Making the leap from candids to posed portraits of friends and family can be stressful, even for top photographers. When posing people, uncertainties abound: How should you light your model? Which lens is right? How do you draw out great facial expressions? Follow these five tips from photographer Patrick James Miller to help get you started.

1. Full-length shot: Avoid the boxy look

Posed, full-body portraits are among the hardest people pictures to nail. With face, body, and limbs to coordinate, they can present a complex set of visual elements to harmonize.

Begin with the right camera position. “For these full-body shots, I started with my camera at about Amy’s chest level,” says New York–based editorial shooter Patrick James Miller. “I work in a straightforward style, and a level, chest-high camera introduces little or no distortion.”

He adds, “Sometimes, though, I will lower the camera slightly and aim up, to make a proud, powerful statement about the subject. Other times, I lift and tilt the camera down for a more intimate, sometimes flattering look.”

Another tip: Work the planes. To add dynamic tension, experiment with aiming your subject’s face, shoulders, and hips in different directions. Place the left shoulder slightly forward and the hip slightly back, for example.

It’s also important to show space between the arms and body. Bending an elbow can help highlight the subject’s waist, while flexed elbows, wrists, and knees tend to add energy.

Asking your subject to put the weight on the back leg frees up the front leg to become an expressive element. In the larger shot here, Miller had Spector shift her weight onto her left foot, so her right leg could cross her body, giving the legs an active triangular composition. “Shifting weight allows for the subject to look less flat-footed and is a great way to add shape to the pose,” the photographer says.

Tilt and cock the head. This can suggest personality and intimacy, but don’t go too far. And watch the hands. Can’t get them to look right? Hide them as Miller did.

Finally, try adding a prop. “Having something for your subjects to lean against, like a chair, can relax them,” says Miller.

Hot Tip: When directing your subject, request that changes made in the placement of body, limbs, and head be very minor. Slight placement differences can affect a pose in big ways. Instead of simply asking that a subject “look left,” for example, ask for a very small turn to the left.

2. Gear choices: Begin with the lens

Why are wide-angle lenses anathema to portrait shooters? These two pictures tell the story. Miller made the left shot with a classic 85mm portrait lens and the right one with a standard-range zoom at 35mm. The results are like night and day. Here’s why: To fill the frame with a portrait subject using a wide-angle lens, you must move in very close. In the photo taken at 35mm, the camera was about 3 feet from our model, while for the 85mm shot, the camera was about twice as far back. The closer your camera is to the subject, the more exaggerated the parts of the face closest to the lens become. At 35mm, the nose appears much larger than the eyes because it’s significantly closer to the camera. At 85mm, the relative distance between the eyes and the nose is visually insignificant, and we see much less apparent distortion.

The correct lens isn’t the only useful piece of equipment for posed portraits. Miller mounts his camera on a sturdy support, and he brings a laptop along for shooting tethered. The former prevents camera shake, and the latter lets him share images in real-time with his portrait sitters. This collaboration gives subjects a sense of confidence and control.

Hot Tip: If all you have is a wide-angle lens, limit your posed portraits to full-body shots; don’t attempt half-lengths or tight headshots. Also, stick to environmental portraits and step back to include a lot of colorful background in your compositions. The farther back, the better!

3. Outdoor lighting: Seek shade

Taking your posed portraits outdoors can improve the variety, mood, and character of your backgrounds—certainly more easily than what you can achieve indoors. However, shooting outdoors often introduces its own problems, the most serious being unflattering light. As seen in the right-hand picture above, direct sunlight creates dark, contrasty shadows in Spector’s eye sockets and under the nose and chin. The solution is simple, though. Have your subject step into shade to even out the sun’s bright highlights and dark shadows for more flattering portrait lighting.

What if you find the perfect outdoor backdrop, but the setting has no shade? Do as Miller did and create your own. For the left-hand picture, his assistant held a 2×3-foot diffusion panel above Amy Spector. This created an oasis of soft, very effective light for a much more flattering shot.

