Digital Photography School

The Perseid meteor shower, one of the brighter meteor showers of the year, occurs every year between July 17 and August 24. The shower tends to peak around August 9-13.  The 2017 Perseids peaked on the night of August 12 and early morning hours of August 13. I was a little bit late to the party and decided to capture star trails on night from August 13 to August 14.  What was meant to be a star trail photography, actually turned out a lovely time lapse video.  I'm not an expert in astro…

That time of the year has come and as usual, in April I return to photograph that lovely brick wall opposite to our apartment, turning green. This year I decided to excel in time-lapse photography and video. A few months ago I bought an intervalometer (around Christmas time) and today was actually the first time I put it on real action.  I did a few tests to see how intervalometer actually works, and once get the basic understanding put it to capture 120 shots with 30-second interval (making…

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and it is a technique in which many images – usually around 3 or 5 – are merged together, so that details from all the different images show up in the final HDR image. It is simply using the dynamic range over many exposures in one single image. [block:block=34] Photoshop is a great and very effective tool for merging the series of photos of the same scene you have taken, to give an HDR image with lots of details and tones. In this article, I will tell you…

Indoor photography covers a huge range of situations – from kids’ birthdays to high-end interior shootings. Basically, everything that is shot indoors. Assuming that you don’t own studio lighting gear, all you’re left with is a light that’s already in your space. Because of that, indoor photography is often not-so-easy to shoot. Why? Because most of the time, the light in indoor spaces is poor and you need to learn to set your camera for low light situations. Here, we’ll focus on some basic…

The purpose of this article is to familiarize the user with the best practices regarding ISO settings for night photography. We will go over a basic introduction to ISO as well as a short guide on using different ISO values in relation to other camera settings in order to achieve best results. One of the reasons casual photographers decide to upgrade to a DSLR camera is so they can capture quality photos during night. However, DSLRs often require understanding of different camera settings and…

In this article you will learn how to import Canon DSLR .mov files into video editing software Adobe Premiere CS 4 and how to possibly deal with a choppy playback.  It's all about codecs when dealing with video editing. If you don't have right codecs CS4 wont recognize videos shot with a Canon DSLR (Although, never version should). One of the simplest ways to make Adobe Premiere CS 4 to recognize .mov files is by simply installing QuickTime player. After you have installed QuickTime just …

In this article you will learn that not all is lost (in most cases), and it's still  possible to recover accidently deleted Canon CR2 files (I'm writing about Canon, as I'm writing from my own experience). Here is my case study: I bought a new Asus laptop about a year ago, it did came with a 500GB built in HDD storage, the main purpose for this laptop was to perform some everyday computing and post-processing RAW images in Adobe Lightroom. If you are a photographer - you get the point. It…

Have you ever wanted to photograph the Big Dipper? It is on of the easiest and probably the most famous grouping of stars in the sky. Fail short using auto mode on your camera? I hear you - I was there buddy. Once I was laying in warm beaches in Turkey (around Izmir) it was night already, the view around me was just amazing, city lights, sea and stars... I spent all night stargazing and trying to photograph at least something using my camera... well... I ended up with nothing. Back then I had…

I have wanted to write about panoramic photography technique I have been using for a very long time already, today finally I decided to put my knowledge on paper (blog). Panoramic photos are cool and easy way to fake a wide angle lens, you don't have to own fancy DSLR camera and super wide angle lens to fit more into frame. For today's tutorial I'm using my Canon Rebel T5 DSLR camera with kit 18mm-55mm lens. I'm always trying to shoot at widest (18mm) to fit more details in frame.  Tools you…

As some of you already know lately I'm a lot into HDR photography. For most of the times I'm shooting from a tripod, but sometimes (just sometimes) I'm lazy enough to take tripod with me. In most cases I end up damning myself for not taking tripod this time and most often avoid HDR shooting. Also in a lot of popular tourist spots (churches,cathedrals) it's forbidden to use a tripod - so you are left with handheld and no flashlight photography. Thus, that doesn't mean you cannot shoot HDR…