With so many lens choices to choose from, how can you possible know what kind of lens to get and if it will do what you want? In this article we will walk you through the different features of standard lenses so that you can learn how to pick out the right lens for the type of shooting you do.

This weekend I am shooting a small wedding in Anaheim in conjunction with Esquire Photography, and with 5 days to go before the shoot I thought it would be good to go through all the preparation that goes into a shoot like this. A wedding is very different than any other shoot as there are no re-takes, no reschedules, and you can’t make any mistakes or miss any of the important shots. So how do you prepare for a wedding shoot? Simply put, planning, planning, planning!

Taking pictures of moving vehicles can be challenging and quite frustrating to get good results. While getting your panning technique down is the major part of it, there is often much more to it than simply pressing the shutter at the right time. Today we head over to a local car show to snag some action shots and give you some pointers on how to get the best results possible.

We recently got the time to sit down with our good friend David Esquire of Esquire Photography in Huntington Beach California. David has been in the photography business for over 20 years shooting events such as the X-Games and doing shoots for companies such as Slim Jim, Sports Illustrated, and The Warped Tour.

There is a huge amount of misinformation on what you can and cannot take photos of and you need to be aware of what your rights are should you ever be in a situation where somebody is questioning your right to take a photograph of something or someone. We have been in this situation several times in the past and even have had people threaten to sue us over the use of certain images, knowing your rights is the best defense when this happens.

More and more people are trying their hand at HDR photography. Today we are going to do a complete walk through of how this amazing technique works. If you aren’t familiar with HDR, it stands for High Dynamic Range meaning you can get an image with a wider tonal range which can add detail to shadowed areas while maintaining detail in very bright areas.

While there are dozens of different types of filters you can put on your lenses for different effects, there are three very common filters that everyone should have in their camera kit, the circular polarizing filter, the neutral density filter, and the UV filter. In this article we will discuss what these three filters are and the effects that it can add to your images.

We had to do another photo shoot today and we really pulled out all the stops with the new gear we have around. As you can see, this is a very typical product shot on a white background for use on a web page or in a magazine. In the past, we have shown some techniques with hot lights, so today we are going to use some flash units.

White balance is one of the more confusing aspects of digital photography and is one of the things that really baffles people when they go from simpler point and shoots to more advanced DSLR cameras and can’t figure out why the color of their images is so bad. Today we take a look at white balance and how it affects the color of your photos.

We always take our own product shots, while manufacturer shots are usually very nice, they often can be retouched to make products look better than they really are. With the product shots for our articles, the only retouching may be to remove some stray dust.

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.