How to use snow to make better images

February 05, 2021 in journal

You all know I love the snow. Any day is a good day for photography, but a snowy one is a day we can't miss out on! These are some tips, tricks, techniques.....

With all the snow we're getting here lately, I thought it'd be useful to make a video sharing some of the techniques, tricks, tips... whatever you want to call them, I use when I shoot in the snow.

Contact sheets in digital photography

January 26, 2020 in journal

Contact sheets are very important in film photography, as we can get a glimpse of all the frames in a roll without having to print them out individually. But do they still make sense in a digital word? Can Do they have any use in digital photography? I think so.

Why I believe that contact sheets can be useful to a digital photographer, and how to create a contact sheet with Adobe Photoshop.

What contrast is, why you need it and how to add it to your images

December 03, 2019 in journal

Contrast is one of the most important elements in photography. I'm not talking -only- about the slider in your photo editor to manipulate the tones of the image.

Contrast means difference. Creating difference between your subject and everything else, you are able to tell a story.

This can be achieved using the differences in color and luminance, but also using shapes, textures and more.

While we seek contrast between the subject and the rest of the photo, we want to minimize it within those elements - thus increasing it between them. One of my favorite techniques to achieve this is long exposure photography: smoothing out water, for example, we remove contrast from it hence increasing that contrast between the water and our subject.

I show you some examples of this and other techniques in this video:

And by contrast I don't mean -only- that slider in your photo editor. Let's talk about what contrast is, why it's important, and how to increase it in your images.

White Balance in Black and White Photography

March 03, 2019 in journal

Despite the lack of it, color is very important in Black and White Photography.

White Balance (or Color Balance) is one of most commonly used tools (it's actually two: temperature and tint) in color photography to modify the warmth and tint of an image.

It is overlooked by many when it comes to Black and White imagery, but we'll see why you might want to add this tool to your monochrome editing workflow.

6 ideas to create minimalist backgrounds in your images

March 02, 2019 in journal

When we see something that catches our eye, it's very tempting to focus on that and start shooting from where we’re standing. This is a mistake.

A good subject is not enough to make a good image.

It's very important to stop and give the scene some time, see beyond the obvious and pay close attention to the background and the edges of our frame. They can make or break an image.

Even the most beautiful subject will make for a bad image with the wrong background.

Long Exposure Photography: final considerations

September 10, 2018 in journal

In this week's chapter about Long Exposure Photography (the last one!), we'll talk about a few things that we have left and were hard to fit in previous posts.