A friend of a friend is a fashion designer. I met her at a fashion show at a local university when I took some pictures (from the audience for my friend, not in any official capacity). The other day, I was browsing through my Facebook news feed and I saw a batch of pictures crop up with her work…

This was probably the best picture out of the whole shoot. Most of them were very poorly lit, and the focus was soft (off?). I asked her how she ended up with the photographer, and her model had booked him. Oh well… her loss.

So what’s going on in this picture? And what’s wrong with it?

Keep reading…

I was looking through the Google Analytics data today, and I came across this question that someone had searched for: Is the Canon 85mm f/1.8 a good lens for night football photography?

I own a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens. I love it, for certain things. Night football photography is not one of them. Keep reading…

Photo by: Laurent.GL.

Found this image in the “Night” tag on Flickr. Cool shot. I love the reflection of the buildings coming off the water. If you’re thinking of taking night pictures like this, then there’s one thing you need to understand: it’s all available light, so it’s all long exposures. In this case, the image was taken with a 2 second exposure. I wouldn’t hand hold that if I were you, so a tripod is definitely necessary. This leaves the shutter open long enough for the distant lights of the city to burn into the image. There’s also a relatively small aperture (f/8.0) which gives you a decent depth of field; that’s pretty normal for landscape/architectural work.

Photo by: Simon Ellingworth.

I wasn’t sure what to look for today, so I went to the popular tags and I picked “red.” Didn’t know what to expect. There was a smorgasbord of images – including flowers, cars, and people – but this first really caught my eye. Like I mentioned before, fire is just so cool to watch and fun to photograph. This image does a great job of capturing it. The flames up top have a feeling of fluidness to them, and the glowing embers in the bottom of the frame give the picture some substance. Technically sound, and nice composition.

Photo by: sungazer4.

Found this one looking through old interesting images on Flickr. It popped up on the first page, and I just thought it was so cool… It’s not quite the dead of night, cause you have a little light along the horizon, creating a low glow over the silhouette of the trees. The lightning traveling across the cloud is cool, but the big puff of light in the middle of the image creates a really cool visual draw. Right place, at the right time. I imagine it takes some patience to capture a lightning strike just so.