Another way to improve portraits made in direct sunlight? Place a reflector immediately below your subject’s face and angle it up to bounce sunlight back up into the eye sockets and under the chin and nose. The face will be more evenly lit—and also brighter than what’s possible in shade. This added brightness can afford you faster shutter speeds or smaller apertures, either of which can render the unlit areas of the background darker, causing your subject to stand out more emphatically.

Hot Tip: On a partly cloudy day, your best bet is to wait for a thinly overcast sky. The light under such conditions can be bright enough for handheld exposures, as well as soft, even, and highly flattering.

4. Indoor lighting: Flash vs. softbox

Because of its convenience and low cost, on-camera flash exerts a strong allure for novice portraitists. Resist it! Your results could resemble the right-hand image above. Compared with the picture on the left, which was lit with a studio strobe and softbox, the direct-flash portrait appears flat and harshly lit, with shiny bright highlights and a distracting shadow behind the subject. The portrait lit by softbox is more flattering, with greater dimension and shaping across the face and softer highlights in the complexion. It avoids the contrasty facial sheen of direct-flash portraits.

Note that by placing his main light off-axis, away from the lens, Miller was able to aim the softbox down onto the model’s face. “I like to have my key and backlight kind of high, shooting down, because it’s directional and natural, kind of like the sun,” says Miller. This strategy also created the shadow across her neck that serves to set off and “present” the face in a flattering manner.

Conversely, the on-camera flash illuminates the neck and face equally, giving the former an unwelcome prominence. Raising his light also buried the shadow cast behind Spector. As a result, she seems to exist in her own timeless world, one without the confining walls suggested by the on-camera-flash shadows.

Hot Tip: If you must light with an on-camera flash, try bouncing its output off a nearby white wall or ceiling, turning either into a giant reflector—without aiming the flash directly at your subject.

5. Expressions: Make them count

The closer you zoom in on a portrait subject, the more weight the person’s facial expression carries. At first, it may seem difficult for novice portraitists to coax relaxed and expressive looks from their subjects. But with practice, it gets easier.

Miller says he starts by putting his subjects at ease. “Before a shoot, I do some homework,” he says. “I try to find out if there’s anything the subject and I have in common. Something we could talk about. I may also show a subject an example of the kind of portrait I want to take. If they like the example, it can build trust. Also, subjects who are parents love to talk about their kids. It can really open them up.”

The good news? The difference between a deadpan, lifeless expression (right) and one that suggests a rich, lively intelligence and vibrant inner life can be achieved through very minor tweaks to the face and head. A slightly lifted eyebrow (left) or a tipped or tilted head can be enough.

“I’m always on the lookout for unexpected moments,” says Miller. “The seconds right after a person laughs, for example, often produce unguarded and natural expressions that can be very charming.”

Hot Tip: When he zooms in to focus on a person’s facial expressions, Miller will often place a black flag beside his subject, opposite to the main light. As in this shot, it darkens the shadowed side of the face, which accentuates its shape and adds a sense of depth and dimension to the image.

The post Five tips for more flattering portrait photography appeared first on Popular Photography.

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This post has been updated. It was originally published on December 17, 2008.

Got stacks of slide carousels loaded with holiday, vacation, and other family memories? Those trays hold too much personal history to be tossed, but in their current analog state, all those images are just too bulky, dusty, and, well, old-fashioned to bother with. Luckily, if you want to digitize slides, the options are plentiful.

Digitizing and storing them in the cloud or on a flash or external drive will reduce clutter and preserve the memories. You have three choices: digitize slides by using a slide duplicator on your digital camera, scanning them, or outsourcing the task to a slide duping house.

Related: How to edit your digital photos to look like film

Slide duplicator

Selling for about $70, a slide duplicator (or “duper”) is a cylinder that attaches to your camera’s lens mount using a T-mount adapter ring. Duplicators are relatively small, rugged, and easy to store and transport. Unlike scanners, they don’t require electricity or a computer.

