This week we go back to the basics and talk about composition with our good friend Roberto Valenzuela.
Roberto talks about composition and gives the following guidelines:

Choose a selective focusing technique
Placement and composition of your main …

Adam Mason asked us how aperture can affect your shot. To answer the question Kerry explains what aperture is and then demonstrates how it can be used to alter the look of the image you are trying to create. By learning how to use your aperture to control light and depth of field you can dramatically change the look of your photographs.

As we continue our series on portrait lighting we now need to look at the different types of classic portrait lighting and see the effect it has on someone so we can decided when to use each type. By choosing the proper lighting for a particular person, we can help them to look their best by making them appear to be thinner or wider or to accent or minimize certain facial features.

Kerry and David start off with discussing some high school grad night party jobs they have been doing recently and how they went after that market.

Later, the guys discuss the use of a light meter and how it can help you get your exposures fast and accurately in-camera and save you time in post-production.

I have heard the phrase “I don’t need no stinking light meter” more times than I can count, your LCD display and histogram are all you need for a perfect exposure right? Would you be surprised if I told you that your camera was lying to you? We first need to know why our LCD and histogram is wrong before we can believe that using a light meter will be of benefit.

Once in a while a product comes along that is so clever, so right, it is just a “must have” product. While at PMA, I stumbled on such a product. The SpyderCUBE by Datacolor is one of those products. Nothing it does is really new, but it does everything right, in a small package, with more features than most any competitive product on the market.

Based on comments and emails I have received there are still some people that are confused about how the three elements of exposure play together to determine how dark or bright an image is. Today I want you to think of the three elements of exposure as the three points of a triangle each having an equal effect on the final exposure of the image.

Heather wrote in with the following question and we thought it deserved more than just a quick email response.

“Hey Guys,

I got a question for ya. Sorry the answer to this might already be on your site somewhere but I’d just thought I would msg you instead. I was wondering if you had any suggestions for photography books either having to do w/ business or the technical side of things.

Yes, RAW vs. JPEG, the seemingly endless debate, almost as bad as Mac vs. PC or Film vs. Digital and people have been asking me to write up an article on this based on my opinion and experience and I have really put this article off for a long time as I wanted to be as unbiased in how I write this given that this is a very biased topic.

Oh Canon 5D Mk II, how doest I love thee, let me count the ways. That could pretty much sum up my impressions of the newest camera from the folks at Canon but it probably doesn’t tell you what you really need to know. I certainly don’t have the testing lab that DPReview or Popular Photography has to tell you all the little specs and test results, but as someone who is shooting all the time, I figured I would get my hands on one and see if it really is all that it is hyped up to be.