography and the photography I do for freelance clients.

The Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby
Find it on Amazon here.

Taking a photography class is a great way to learn photography skills, but I think it's always a good idea to have reference materials around that you can refer to again and again. I have a whole library of books about photography and software that I find essential to my day-to-day use of my camera and computer, so I hope this list is helpful to you too.

Spot 5 Art Studio

Hi everyone. I've recently become a part of an art studio on Frankfort Avenue called Spot 5. Previously, they had been offering mainly painting and ceramics classes for children and adults, but they are expanding their program quite a bit in the coming months. They are going to begin offering photography classes starting next month. It's a great space, right on Frankfort Avenue in Clifton. I am excited to be a part of this program, and I think it will afford a lot of opportunities for great classes. I am slated to teach an Introduction to Digital Photography class next month, and a Nature Photography workshop in May. I'm also working on a Parent & Child workshop, which should be taking place in July. I've gotten a lot of requests from people wanting tips on how to get good shots of their children, so we thought this would be a fun workshop to offer.

For more information about Spot 5, click here.

For information about the photography classes I am teaching at Spot 5, click here.

The Art and Challenge of Portraits

As you probably know, taking a good portrait of someone is not as easy as one might think. The camera makes a lot of people nervous, and it makes people pose even if they aren't meaning to. A good portrait is a shot of someone where they look natural and relaxed. It's hard for most people to relax in front of the camera. The photographer's challenge is to make their subject relax and let down their guard.

There are several ways to do this. One way is to take lots of photos. These photos I present below are from a group of about 60 shots. As you can see, of those 60 shots I took, only about 3 or 4 are worth keeping. This is pretty typical. If you are shooting digitally, taking lots of photos is not going to cost you anything, and it's worth doing no matter what the subject, but is especially essential when shooting portraits. Another technique that is often used by photographers to get their subjects to relax and forget that the camera is there is to engage them in conversation. I usually do a combination of both. You have to be careful with the conversation, however, because if you snap a photo of your subject while they are talking, then you might capture them with their mouth open. Plan on taking one shot after the other- that way you'll get some good ones during conversation pauses, or even better, when your subject is laughing. It's always good if you can get your subject to laugh.

This set of portraits below are of my sister. I have one sister and she is three years younger than me. We've always been close, growing up and now that we are adults. However, just because I have a good relationship with her doesn't necessarily mean that I can take a good portrait of her. She's always presented a challenge to me photographically. She's an attractive woman, but we tend to cheese it up when we are around each other, so my portraits of her are often stiff. She doesn't look at ease in front of the camera, and her smiles don't always look natural.


(Captions refer to the photo above) I think this was the best shot of the group, because I managed to trip the shutter when she was laughing. This is how she really smiles and the look on her face is relaxed, open and natural. However, her face is in shadow a little bit, and when I looked closely at the photo, the focus on her face is not as sharp as I would have liked. You have to watch your camera when taking these types of shots. Sometimes the autofocus does not focus on the elements of the photograph that you want it to focus on. Often, you don't find this out until the shoot is over and you're viewing the photos on the computer screen. That's another reason to take several different shots of the same pose. Chances are one of them will turn out the way you want it to.


In some ways, I like this shot more than the above shot where she is smiling more. The light is better overall, and the angle of the photo is more interesting. She's not looking directly at the camera, which might bother some people, but I don't mind it. It looks like she is contemplating something.


Usually you never want to undershoot (placing yourself lower to the ground than your subject, causing you to have to point the camera up to take the shot) when taking portraits, because it is not a flattering angle for anyone. I sort of did that here, but I liked the resulting angle. The portrait probably would have been a little stronger had I not undershot it quite as much, but it was salvagable.


When working with people, you have to watch the expression on their face in each shot. This is much easier to do now with digital photography. As you photograph your subject, take the time to review the photo on your camera's LCD screen. Make sure they have their eyes open and mouth closed. Eyes closing in portraits is probably the most typical thing that will botch a portrait. Take many shots of the same pose in sucession (even use the continuous mode on your camera) to make sure you'll get a few shots where they eyes are open and your subject is looking good.