Dupers have a lens mount on one end of the cylinder and a sliding gate that holds two slides on the other. The duper focuses a slide’s image onto your camera’s sensor using an internal lens that has a fixed aperture and focusing distance.

Most duplicators today also have a zoom mechanism that lets you continuously crop into the center, eliminating up to 50 percent of the image area. The slide gate adjusts in four directions, letting you crop left, right, top, or bottom. It also twists to level a horizon line. When you achieve the desired crop, lock the gate into position with the two thumb screws, and you’re ready to dupe.

A downside to duplicators: If you’re working with a non-full-frame camera, you may be forced to crop into the image. With some slides, that can be an improvement, but for scenes that were carefully composed in-camera, it’s a deal-breaker.

To digitize slides, start by dusting each slide front and back with bursts of canned air before duping. We found it easiest to work with our camera on a tripod, which we placed about 10 inches in front of a bare 150-watt tungsten light bulb that served as both a viewing and taking light. Because the unit’s fixed aperture is small (to assure adequate depth of field for sharpness), the viewing image is very dim, necessitating a bright source to see the slide and confirm that it’s correctly positioned in the gate.

Once you’re setup, duping goes quickly, thanks in part to your camera’s rear monitor and histograms, which make finding the right exposure a snap. Your camera’s auto white-balancing feature also comes in handy. In the film era, matching the color palette of your duping film to that of the light source was a major consideration. With auto white-balancing, you can use almost any common light source so long as it’s bright. With our duping system finalized, we were able to knock out six or seven slides per minute.

You may lose some sharpness with a duper but overall, this is a quick and easy method for creating reasonably high-quality scans at home. Of course, it does require you to own a digital camera.

Bottom line: A slide duplicator is an affordable way to digitize slides. However, your scans will only be as high-quality as your camera sensor’s resolution.

Pro: Inexpensive and relatively fast.

Con: A digital camera (ideally, full-frame) is required.

Digitize slides with a scanner

Related: Best 35mm film

The good news: Film scanners have become ultra-sophisticated, ultra easy to use, and reasonably affordable. Depending on resolution settings, as well as noise and dust reduction options, scanning each slide can take several minutes or longer.

Your scanner should offer a resolution of up to 6400 dpi (noninterpolated) for sharp, crisp photos. We also highly recommend scanners that have dust-removing Digital ICE technology, as well as those with noise-reducing multisampling modes.

If you have medium-format or B&W negatives in addition to slides to digitize, look for scanners like the Epson V600, which accommodates 35mm and 120 film and 35mm slides. It also employs Digital ICE to remove dust and scratches.

If you don’t already own a good image editor, you may want to invest in a subscription to Adobe Photoshop or Capture One (or you could just use Photoshop on the Web for free). You will need it for cleaning up dust spots and other imperfections in your scans.

If you have literally thousands of slides to scan, get a larger unit with an accessory batch loader. They’re bulky—storing them can be an issue—and may add to your start-up costs (Nikon’s SF-210 runs about $1,709), but will save you many hours in the long run. Pacific Image PowerSlide X ($999.99) can batch scan 50 slides at a time.

Bottom line: Film scanners aren’t as quick as digitizing slides with a slide duplicator but they do provide users with a lot of control over the final output. Also, built-in dust and scratch-removing software saves editing time.

Pro: Extensive control over resolution and image quality.

Con: The cost of the scanner may be high and they take up space.

Slide scanning service

If you want to digitize slides with low effort, consider a slide scanning service. Before you resort to them, if you live in a metropolitan area that has custom labs, make the rounds to check on local availability and pricing of the service. Virtually all retail photofinishers that use digital mini labs (the majority today) can digitize slides at moderate resolutions.

