The next time you’re in the big electronics store and have a chance to see a couple dozen televisions all playing the same channel or movie notice the difference in color from set to set. They are all different—even in the most expensive models! Consistent color is insanely difficult to achieve. Sadly, the same is true of computer monitors. When you email a picture to someone it’s going to look different on their machine than it does on yours. It may be close, but it will not be identical. Monitor manufacturers have done their best to make the red I….

The day will come when there’s going to be a piece of glass between you and something you want to photograph. For whatever reason, you can’t get to the other side. You may be in a house looking out. You may be outside looking in. Maybe you’re in a car or a train. (Hopefully, you’re not driving the car or the train.)Whatever the circumstances, shooting through glass is almost always less than ideal. The problem is reflections. It helps to know how they work before you can try to eliminate them. And the keyword is try. Sometimes there’s very little….

Sometimes the best laid plans of photographers simply turn to chaos. What you want to happen and what’s happening in your viewfinder can quickly become two very different things. Kids make dopey faces. Babies cry. Life happens. You know the drill. You can resist and try to right the ship and you may succeed, but there comes a time when you just need to throw in the towel, laugh it off, and join the parade. Just let it happen; you will be amazed what life will lay at your feet when you relax and let it. I totally understand that….

Yesterday’s lesson about ISO and today’s lesson are admittedly a bit technical. Every once in a while it will be good for us if we dive into the cold water and swim a lap or two; I promise not to make a steady diet out of it. But these litle bits of knowledge can take you a long way toward using your camera on manual settings and manual settings is where the creative stuff happens. Please don’t be afraid. I’m here to help. What I want you to get out of today’s lesson is actually very simple. If you get….

The ISO setting on your camera determines how sensitive your camera is to light. ISO stands for International Standards Organization. Waste no time remembering that. It’s worthless information; museum walls are covered with photographs taken by photographers who could not, with confidence, tell you what ISO stands for. The feature that sets the light sensitivity of your camera should be called something like Light Sensitivity Setting. All things being the same, it’s difficult to imagine the circumstances under which a camera that is extremely sensitive to light is not preferable to one that is not—the higher the ISO number, the….