By mastering work with artificial light sources, and especially flashes, you break free of several exposure limitations that hold you back when you’re taking pictures in natural light. Using flashes also gives you much sharper pictures, because the flash is so short that it eliminates motion blur.

The major advantage of artificial light sources over natural light is that you have them fully under your control. There are many tools for changing their characteristics. Artificial light lets you photograph topics that would be impossible to handle under natural light.

Work with natural light has simpler equipment demands than work with artificial light, but on the other hand, you don’t have the light fully under your control. But you can still direct and enhance the light, using reflectors and diffusion panels.

Photography doesn’t have to be just trigger-pressing. It has its rules and its theory. Come join us for a look at photography’s basic means of expression, and learn the difference between a photograph (a photographic image) and a mere camera-powered recording of reality. You should give each photo a distinct subject, and to express that subject creatively, you need thorough work with light, composition, and perspective.

Using a series of repeating objects in a photo’s background can make it compositionally impressive. It gives the photo a rhythm—which you can then interrupt with a properly placed subject. And if you hide the end of the series of objects that form the rhythm, you make the photo feel endless. Your audience gets the feeling that the row of repeating objects never ends.

Your basic light for photography—available to you free of charge—is natural light. But when you’re using that light, you usually don’t have many ways to fully control it, and so you’ll often have to adapt your exposure and your scene to the light. You’ll learn to perceive light and take advantage of its characteristics with some practice…

One very simple and effective way to emphasize your subject is to find a high-contrast background. You can contrast your subject against the background not only visually, but also in terms of its meaning. These contrasts are especially strong when a picture contains two elements that seem dissimilar, but join together to form a surprising composition with a powerful message.

When you’re taking digital photos and their colors are globally shifted due to a bad white balance setting in the camera, the fix is a matter of moments in Zoner Photo Studio. You just set a neutral color using the white-balancing eyedropper. But what if you want to fix the colors in a scanned photo? One where the tooth of time has gnawed at the colors? Then you need some more demanding edits. So let’s take a look at how to fix this kind of picture, where time has left its mark on the colors.

An eye for light and perfectly handled work with natural and artificial light sources are the key prerequisite for a good photo. The right lighting lifts a photo up out of the dull gray average, while a badly lighted picture, no matter how beautiful its subject, will never impress.

When a photo tells a story and uses several objects to tell it, that can be a lot for your audience to digest. To make sure they know how to read the photo, position the different parts of its composition so that the photo forms a single, balanced whole. The photo shouldn’t feel like one side or the other is too “heavy.” Let’s take a look at today’s article at how to use composition to get a correctly balanced picture.