The pricing will vary, but can be as little as $0.25 per slide. Be sure to do your research and verify all costs. Vendors with low per-slide charges, for instance, may tack on fees to cover the cost of an SSD card or file transfer service. When selecting a vendor, confirm that it cleans and scans each slide individually and avoid batch scanners.

Scanning services now generally offer scans at a resolution fit to print and view digitally. Some may provide a discount should you choose lower-resolution scans—but be forewarned that prints may not be possible.

Before submitting your slides, dust them off with canned air and pack them up carefully. If you’re mailing them, use dust-free protective padding like packing paper or bubble wrap, and put the slides in resealable plastic bags to lock out dust and moisture. Don’t ship loose slides as the mount from one can easily gouge the emulsion of another, and don’t wrap slides in paper towels, which shed dust and lint. Wrap stacks of slides in dust-free paper or aluminum foil and rubber band them together, writing some form of ID and your name and telephone number on each stack.

If you’re submitting hundreds of slides, save yourself future headaches and batch them by subject and label each group with a short, descriptive term (Holidays 2005, NYC Vacation, etc.). Ask the vendor to put each group of scans in its own folder on the resulting SSD card or file-sharing service and request that your descriptive names be carried over to the folders. Although there may be an extra charge for this, you will locate images much more quickly later.

Bottom Line: While sending slides out for duping is, from a labor standpoint, the easiest way to bring your slides into the digital era, it’s probably also the most expensive.

Pro: Little labor on your part.

Con: Can take weeks, is expensive, and affords you little control over the image quality.

The post How to digitize slides appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Photographing someone’s Big Day is a beautiful—and stressful—job, especially if you’re not a seasoned pro. This week, PopPhoto is serving up our best advice for capturing that special kind of joy.

This post has been updated. It originally published on May 18, 2012

As the ones responsible for capturing a wedding day in images, we photographers are under a ton of pressure. To help you next time you’re asked (or even hired) to assume the role, we tapped ten top wedding pros for their techniques and strategies for bringing a smile to the face of even the most demanding bride or groomzilla.

This isn’t about what equipment to buy to shoot weddings—you can read about that here. Nor is it about conventional poses, lighting setups, shot lists, or marketing strategies. (For these, see any of the 200 wedding tutorial books you can find at bookstores and online.)

Instead, we want to bring you the thought processes of America’s top wedding shooters as they hit the ground running to cover a typical event. What are they looking for as they go from formal family portraits to the ceremony, to the dinner and reception? How do they (subtly) coax participants into the poses and pictures that will produce a stunning wedding album? And how do they set up the circumstances that allow them to find, mine, and even create that most important of wedding guests: human emotion.

Chasing emotions

A set of pictures that capture the deep and true feelings between a couple getting married—and the emotions and hope that friends and family feel for them—is the holy grail of wedding photography. This, ultimately, is what we’re after.

As Dave Getzschman, a former wedding pro based in Los Angeles puts it thusly: “Emotion is the substance of wedding photography. You can and should build images around light, color, and composition, but without emotion, there’s a vital human element missing.”

Getzschman looks for real interactions between the couple, the wedding guests, and members of the bridal party. “These emotions reflect our humanity and translate immediately and powerfully to viewers regardless of their culture, race, ethnicity or language,” he says.

How do wedding photographers find or create the conditions in which these emotions are allowed to rise to the surface in images? “I engage with my subjects and it gains their trust. I arrive early, introduce myself, learn people’s names, ask questions, listen,” Getzschman says. “When intimate moments occur, I want to have ingratiated myself to the point where I can stand a few feet away from my subjects with a wide-angle lens and have no one feel that I’m intruding.”

For photographer Ira Lippke, it’s all about depressurizing the situation. For example, during a couple’s formal portrait session, “I emphasize that the photography is secondary. The primary reason for pulling the couple away from their guests is for them to have some meaningful time together, just the two of them on their wedding day,” he says. The couple immediately relaxes and focuses on each other, “and I get emotionally real images that way.”

