Short and sweet

1. It is winter now, and in many parts of the U.S. and the world it’s cold. If you don’t like shooting in frigid temperatures, there are many things you can photograph indoors. This is a mixture of vegetable oil and water shot in a flat bottom, glass container. The color comes from paint smeared on paper lit with a flash. 2. When you use a long lens and shoot the sun, it’s unusually large in the frame. The longer the lens, the larger the sun becomes. This is a dramatic way to show the sun in an image. This shot was taken with a 500mm focal length. Had I used a cropped sensor camera or a 1.4x converter, it would be even larger.

3. When photographing animals, dramatic expressions can occur very quickly and then they’re gone, lost forever. Watch animals through the viewfinder, not directly with your eyes. If you do the latter, and a great moment occurs, by the time you look through the camera and compose, it may be too late. 4. Shooting snow means the meter can be fooled by all the whiteness. Images will be underexposed. However, there is no general rule about this because in a shot like this, much of the center of the frame -- where metering takes place -- is middle toned. Other photographers say to overexpose snow photos. Here that wouldn’t work. §