Natural light can be your friend or your enemy depending on how you approach it. The biggest mistake people make is thinking that the sun is a giant soft light in the sky. While the Sun is over 92 million miles away, if you hold your thumb up to the sun at high noon, it appears to only be the size of your thumbnail making it a VERY small spotlight which causes very harsh shadows.

The most common mistake in doing a portrait is to use an on-camera flash. While an on-camera flash will illuminate a subject well, the direct head-on light will wash out all the shadows making the face look flat. So our first rule is to have the key light off to the side of the subject’s face.

In forums and comments all over the net you will see people asking the same question over and over again – “What equipment should I buy?”. Not meaning to sound rude, but this is like asking some stranger on the street “what kind of car should I buy?”, the simple answer is “you aren’t giving me enough information to give you an answer”.

I am a big believer in bartering goods and services whenever possible. This week I did some computer service for a professional photographer friend of mine, in exchange he offered me one of his older studio lights. When he handed it to me I thought “what the hell is he giving me”. The old box lamp that looked like something from the dark ages. He swore this Lowel Omni Light was a top notch light.

I basically started off my photography journey doing product shots for some hobby websites I had. I was competing against big print magazines so I always strived to come up with product shots that were as good or better than what the big guys were doing.

As i write this I am on vacation with my wife in San Francisco and I think that taking a look at some example photographs may help you take better travel photos. While there are plenty of the basic snapshot photos, I also want to capture something a little different sometimes.