Angelica Glass offers a similar approach. When subjects are standing and see the camera, they often tense up. Some even stop breathing. “My favorite strategy is to ask them to sit. Once seated, people tend to become more relaxed and breathe normally,” she says. “For shots of the bridal couple, I also ask others to leave the room. That way the couple can relax without too many sets of eyes on them.”

New York-based shooter Ron Antonelli also takes a physical approach to posing portraits. “I remind the couple to touch one another. Whether it’s holding hands or having an arm around a partner, a spontaneous moment will always seem more emotionally connected if a couple is physically connected,” he advises.

Importance of candids

While beautifully composed moments at the altar and attractively posed or semi-posed portraits are important components of a fully accomplished wedding album, the images that resonate—the ones that viewers linger over—are often the candid images that showcase memorable exchanges and implied narratives.

For Todd Laffler, “Candids are king. When I’m trying to capture impactful candid moments, I think of myself as a hunter in camouflage, observing and waiting out my prey. It often takes keen observation, anticipation, and patience to capture a moment at its zenith.”

He continues, “One of my favorite times for candids during a full-mass, Catholic or Episcopalian service occurs during communion. At this time, after the bride and groom have received the Host, the focus turns away from them as the rest of the congregation takes communion. This is when I find loving, intense, and intimate moments between the two. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, I can be rewarded as they happily share a private moment in the middle of the ceremony, up near the altar.”

Sergio, a single-named photographer based in Tucson, AZ, carries the hunting metaphor a little further: “Real moments are the most valuable prey of all. I think of such a moment as a mouse. I need to set a trap of light and composition, and then be patient. You don’t chase a mouse with a mousetrap; you set the bait and wait.”

The best candid pictures capture a moment, but they also imply a story or define the relationships among families and friends. “I don’t find it the least bit satisfying to make pretty, one-dimensional wedding pictures,” says Getzschman. “I challenge myself to make multidimensional images that suggest a context, convey a narrative, and offer insight into the relationships between my subjects.”

The truth about shot lists

Even wedding warriors who deny it have a shot list imprinted somewhere along their strands of DNA. Their trick is to approach each wedding milestone (procession, vows, first kiss, recession, reception toasts, first dance, etc.) with a fresh eye.

For example, Laffler likes to “photograph the bride and groom entering the ballroom for the first time from behind with a wide-angle lens. This way, we can see all their guests’ reactions to them coming in.”

Of course, he can only do this if he has a second photographer working for him to cover the more typical vantage point, in front of the bride and groom.

Ron Antonelli agrees that one way to get creative with the usual wedding scenes is to capture them from unusual vantage points. “We sometimes mount a remote camera with a wide-angle lens to the chuppah [bridal canopy] during a Jewish ceremony and hide it so it can’t be seen. I fire the camera from anywhere, making photos that otherwise would have been impossible. It’s fun later on when our clients react on first seeing the shots. They had no idea we had taken them!”

Lippke also champions unusual points of view: “I love to shoot the first dance, for example, while crouching at the edge of the dance floor,” he says. “I position myself so that the couple are naturally backlit by the perimeter floodlights.”

Composition counts

Jeff Newsom of San Luis Obispo, CA, finds that careful lens selection and composition can add interest to a wedding scene that on the surface may appear bland. “I explore a lot at every wedding I shoot,” he says. “I’ve found over time that I favor getting closer with a wider lens than standing back with a telephoto. It gives me a natural sense of being close to the subject.”

This technique gives him a chance to showcase a bride, say, by separating her from the background through defocus or by using a low camera angle to eliminate background clutter. He also prefers strong backlighting to wash out a background.

Seeing the mise en scene

Given how much couples (or their parents) usually spend on lighting, flowers, food, music, and all the other expenditures that make up a wedding, the photographer can’t neglect them. You should always capture the venue in wide, establishing shots; get close-ups of table settings, floral arrangements, and the bride’s gown, as well as other macro views.

