Stock Photography Articles and Tips

She's the cutest thing in the world, a pink and chubby bundle of happiness. So capturing your baby’s beauty on camera should be the easiest thing in the world. But too often the results are not as good as you’d hoped. So follow our guide and you’ll soon be filling albums with delightful digital pictures of the new addition to your family. Read more»

An electrifying event in the game of baseball, a grand slam instantly changes the pace and outcome of a game. With one swing of the bat, the long ball with the bases loaded lets a team instantly take a commanding lead of the game. You can change the outcome of your game - shooting digital photographs - with these digital photography tips Read more»

This is a step by step guide to what to look for when buying a digital camera. It will focus you on the right model for you. What are the significant features you should look for, and what do those specifications mean? This guide will not help you buy the best digital camera, it will help you buy the right one. Read more»

In the digital age, color-correction is a much more attainable skill than it was in the film age. Anyone who knows how to read numbers can color-correct a photo with a computer. Read more»

Night photos can take on a somewhat magical quality you may find lacking in normal daytime photography. Amazing night pictures certainly can attract attention. As the sun goes down, however, it becomes harder to capture images without the proper equipment and techniques. Read more»

A baseball game is the perfect way to spend a lazy summer afternoon, plus it provides opportunities to take photos that last a lifetime. While many claim the sport of baseball is a slow-paced affair, when action does occur, it can happen very swiftly, almost too fast for an unskilled photographer to shoot the photos they desire. Thus, before you plan on taking photos at a baseball game, you may wish to read the following advice. Read more»

With all the advances in digital photography technology, about half the professional photographers I know had switched from film to pixels, and a couple of them consistently ask me why I haven't switched too. Read more»

One of the wonderful things about digital images is the ability to crop and manipulate them in a variety of sizes and orientations with such relative ease. However, sometimes you need to be able to determine with some accuracy the size that a digital image will occupy when presented. Read more»

Replace a background in a photograph with a completely different one. Read more»

Portrait photographers sometimes employ special "soft" lenses to impart a glowing, flattering and "dreamy" feel to their subjects. Learn how to simulate this effect digitally. Read more»

Learn how to effectively retouch images to enhance skin tone, remove blemishes and wrinkles, whiten teeth, etc. Read more»

Photographers using prosumer-level digital cameras have very little ability to effectively employ shallow depth of field techniques because of the small sensor size these cameras use. Learn a powerful technique to simulate shallow DOF for enhancing portraits and other images that could benefit from shallow DOF. Read more»

Learn how to convert color images to black and white and then selectively restore color to certain areas for artistic appeal. Read more»

Sharpening images is a necessary step in the digital image workflow, but it can exacerbate noise or film grain to unacceptable levels. Learn effective ways to sharpen without affecting the noise. Read more»

Learn how to combine two different exposures of the same scene to create composite images with greater dynamic range than the film or sensor would otherwise be able to handle. Read more»

Digital cameras, like slide film, are notoriously unforgiving of overexposure; overexposed areas tend to blow out to completely white highlights with no chance of recovering the lost detail. Learn how to salvage such images. Read more»

Although lens vignetting of the unintentional variety is usually unwanted, vignetting can also be used intentionally to create a sort of "spotlight" effect that, if done subtly, draws the viewers eye to the subject of the photograph. It is particularly well suited to portraits. Read more»

In this tutorial I will show you how to simulate black and white infrared film. Infrared film is sensitive to both ultraviolet and infrared wavelength light. Green foliage reflects a lot of infrared light, which is why infrared film is often used to take "supernatural" landscapes. Cameras do not focus infrared light the same way they do visible light, which is one reason infrared photographs tend to be a little blurry. Read more»

Learn a fast and effective technique for removing hot pixels (dark current noise) from nighttime and long exposure digital camera images. Read more»

In this tutorial I will show you how to sepia tone a color or black and white image. This technique is modeled on the traditional darkroom method of sepia toning in that the sepia color is applied "unevenly" to areas of different tonality. Read more»

Learn an effective technique for reducing excessive contrast. A contrast mask allows you to reduce overall contrast, simultaneously bringing out more detail in highlights and shadows. Read more»

Savvy photographers often use a neutral density filter to compress the dynamic range of a scene to allow the film or sensor in their camera to properly expose it. Learn how to tweak images with large underxposed areas to appear to have been properly exposed using an digital analogue of this technique. Read more»

Learn a dead simple technique for matching the toning of one image in another. A trivially easy way to do sepia, selenium, platinum, palladium, cyanotype and other classic tonings! Read more»

Digital cameras are prone to sensor noise, the digital counterpart to traditional film grain. Learn how to ameliorate the problem of sensor noise. Read more»

Learn a variety of different ways to convert your RGB color images to black and white. There are more ways than you think! Read more»