Sometimes portraits end up looking too serious. That's fine if what you're going for is a serious "artsy" or documentary photo. However, if the object of the portrait session is to get some nice relaxed photos of your subject that give off a warm, happy vibe, you don't want them to look like this. When reviewing photos as you shoot them on your camera's LCD screen, also watch for the mood that your sujbect's expression conveys. Make sure it captures the look that you want.

If you're shooting with film, it's a little more difficult to monitor how your portraits are looking as you shoot them. You really have no way of knowing until after the film is processed. We are spoiled in the digital age by not having to worry about this as much anymore, but there was a day not too long ago where all photographers had to combat this problem. The solution to this is just to take lots of photos.

Flower Photography

Flowers are a popular subject for photography. Since they are such a popular subject, sometimes the challenge is to try to capture them in interesting ways. Anyone can take a photo of a flower, but it can take some skill to take a flower photograph that stands out in the crowd.

I have a perennial garden in my front yard. It was planted by the woman who owned the house before my husband and I bought it last year. We moved into our house last July, and I've been enjoying our first full year here. Since I wasn't the one who planted all the flowers in my garden, I haven't really known when things were going to bloom, and so it's been exciting to watch it since this spring. Our house's former owner was a skilled gardener, and most gardeners who really know what they are doing plant so that there is something blooming at every point in the growing season, rather than planting things so that everything blooms at the same time. By planting this way, the garden always looks pretty, and it always looks different.

I've been trying to capture my garden as it blooms this year. Below are a few examples of photos I've taken this year that I will use to illustrate a few techniques.

This is a clematis that is in my backyard. The shot below is taken at point blank; me standing right in front of where it blooms. I took this shot to show the placement of the plant in my yard, but it is not an especially eye catching photo. This is a photo used for the sake of documentation, and it does not really show off the beauty of the plant. You can't even see the purple blooms on it in this shot.


Using my 18-200mm lens, I zoomed in on one of the plant's flowers to take this shot. Notice how the background blurs as I zoomed in, and also how the flower fills most of the frame. By placing the flower in the frame like this, the shot becomes all about the flower, and shows the detail and structure of the flower.


Zooming in on a flower, or in this case a weed, puts the focus on the flower. You can also open up your aperture to blur the background. Usually flowers occur in places where there is a lot going on in the background, whether it's all the other flowers and plants growing nearby, or houses or buildings in the background, or just the busy texture of grass. To make the flower stand out from busy backgrounds like this, the afore mentioned techniques are often used. I opened up the aperture of my lens to its widest to take this photograph of a dandelion. I also crouched down on my knees to take the shot at weed level, as it were. Positioning yourself level with the flower can make flower shots more interesting than shooting down on them while you are standing up.


Irises are one of my favorite flowers, so I was excited to see that a plant I had thought might be irises bloom in my garden this spring. Irises don't bloom for very long, so I had to act fast to capture them at their peak. The photo below was taken of an iris blooming in my front yard. I could crouch down low enough so I could shoot the iris so only the fence showed in the background. I positioned myself carefully, because the irises are toward the front of my yard, and if I'd shot some of the other blooms on the plant, the street would have been in the background, with parked cars and other unphotogenic items showing. I didn't want that, and didn't want a cluttered background, so I zoomed in on this particular flower, right after it had rained, which is always a nice time to capture flowers.


I wasn't thrilled with the fence background, though, so I clipped a flower and brought it inside my house where I'd set up a black backdrop. This is an excellent way to photograph flowers, because you don't have to deal with busy backgrounds, wind which can botch the focus of your shot, bugs or any other distractions. This is a more formal way to photograph flowers, but it can be striking, depending on the flower.


So there are a few ideas for you to try. Enjoy!

Why shooting in the RAW format is a good idea

When I first got my digital SLR (DSLR) in 2005, I didn't bother to read much about the RAW format. I set my camera on the highest quality JPEG (JPEG Fine in Nikonspeak) and went on with my business. I'd heard a little bit about RAW reading photography articles on the internet and books about digital photography, but at the time RAW just seemed like kind of a pain in the rear.

