Short and Sweet

1. When shooting in deep shade, colors tend to go bluish especially if you use daylight white balance. If you try to adjust the WB to cloudy or even AWB, you might come closer to the correct color. For precision, I leave my WB on daylight for all outdoor photography. I fine tune the white balance in ACR or Lightroom. 3. Don’t handhold macro shots and expect to have sufficient depth of field. Use a tripod -- not even a monopod. For macro work, you need small apertures like f/22 or f/32 to get back the depth of field you had lost in magnifying small subjects. Macro photography is most compelling with complete DOF.

2. You can never go wrong with a black background behind any subject. It is a dramatic look that forces attention nowhere else but the subject. Even with models that have black hair, you can add just a touch of light on the hair to give it enough texture and defi

nition to separate the subject from the background.

4. When shooting dynamic interiors, wide angle lenses are best -- and the wider, the better. I shot the Old State Capital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with a 14mm lens. Thanks to the ‘distortion’ from such a wide lens, the curves of the dramatic staircase are exaggerated and made visually compelling. §