I have a printer in my basement the size of an upright piano. It will make a print four feet wide and one hundred feet long if you’d like. In any major photo gallery these days the prints are likely going to be really big and really beautiful. It’s wonderfully gratifying to have one of your photographs cover a wall and serious photographers can’t resist; count me among them. This recent technology is incredible. But many of the first photographic prints were sized for lockets and picture frames the size of a playing card. They were one of a kind….

  I put this tip in spontaneously, prompted by a most thoughtful email I received a couple of days ago. It was from Sid Garcia—we’ve never met. It read:   Good day, Mr. Kelsh. Before my son was born, I got a copy of your book How to Photograph Your Baby. I’ve been doing a number of lifelong photo projects. Here’s one of them. I thought you would enjoy this. Thank you for your inspiration. Sincerely, Sid Mr. Garcia had been prompted by a suggestion I made in the book to annually photograph your hands and the hands of your….

Contrast is the range between the blackest thing in your picture and the whitest thing. When you make the darkest thing in the picture darker and the lightest thing lighter, you have increased the contrast. Fortunately, there’s a slider someplace in your editing program that makes it relatively easy. Knowing exactly how much to do it, however, is part of the art of photography and takes some practice. Basically, you want your picture to be as contrasty as possible WITHOUT LOSING DETAIL IN ANYTHING. Then your pictures have snap and feel three-dimensional; they draw the viewer in. If you watch….

  OK, let’s get right to the fun part. I’m putting a folder of my photographs on the Facebook page so you can download them and compare your work to my work and see if the contrast and brightness are all comparable. (I’m using black and white photographs because when you get a handle on these concepts in BW it makes it a lot easier to deal with other color issues. I’ll be posting some color photos on another day.) I’ll get to why my pictures are the industry standard and yours aren’t in a moment and I mean that….

The word funny somehow doesn’t do Elliott Erwitt’s pictures justice, but the longer you look at his pictures they funnier they get. I’m not a big collector of other people’s photographs, but I do have two signed Elliott Erwitt prints hanging in my home and they have been bringing me pleasure for decades. At the heart of Erwitt’s brilliance is the ability to see things other people don’t. He has been given the “ability to notice” like a gift from the photo gods. And although his technique is as good as a street-shooter’s technique can be, it’s only technique and….