A RAW file is like a digital negative. It captures the raw image, literally. When you change the RAW file to a JPEG, or if you shoot on the JPEG setting, the resulting files are not the original data captured; rather the files consist of chunks of pixels that the JPEG process corrals together to produce a close approximation of what was originally shot. For a much more accurate description of what a JPEG is, go here.

There's nothing wrong with JPEGs, in fact you must always convert RAW data to the JPEG format if you want to print a photograph shot in RAW, or if you want to upload the photo to the internet, or e-mail it or do just about anything with it. This is why I resisted the RAW format for so long. Usually I do want to print or e-mail my images, so the notion that I'd have to convert each and every image from RAW to JPEG if I wanted to do anything with them just seemed like an annoying extra step to me at the time.

Another thing about RAW is that you must have RAW conversion software if you want to deal with that format. Most cameras come with software, but typically photographers who work a lot with RAW images don't use the "free" software that came in the box with their camera. I, for one, never loaded any of the software that came with my Nikon D70 on my computer. I don't use it to download, I use a card reader to do that, and I don't use it to process or edit photos- I use Adobe Photoshop CS3. Photoshop CS3 comes with a plug-in called Camera RAW, and I like it. There are other RAW processors out there- Aperture, if you use a Mac, Lightroom, which is also made by Adobe, or there is Open Source software that will process RAW files as well, if you are into that sort of thing. I use Camera RAW because it works for me and it's part of my million dollar Adobe CS3 software package and since I paid over $600 for the upgrade from CS2, I'm not in a hurry to go spend another $300 on Lightroom or any other program.

Anyway, I digress.

Several of my photographer friends tut-tutted at me when I said I never shot in RAW, so I finally capitulated and gave it a try. Once I did, I asked myself why the heck I'd waited for so long?! Yes, it adds time to post processing, yes the files take up more room on the memory card. Wah! It's really not a big deal, those things. The versatility of RAW files more than makes up for the hassle.

When you open a RAW file in Camera RAW (and other RAW processors), you have very fine tune control over exposure, white balance, tonality, saturation, sharpness- etc.... Working with a RAW file is like working with a negative in the darkroom, only without all the smelly chemicals (I do miss those!). Everything you need to finesse your images is right there in the form of sliders and buttons. You can play with all of them and watch the effect they have in a large preview. CS3's Camera Raw even has the ability to recover blown out highlights (whites that are too harsh)- something that would be utterly lost in a JPEG. It has another slider called "Fill Light" which I quite like too.

Once you've adjusted the image to your liking, you can have it open up in Photoshop and from there save it as a JPEG to print or put on the web.

The example below illustrated just how effective editing an image in Camera RAW can be. The first photograph I deliberately shot on the wrong white balance setting. I was shooting with natural light, and I set my camera's white balance to tungsten (otherwise known as indoor/incandescent lighting). As you can see, the shot has an ugly blue cast to it. Had I shot the photo in the JPEG format, I could have tweaked the color balance in Photoshop a little, adding yellow to take some of that blue out, but it wouldn't completely fix the shot.

Notice also how the image's whites are pretty harsh, especially on the left hand side of the vase.


Now look at what happened when I changed the white balance to daylight within Camera RAW, plus used the Recovery slider to bring back some definition to the whites. I was pretty amazed with the results. This shot looks just like some others I took during the same shoot with the white balance set correctly.


These shots were taken during a demo I gave to my Intermediate Photography class about hot lights. Hot lights provide a constant source of light, often used for product photography and sometimes portraits. They are much cheaper than strobe lights, so they are popular with people who set up small photography studios in their home, or for photographers that don't have big budgets for strobe lights. In order to shoot with these lights, you must set your camera's white balance to tungsten. During this demo, I took some of my shots with just the existing light coming in through the window from outside, and some of my shots with a hot light. When switching back and forth between daylight and tungsten lighting, it's easy to forget to set your white balance back to daylight once you finish shooting with hot lights. You can tell that you have it set incorrectly if you look at the image on your camera's LCD screen once you've taken the photo, but sometimes in the flurry of the moment, we forget. Sometimes too, lighting situations are very tricky, or you might find yourself having to shoot in mixed lighting, and in those situations you might really need to custom tweak each shot to make it look right after the fact. Camera RAW. It's a good thing.

