Today’s topic is difficult to photograph. It’s all about words. In fact, it is words, the words you put with your pictures. Any language that accompanies your pictures is going to change the viewers reaction to the picture. For example, “Can’t wait to see you at the picnic this Saturday” attached to a picture of your family gets a very different reaction than “Bob and I have decided to get a divorce.” My point in this extreme and silly example is that the words change the picture. There is a third effect that happens when you decide to say something….

It’s with a little bit of reluctance that I’m dedicating another Photo Tip to resolution. Learning about resolution isn’t all that much fun and I really want this to be an enjoyable experience for you. I did receive enough positive feedback from my How to Size a Picture for Emailing Photo Tip to think I’m keeping things simple enough, and enough questions to indicate that there are still plenty of you out there that are confused. In hindsight, it dawned on my that I could have done Resolution Week and devoted five tips to it; that wouldn’t be unreasonable. As….

There was a video on YouTube floating around recently that was cleverly produced by a commercial photographer mocking all of the questions that people ask someone who has an expensive looking camera hanging around their neck. (I want you to know that I try to be as friendly as possible with these people. This represents several hundred conversations in my lifetime, I would guess.) And very near the top of the list of questions I’ve been asked is one that really makes no sense, but these poor people don’t know how else to phrase the question. This, verbatim, is what….

I can’t remember what the language of love is but the language of photography is light. When the light is right everything you say with your camera is filtered through some kind of photographic French accent. The words—or, in this case, the pictures—are the same except better. Just like a French accent, beautiful light touches people emotionally. (Come to think of it, French is the language of love, right?) You need to know the difference between hard light and soft light. Hard light makes distinct, hard-edged shadows. Softlight makes shadows that are barely visible. A sunny day is hard light…..

  Before I went digital, there was a period of time when there were Wizard of Oz characters who could magically put my pictures into a computer and “fix” them. If you were willing to pay a lot of money there was nothing they couldn’t do. Remove clouds, cut and paste heads, clean up backgrounds. I exposed film. I worked with light. It was all incomprehensible. I can clearly remember wondering how they could tell the computer to turn a red shirt blue and just the shirt—not the whole picture. (The computer they used, by the way, would fill your….