Ira Lippke approaches the big picture the way a landscape photographer would. “I love landscapes,” he says. “The wide establishing shots of the wedding venue are a critical part of telling the wedding’s story. Personally, my favorite environmental images have people in them, but we get the undisturbed venue before guests arrive, too.”

Technique is crucial, Lippke adds. “There’s an art to bringing out the character and detail of the whole scene in a beautiful way. For me, it’s about finding the best camera angle to produce a beautiful composition and then deciding on the best exposure. I think about whether I want to utilize a slow shutter speed to create some motion blur that would show a human presence without that particular person being distracting, or if I want the entire scene in sharp focus.”

Have an assistant

Being able to focus on both the big picture and the intimate moments that constantly, yet unpredictably, arise during a typical wedding means that this kind of photography is really a two-person job. Having an assistant isn’t a luxury. For dozens of reasons, it’s a necessity. Almost all the pros shown here work with a second shooter—their coverage is strictly a tag-team effort.

“Immediately before the ceremony I meet with my associate photographer, and we make our game plan of how we are going to capture the different aspects of the ceremony and how the layout of the scene would be best photographed,” explains Lippke. “Usually one of us stays upfront to document what is happening at the altar, while the other works on capturing the big picture view. For the reception and cocktails, we take turns covering what is happening while the other photographer spends some time exploring details and the environment.”

Develop yourself

Craig Fritz, who with his wife Kitty makes up Twin Lens Images in rural New Mexico, stresses the importance of developing your own, unique pictorial style.

“Lately, we have been making a concerted effort to stay off of wedding blogs and look at fewer wedding magazines,” he says. “Not because we don’t enjoy looking at the great work out there, but because we recognize that when you inundate yourself with that type of imagery, you can begin to see other photographers’ themes, techniques, and photos in the scene you’re attempting to photograph. We very much want to do our own thing, see our own way, and so this is one way we’re attempting to keep ourselves visually fresh.”

The post Tips from a pro: An introduction to wedding photography appeared first on Popular Photography.

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To celebrate Earth Day 2022, we’re revisiting some of our favorite environmental stories and interviews from the PopPhoto archives.

From photography’s beginning until relatively recently, artists who turned their lenses on landscapes were fascinated by nature’s charm, mystery and beauty. By the mid 20th century, however, as a result of industrial activity, American landscapes took on other, less pretty, characteristics. Among the first modern photographers to point this out was David T. Hanson. His book titled Wilderness to Wasteland (Taverner Press, 2016) showcases pictures made in the ’80s that reveal the extent that the environment has suffered.

In some sense discovered by John Szarkowski, the late Director of Photography of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Hanson was honored with a show at the museum in 1986 at the age of 38. Its subject was Colstrip, Montana, a town near his boyhood home and the site of the largest strip mine in the US. Due largely to Hanson’s MOMA show, Colstrip became a poster child for the environmental desecration that industry was inflicting on American lands. The show secured the photographer’s status as one of the earliest and most prominent of contemporary landscape photographers who saw and interpreted their subjects not so much in terms of their inherent beauty, but, ironically, the ugliness perpetrated upon them.

Hanson wears many hats. He can accurately be called a documentarian, fine artist and an environmental activist. Born in 1948, this artist, writer, and teacher started out as an assistant to two of the greats: Minor White and Frederick Sommer. He took his M.F.A. in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he would ultimately teach from 1983 to 2000. His work is in the permanent collections and the subject of many exhibitions in the world’s major art museums.

The title of his new book, Wilderness to Wasteland, could summarize the central concern of his life. The book’s largely heretofore unpublished and un-exhibited pictures depict mostly western landscapes that after decades of irresponsible industrial activity have transformed into toxic dumps. The vocabulary used to describe his subjects says it all: Slag heaps, spoil piles, toxic pools and strip mines.

