Photo by Steve took it

One feature that I find may DSLR owners (and some point and shoot owners) have on their cameras that they fail to know about (and/or utilize) is Depth of Field Preview.

I know it’s under utilized – because I constantly forget that it’s in my toolbox of camera features myself.

On many DLSRs the depth of field button is located on the front of your camera, right where your left hand will rest when holding your camera, next to the lens.

Pressing this button will tell the camera to set the aperture at the selected level, allowing you to see what the shot will look like in the view finder – particularly the depth of field. This enables you to see how much of your image is

…

It has been quite a while since I wrote a post summarizing what some of my favorite Digital Photography Tips sites have been publishing – so today is the day. I hope you enjoy this compilation of some of the highlights from the last month or so.

• 4 ways to bounce a flash – from DIY Photography
• Photo Critic shares how to win photography competitions
• Strobist writes about Hacking Your Camera’s Sync Speed
• Photojojo shares a tip on how to take ’spinning’ photos – a cool effect
• Epic Edits writes So you think you know what an f-number is
• Top Left Pixel has a cool image and mini tutorial on making ‘little planets’ shots
• Epic Edits shares a tip on Non Destructive Dodging and Burning
• Photodoto shares some thoughts on Using Overexposure
• Think Camera shares some tips on Long Exposure Photography
• Photocritic shares a few thoughts on teaching kids about photography (I’ve been working on a similar post for the next few weeks of DPS – stay tuned).

Don’t forget some of our own recent popular tutorials:

• How to Photograph Fireworks Displays
• How to Take Great Group Photos
• Most Popular DSLR Lenses
• Understanding Histograms
• Introduction to Filters for DSLRs
• WIN a Cam-Pod in our Forums

Lastly – for those of you who love the videos that we feature – I’ve included two videos below. The are part of a series of videos titled ‘Off Camera Flash’. Enjoy:

The following tutorial on Photographing MotoGP racing has been submitted by Dave Wild. Read more of Dave’s blogging at Public Energy. You can see more of his photography at his Flickr Account (his MotoGP images are here).

June’s MotoGP in Donington, UK started with horrible grey skies and lots of rain. I was prepared for the weather but I hadn’t done my homework with regard to taking photos. I was starting with just a few thoughts on what to expect but I experimented throughout the day and discovered what worked and what didn’t.

In general, the bikes move very fast so you’re going to need a fast shutter speed to capture them without blur. When you look at motorsport photographs, the photos tend to be either

• very sharp photographs
• photos where the subject is sharply in focus and the background is blurred
• and sometimes where the photographer has the main subject blurred to accentuate the speed

Photo by ssh

It’s the weekend (a long one for many of you) and time for another ‘reader question’.

What type of photography do you do?

I know, having spoken to many of you, that the readers of Digital Photography School use their Digital Cameras for a large variety of purposes – but it’d be interesting to see some sort of a summary of it all in the one place.

Are you into Portraits, Landscape Photography, Sports, Macro etc?
Or do you use your camera more for capturing the day to day life of your family and friends?
Or are you more of an occasional photographer, getting your camera out to record trips (travel photography)?
Or perhaps you have a really targeted interest like

…

“I was flicking through my camera’s menu today and came across a little graph labeled ‘histogram’. What is it and should I take any notice of it? Is there such a thing as the ideal histogram? What should we be aiming for?” – Brent

What is a Histogram

Histograms are a topic that we could (and probably should) spend a lot of time talking about but let me give you a very brief answer to get you through in the short term.

Histograms are a very useful tool that many cameras offer their users to help them get a quick summary of the tonal range present in any given image.

It graphs the tones in your image from black (on the left) to white (on the right).

The higher the graph at any given point the more pixels of that tone that are present in an image.

So a histogram with lots of dark pixels will be skewed to the left and one with lots of lighter tones will be skewed to the right.

The beauty of a histogram is that the small LCD display on your camera is not really big enough to give you an great review of a picture and you can often get home to find that you’ve over or under exposed an image. Checking the histogram can tell you this while you’re in a position to be able to adjust your settings and take another shot.

Some Examples of Histograms

Let’s look at a couple of examples of histograms on shots I’ve taken over the first year of my son’s life (it’s his birthday this week so we’re going through some shots).

Compare these two shots and their corresponding histograms: