Do you know something about photography that might help thousands others?

One of the aspects that I’ve been loving about Digital Photography School over the last few months is that among the DPS community are a growing number of digital photographers who have some amazing gifts and abilities when it comes to their photography. What’s more, many of them are willing to share what they know with the rest of us – helping us all to learn more as a community.

If you’re one of these people with some great experience to share I’d love to invite you to do it more formally in the weeks ahead.

I will be taking a two week trip at the beginning of June and rather than just recycling old tips for those weeks I want to invite

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Image by Peter de Krom

I normally talk about the importance of using a flash when taking shots into the sun to give sufficient light to add features to your subject but there are also times when making your subject featureless apart from their outline against a bright background can be most effective – or when in other words silhouette is a worth exploring.

Silhouettes are a wonderful way to convey drama, mystery, emotion and mood to the viewers of your photos and often stand out in an album because of the combination of their simplicity but also the story that they convey. I love them because they don’t give the viewer of a clear picture of everything but leave part of the image up to their imagination to wonder about.

The basic strategy you’ll need to employ in taking silhouette shots is to place your subject (the shape you want to be blacked out) in front of some source of light and to force your camera to set its exposure based upon the brightest part of your picture (the background) and not the subject of your image.

In doing this your subject will be under exposed (and very dark, if not black).

There are a lot of very technical descriptions going around on how to take great silhouette shots that you might want to look up but let me attempt to run through some basic steps that should get you the results you’re after. In essence what we’re trying to do is make your camera think that it’s the bright parts of the picture you are most interested in.

Here’s how to do it:

Last week I asked readers what shooting mode they shoot in most.

The results actually surprised me a little (and so did the massive numbers of responses – well over 200 so far). From the emails that I get from readers and the last time I informally asked this question I was half expecting ‘Automatic’ to feature a lot more heavily in the responses.

However the vast majority of readers get a little more manual than I was expecting with the most using Aperture Priority Mode, followed by Full Manual Mode. I’ve graphed the results below to give a visual representation of what people are using.

Note: It is worth noting that I did receive a few emails from more beginner readers saying that they didn’t vote because they felt a

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Every now and again I like to post a few links from other great photography sites around the web. Here’s what I found on my surfing today.

• Photojojo has a tutorial on Making a Flash Photo Flipbook – fun!
• DIYPhotography has posted Part 2 of their Guide to Photographing Children
• Instructor Insights shares a tutorial on Converting Color Images to Black and White in Photoshop
• Outdoor Photography Tips shares an article on Improving your Artistic Eye
• Photocritic shares a guide to Doing a Photo Critique

And lastly – a little fun quizz. Which famous photographer are you? Here’s my result – (share yours in comments below):

Weekends are great for learning new photoshop techniques so I thought I’d post another video tutorial today. This one teaches how to convert a regular digital image into a ‘pop art’ image in photoshop.

I hope you enjoy it.