Canadian photojournalist – Ted Grant – is quoted as saying:

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”

This quote often comes to mind when talking about portraiture and I thought it might make an interesting discussion starter.

Do Ted’s words resonate with you?

A Guest Post by Lynsey Peterson.

Nothing freaks me out like props.  Every time I see a picture of flower girls holding an empty frame that is outlining a bride and groom kissing in the distance, I die a little inside.  

Whenever I am subjected to a photo that attempts to bring in a letter jacket and a football and a casual I’m-just-hanging-out-here-in-my-letter-jacket-holding-my-football expression, I try to remember that I am terrible at making coffee and therefore cannot give-up photography immediately and go get an application at Starbucks.  We have come to a place where portrait photography trends are natural and candid and while you would think that means we are leaving all props behind to die a formal, posed, and staged death, we just can’t help ourselves from wanting to put a little extra something in there.  

Something personal. …

Today Joe Decker shares some tips on wide angle photography.

One of the first lens purchases aspiring landscape photographers typically made is a wide or super-wide lens, anything (in full-frame 35mm terms) from 24mm on down, and with good reason, wides offer photographers the ability to capture the sweeping vistas of the natural landscape. But they can also be a challenge to use effectively, it’s all to easy to end up with a wide-angle shot that lacks the power and grandeur we felt when we were shooting. In this article, I’ll explain why that’s so often the case, and provide a few tips for working around those challenges, showing you how to use wide-angle lenses to create dramatic, effective images.

Nordenskjöld Lake, Torres Del Paine National Park, Chile. Image Copyright Joe Decker

I had noticed this lighting scheme earlier in the song and missed it, focusing elsewhere. But when guitarist Brendt Allman went into his solo, I waited to see if it would happen again. Sure enough, it did. EOS-1D Mark IV, EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS II. ISO 3200, 1/200 f/2.8.

A few years ago, I managed to start working with one of my favorite groups of musicians, a progressive heavy metal band from Pennsylvania called Shadow Gallery.  This has led to me …

This week – as a follow up to our article Composing with Curves – your challenge is to take and share an image on the theme of ‘Curves’.

Read Composing with Curves, choose one of the types of curves mentioned (‘C Curves’, ‘Arches’, ‘S Curves’, ‘Circles’ or ‘Implied Curves’) and go out and try to capture some of them.

Once you’ve taken your ‘Curves’ Photos – choose your best 1-2, upload them to your favourite photo sharing site either share a link to them even better – embed them in the comments using the our new tool to do so.

If you tag your photos on Flickr, Instagram,

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