A Guest Post by Piper Mackay from www.pipermackayphotography.com.

1. Do your Research

Taking an international trip to an exotic location, especially if you are going solo, can be a large investment. Whether you choose to go solo or join a group you need to take proper time to do your research. There are many area’s that I have researched for well over a year prior to committing to the expedition. What is the best time to come, are there events or festivals at certain times of the year, is it the rainy/dry season, how does that effect the roads and the environment that you are shooting in, how far are the accommodations from the subject you are photographing? Take the proper time to ask all the important questions and learn all the details to maximize your photographic opportunities.

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Photographer Thomas David recently published a beautiful series of images on Flickr by the title of Dust and Dance where he shot a dancer in action – with the action enhanced with Dust spraying off her. Here’s an example (used with permission).

He also created this short behind the scenes video that shows how it was done.

Check out the full series of Thomas’s shots on his Flickr account here including the setup for his shoot here.

A Guest Post by Todd Sisson from www.sisson.co.nz.

As a landscape photographer I am constantly seeking that next X-factor shot – an image that leaps from the screen or page and demands the viewer’s attention – preferably attention of the favourable variety.

If you spend an hour or two on a photosharing site like Flickr viewing landscape images in un- curated groups you will note that a very small percentage of the total image population stands out from the crowd.

However, if you view a carefully curated collection of top-shelf landscape images you will probably start to notice some themes appearing. Certain visual cues and devices appear across multiple images – there will often be subtle commonalities between these attention hogging photos.

In many instances these images will possess the qualities …

Camera features on cell phones, tablet computers and even MP3 players have made it easy for everyone to capture their lives in a series of images. If you just need proof of the crazy things your friends do, any simple camera’s basic features should suffice. If you want to take a more professional approach to photography, though, some high-quality apps can set you above the photo-shooting pack.? ?

Easy Release

?If you want to own the rights to your photographs free and clear, which makes it legal for you to sell the photos commercially to magazines or as prints, you must have a model release for every photo that contains an identifiable person or persons. Easy Release is the app for that. The Easy Release app gives you the tools to collect digital signatures with each photograph …

This is the third in a series of four articles about exposure by Andrew S Gibson – author of Understanding Exposure: Perfect Exposure on your EOS camera. You can read the first lesson, which explored the reasons for using program, aperture priority and shutter priority modes, here, and the second lesson, which explained why your camera’s meter gets exposure wrong, here.

In my last article I looked at the fundamental reason why your camera’s meter sometimes gets exposure wrong. Camera meters measure reflected light, and will give an incorrect exposure reading if the subject is lighter or darker than average (you can read the article again for a full recap).

But there’s another reason why your camera’s meter may get the exposure wrong – and it’s to do with the metering modes …