Wilderness to Wasteland showcases work executed as Hanson crisscrossed the country pursing multiple projects—often funded by public and private fellowships. It has four sections. The first titled Atomic City was completed in 1986 and is named for an actual town in Idaho. Near the site of the world’s first successful electricity-generating nuclear power plant, it’s sadly also the site of the world’s first partial nuclear meltdown, and years later, the world’s first—and America’s only—fatal meltdown, which cost three workers their lives. The region eventually saw over 50 mostly experimental nuclear reactors built, and is today one of the country’s most contaminated Superfund sites. Hanson says that it will probably remain so for centuries.

By the time of the photographer’s 1986 visit, Atomic City was largely abandoned, and his pictures of its uncared-for structures, unpeopled streets, and empty vistas strongly evoke a post-apocalyptic world partially bereft of humanity, beauty, and life itself.

The book’s second section, The Richest Hill on Earth, occupied Hanson from 1985 through 1987 and focuses on the extensive copper mines, workers’ housing, and individual neighborhoods that surround Butte, Montana. The town is home to what local promoters once called “the greatest mining camp on earth…[and producer] of two billion dollars worth of gold, silver, copper, and zinc.”

Hanson photographed Butte just after its mines had closed and its workers were dismissed. His pictures, again, have an eerie feel, utterly devoid of people, but rich in slag heaps, mine waste and dilapidated homes that, sadly, appear to still be at least partially occupied. Oddly, the town’s residential streets reach right up to and abut the mines with their above-ground conveyor belts, feeders, dischargers, and chutes. Presumably the miners rolled out of bed and continued rolling right down the mine shafts to work—almost like residing in an industrial plant.

The third section of Wilderness to Wasteland bears the same name, and Hanson created it while traveling across the country on a Guggenheim Fellowship between 1985 and 1986. Its subjects are hazardous waste sites, and he photographed them as he crisscrossed forty-five states in 12 months. As Hanson explains in the book’s introduction, “The series is wide-ranging in both subject and geography: Alabama farmland, real estate development in the Los Angeles basin, a Florida prison, oil fields in Texas, petrochemical plants in Georgia, abandoned mines,” and much more.

To our eye, the aerial views of toxic Superfund sites are especially powerful. At first glance, many could be taken for abstract expressionist paintings. One titled “Waste slag and irrigated cropland along the Jordan River, Sharon Steel Corp. Superfund site, Midvale, Utah”, is typical. The horizontal image is bisected vertically about mid frame, showing a ravaged landscape to the left, stained by pollutants and bulldozed into unnatural and unrecognizable gullies and gulches. Conversely, the right half presents lush green cropland representing a more recognizable natural scene, though we’re ironically aware that it’s probably drenched in pesticides and herbicides.

“I used aerial photography to gain access to high-security areas and to contextualize the sites within their larger surrounding landscapes, as well as to minimize my own exposure to these highly toxic environments,” Hanson says of these airborne views.

Twilight in the Wilderness makes up the book’s final pages and is a set of night photos of industrial sites related to energy production. Made between 1982 and 1983, they show oil tanks and refineries in California, Montana and New England. Hanson refers to these glowing pictures as Luminist landscapes after a 19th century school of landscape painters. The images carry titles based on original Luminist paintings from the 1800s. Hanson used the setting sun to sidelight reflective oil tanks, which glow like circular space ships landing against crepuscular skies. Equally eerie are sites lit by mixed light sources: faint daylight and bright moonlight, sodium and mercury vapor, tungsten and green fluorescents.

Though the book’s pictures were made some 30 years ago, the environmental issues they point to are still with us, and are more alarming and ominous than ever. Perhaps the most important role of these pictures is to illustrate what we risk by not paying attention to land management. If industrial interests are allowed to defile—and leave defiled—the natural environment, we will slowly turn the Earth into a place like those Hanson photographs, one uninhabitable by humans.