Nature Photography at Blackacre State Nature Preserve

The building where I normally teach my Nature Photography class for JCPS Adult Education during the summer is not available this year, so we decided to move the class to Blackacre State Nature Preserve. I think that will make the class more fun- the whole class will be out there, some it I will teach inside a classroom, and the rest will be field shooting on the grounds.

Nature Photography will be offered two times this summer, in a three session block:

Thursday, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM; 3 sessions starting June 12, 2008, ending June 26, 2008

Tuesday, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM; 3 sessions starting July 1, 2008, ending July 15, 2008

I haven't been out to Blackacre since I was a kid. I'm going to have to go out there and scope it out for the best spots to shoot. I remember it being quite lovely, and from their webpage, they are still quite active in the community, and offer a number of programs.

You can register for that class and read more about it and other JCPS Adult Education classes here.

Macro photography with close up filters

There are many ways to take photographs of something up close, or to photograph something small. This type of photography is called macro photography. Most modern cameras have a macro setting, usually noted as a tulip on the shooting mode dial of SLR cameras and as a little tulip symbol on one of the buttons on point and click cameras. Sometimes that setting is accessed through menus on point and clicks- it depends of the model. This "tulip" setting has a certain amount of latitude- usually you can get about 6-10 inches away from your subject and still capture the subject in focus. Most built in macro settings will not allow you to get any closer than that.

In order to photograph subjects closer than 6-10 inches, you will need a special lens, called a macro lens. These lenses tend to be rather pricey, but they are the best way to take macro photographs. Both Canon and Nikon make several macro lenses, the more expensive ones allow you to put more distance between you and the subject, and sometimes also have technology like Vibration Reduction built into them.

There are other techniques for macro photography, devices called extension tubes, or there are ways of taking a normal lens and mounting it backward on a camera to allow it to focus up close. I don't have expertise with any of those methods, so I will not go into explaining any of those methods here.

The "poor (wo)man's" way of taking macro shots involves a set of close up filters, which you purchase to fit the end of your lens. They come in a kit of three, as seen below. I use these filters and this method of macro photography a great deal. These close up filters cost me about $70, whereas the macro lens that I'd like for my Nikon costs almost $900, and is not currently in my budget, as it wouldn't be for most people's.


The filters are made to be screwed on to the end of your lens one at a time, though you can "stack" them for a more powerful magnification. The first photo below was shot with the +1 and +2 filters screwed on top of each other, on the end of the 18-70 lens that I have for my Nikon. Conversation hearts are pretty tiny objects, so in order to capture them in any detail, I needed to use these filters.

Focus is tricky with close up filters, and even with a true macro lens. A tripod is pretty much essential, though I have gotten some good shots outside in good lighting using macro filters and no tripod. All of these shots were taken indoors without a flash, all using a tripod.

When you shoot with these filters, you have to be almost right on top of your subject to be able to focus, so the end of my lens was probably literally less than an inch from the hearts in each shot.


The first shot I took of the hearts with the +1 and +2 filters turned out pretty cool, but I wanted to magnify the shot even more, so I screwed my +4 filter on top of the +1 and +2 to get both of the shots below. The more filters you have stacked onto your lens, the more likely you'll get vignetting, which causes black to appear on all four corners of your shot, or as you can see in the close up shot of the group of hearts up close, the focus on the edges of the shot falls off a bit. Focus with the +4 filter is very selective. Sometimes these results are not desirable, but sometimes they end up looking kind of interesting.

Though I have always taken my closest close up shots with all three filters stacked on the camera's lens, I read recently that you can just screw the +4 filter on the camera lens by itself and get the same basic effect. Try it both ways.


Even with all three filters stacked on the camera, this is as close as I could get to the one individual heart. If I wanted it to be blown up more, or to take up more of the frame, then I would have to use a real macro lens or employ one of the other macro photography techniques.


However, another way I can have the heart take up more of the frame is to simply crop the photo.


This is by no means an exhaustive explanation of macro photography, but hopefully it will show you what you can do with close up filters. They can be a lot of fun to use.