Composition is one skill within photography that we can probably never master, but just continually develop.  The composition we choose when taking a photograph, i.e. where we choose to place the boundaries of the frame, the perspective we choose to employ from the chosen focal length, how we choose to arrange objects within a scene etc, all influence the way a viewer interacts with the image, and so are all crucial to the success of any given image.

When a composition of an image is broken down to the most basic level, it can almost always be considered as the balance and interaction between different shapes, patterns and light within the scene.  It is very easy to critically assess the photographs of others in this way within a couple of seconds of laying eyes on them, however, how often do we …

This opinion piece was contributed by Declan O’Neill from www.newzealandlandscape.com.

The winner of one of Britain’s most prestigious photographic competitions was stripped of his title recently because of excessive use of Photoshop. David Byrne was the winner of the Landscape Photographer of The Year award and a £10,000 ($16000) prize but has now had his title and prize money taken away in a surprise move by the organisers of the competition which is supported by Epson, The Sunday Times Magazine and The National Theatre.

The dramatic reversal came about after other photographers pointed out that the image had been photoshoped to include clouds not in the original image. Other photographers pointed to the impossibility of the sun casting shadows in different directions.

Mr. Byrne …

A Guest Post By: John Davenport

You might have read the title to this post and thought that I was going to talk about how editing your photographs can make you appear to be a better photographer, but no, I really do mean better – behind the camera.

I came across this idea of improving my skill behind the camera, by focusing on my skill behind the computer, when I was going about launching my new YouTube series, “Let’s Edit”, which focuses on how to edit photos in Lightroom.

What Exactly Can Editing Teach Us?

As we start out on our photography journey we are learning everything there is to know about creating a photograph. From how our camera works to how different light effects our shots and this can …

Since the introduction of Photoshop CS2, Adobe’s image editing software has shipped with the ability to easily merge a series of photographs into a panorama.  Often, it is incredibly simple: once you have the images you want to stitch together, it only takes a few clicks to produce the blended panorama.  However, whilst Photoshop may be able to seamlessly merge your images 90% of the time, on occasion it may struggle to perfectly match the exposures across the input images resulting in a final panorama with obvious joins between the individual photographs.

To see what I mean, have a look at the image below.  This is a 7 shot panorama, straight out of Photomerge, and you can see obvious banding in the water of the lake, as the exposure/colour tone subtly change between images.

[caption id=”attachment_46747″ align=”aligncenter” width=”600″ caption=”Top: The panorama fresh …

I know, it’s a long title but I want to show how easy it can be to assemble panoramas with either a Gigapan head or by shooting freehand, gridded panoramas. AutoPano Giga has been my panorama product of choice after starting with huggin, a free option that does quite well it its own right.

One ability AutoPano Giga excels at is the ability to take images and information from a number of automated shooting heads, such as Kolor’s own PanoGear or even other brands, such as the GigaPan EPIC Pro, which I reviewed for DPS two years ago. I noted in that post that Gigapan’s software was in its first stages and was quite basic and while the software has been upgrade over the intervening two years, …