1. We keep the lights off. The holidays are a time for candles, gently lit shrubbery and the warm glow of the fireplace. All great for ambiance — all terribly

Even though professionals do macro photography using DSLRs and often high-priced lenses, you can try basic macro photography with any old compact. You just have to switch it to macro mode.

Used wisely, low depth of field makes your pictures more interesting, more intelligible, and easier to “read”. So—how do you get that pleasantly unsharp background in a photo? The following

Beginners’ mistakes are free. (Well, psychologically at least.) But you should still learn from them—even more than from your successes. And sometimes you can learn about them before they happen. So let’s take a look at photographers’ most common mistakes.

Photography is literally painting with light, and so no photo can come from a scene where there’s no light at all. And even low-light sites have a problem: poor exposure. What can we do to get good pictures out of bad light?

I have always wanted to “do photography.” But I just didn’t have enough time for it among all my other hobbies, and so learning to take photographs always stayed just