A guest post By Cliff Kolber from www.kolberphotography.com.

The Florida Everglades and other wetlands cover thousands of square miles between the east and west coast of Florida. Everglades National Park is the centerpiece of the region, but there is a long list of other great places to explore and photograph. Here are seven of my favorite destinations for bird and landscape photography in South Florida. Some are well-known while others are obscure or out-of-the-way. They are all well worth the effort and should result in great fun and great photography. More details on Loop Road and Pahayokee can be found in my website under the Newsletters tab.

The list is by no means all-inclusive but it does give you a rich menu of some great places to visit. Bring your longest lens (at least 400mm) for bird and wildlife photography along with a quality tripod and you should have a successful trip.

The best time to visit is during the South Florida winter, from November through early April. Birds are abundant, the weather is pleasant, and mosquitoes should be few and far between (hopefully). Winter is also the dry season; it rains very little during these months. In some of these locations you will see alligators and possible encounter one on the road. Let them have their space. Alligators are more afraid of you than you of them.

In a recent post, I referred to studio photography with a white background and bright lights as being ‘high-key’and got quite a bit of flack about it. 

While calling this style ‘high-key’ may be a deviation from the original definition, it’s a heck of a lot easier than always calling it ‘photography with a white background and bright lights’. Recently, I read a blog from a photographer who calls it ‘white seamless’ due to the large roll of white seamless paper (or in my case, vinyl) which you use as the background. So here I am, calling it ‘white seamless’.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat and many ways to produce the white seamless look. I don’t know much about those other methods and I learned my own by trial and error.

Set-up

I set up the studio thus (my full kit list is in my last post):

• Background – white roll of seamless vinyl on a heavy duty stand
• There are two lights pointing at the background – 400 wt on half power with a high performance reflector attached. Lights are aimed around 45* towards the background. Nearly head-on at the background, not at an angle facing each other. The light from these can easily spill and wrap around your subjects which is really obnoxious. If I had a permanent location and didn’t have to set up every day, I would also be using gobos like this bi-fold door idea from Zack Arias to be sure that the background is lighted entirely separately from the subject.
• Camera right, 750 wt light somewhere near full power with a large soft box. Set up mid-height (stand not fully extended) and pointing down. Great long shadows add the effect that, although the surroundings are pure white, the subjects are still in a real environment, not just cut and pasted onto a white sheet of paper.
• Camera left and behind a bit is another 750 wt light with large bounce umbrella on a slightly lower power than camera right. This aids in the lovely shadows which don’t completely ‘blow out’ the subjects. I’ve found that shooting between the lights (camera right is just on the edge of the white seamless and camera left is behind me) canceled out the light spill I was experiencing before I made the changes.
• I use radio trigers to trigger the flashes wirelessly
• Because I shoot children mostly, my camera has an 18-200mm lens so I can be more flexible with their movement and not miss a shot.
• Camera is tethered to a macbook on a 5m cable and shot directly into the hard drive on the computer and also stored on the large memory card in the camera for added protection.

I don’t use light meters I’ve just experimented a lot and when I get a set of images I love, I put a photo in my notebook and draw a diagram of how it was lit and all the settings I used.

Photo by wvs – 10mm

Many digital photographers get a little obsessed by the ability that their zoom lenses give them to get in nice and close to their subjects.

While there’s a lot to be said for the power of zoom lenses (in fact many manufacturers are developing cameras with bigger and bigger lenses like the 20x optical zoom on the Olympus SP-570 that was announced this week) photographers who exclusively shoot at the longer focal lengths that their camera and lens offer could be missing out on some wonderful perspectives and framings.

Today I want to present you with 17 shots – all taken with wider focal lengths (mostly with 10mm lenses). I hope these give a little inspiration to rediscover the wider end of your camera’s zoom.

I’ve included the focal lengths of those images with EXIF data that reveal the focal length used.

If you’ve got some wide angle images to share don’t forget to drop by the forum to post some of them for the rest of us to see, be inspired by and learn from.

Further Reading – read more about creatively using the lens distortion that shooting at wide angle lenses can bring in portraits.

Don’t miss future posts like this – subscribe to Digital Photography School.

Photo by petecarr – 10mm

For this month’s DPS Writer’s Critique, I thought I’d turn things around.  It has been suggested before that there should be the opportunity for blog readers to not only voice their critique of the monthly photos, but that they should also show the rest of us what they were thinking.  And that’s what we’re going to try this month!

With that concept in mind, here is one of my photos I am releasing under a Creative Commons license.  You are free to take it, play with it, adjust it and, generally speaking, improve it.  I’d highly suggest downloading the original CRW (RAW) file here for best results.

Take a stab at editing this photo and post your results in the comments section below.  My ego can take it.  Please also take a moment …

Butterfly Lighting is one of the most flattering and artistic ways of lighting the face. As it’s name would denote, Butterfly Lighting is created by the way in which you angle the light to fall on the face of your subject. Often used by celebrity photographers, this style of lighting can be achieved by a single off camera light and a reflector.

Image by Kathleen Thomas Photography

Here’s a step by step guide of how to achieve perfect butterfly lighting:

1. Face your subject at 7.8 view: Start by facing your subject directly to the camera, then turn the head just to hide the far ear. This view of the face is most flattering as it minimizes the face.

2. Hold your off camera flash 1′

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