The post David T. Hanson’s 1980s landscapes are a grim reminder of the world we’ve made appeared first on Popular Photography.

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For Gary Parker, few things are more enjoyable than photographing man’s best friend. “I’ll shoot any pup I hear about—entirely for fun,” says this advertising, editorial, and, yes, pet photographer from San Jose, California . “For the basset puppies you see here, I drove over 100 miles to meet them, and it was a blast.” Creating great pooch portraits, he says, is the same process as taking great people portraits: “They should nail the character, personality, athleticism, and pure beauty of the subject.”

GaryParkerPup

His typical canine portrait session can begin with a traditional set-up. Here, Parker might attempt to produce a specific look requested by a pet’s owner. To nail these, he says, it’s important to start with a relaxed animal. He recommends easing into the shoot to keep the pups calm and happy. Work slowly, move slowly, and be relaxed yourself. Be relatively quiet, and don’t force yourself on the pet. “Eventually the dog will lead you to cool photos,” says Parker. “As with babies and small kids, it can take some time.”

Find the Right Setting

“I see dogs as outdoor creatures and that’s where I like to shoot them,” says Parker. He says the best outdoor locations offer bright, natural light with ample areas of open shade. A great setting will put generous swaths of uncluttered space between you and the dog and between the dog and the background. It will also allow for long, flattering portrait lenses (say, a fast-focusing 70–200mm f/2.8) and defocused backgrounds. To keep your canine calm, avoid distractions such as people or other dogs.

Parker prefers naturally occurring shade or that cast by a large overhead silk or scrim. If he has to shoot in direct sunlight, Parker will work only early or late in the day, making sure that his subject is backlit. He fills in the backlight’s shadows with reflectors or a flash. “Bounce a speedlight off reflectors or white walls, but never aim it directly at a subject,” Parker advises.

During the more traditional portrait segment of the shoot, he suggests having a wide variety of your dog’s favorite treats on hand. Most breeds are food driven, and most animal trainers use treats to direct their subjects’ attention and to reward and encourage desired behaviors.

To use treats effectively, Parker has an assistant tease the pet by concealing the treat in his or her hand, making sure the dog knows it’s there. The ploy usually provokes the desired expressions. For group portraits of a pet and its owners, these expressions can suggest important interaction, even affection, between human and animal.

Act Like a Sports Shooter

Once he’s nailed a portrait that meets the owner’s needs, Parker gets active. Capturing dogs in motion requires all the skills of a sports photographer.

The best of these pictures capture real moments that he could never have imagined or staged. To start, he might ask owners to simply play with their dogs. “Sometimes I play with the pet myself while making pictures, typically with a wide-angle lens. I’m like a big kid shooting, running and jumping with the animal. The results are images with energy,” Parker says.

“Since I often find myself on the ground, rolling with the pet, assistants are essential,” the photographer says. “They aim reflectors, change batteries in a flash, or toss me lenses. My focal length needs can change on a dime, and it makes a huge difference having someone there to quickly swap out my lenses.”

On set with animals and their owners, an assistant plays a crucial role beyond the technical. “They make you look professional and can instill trust in a pet’s owner,” Parker says. “In the heat of the portrait session, assistants organize gear, chase after a mutt on the run, and provide distractions that can catch or redirect Fido’s attention. I’ve even asked assistants to run poop patrol!” he says.

As for composing an image, as most of the photos here show, Parker likes to get his camera low and shoot into his subject’s eyes. “I love unusual angles so I’m constantly flat on my back or stomach or in other odd positions that tend to require a chiropractor afterwards,” he jokes.

“When getting down to the dog’s level, I move slowly, making minimal eye contact, especially if the dog is hyper. Eye contact can cause some breeds to tense up. It’s important to come off as nonthreatening. Stand back, blend in, and let the dog rule,” he says.

Consider Your Gear

Shooting subjects who move quickly and unpredictably naturally requires proper gear. Parker advises using a high framing rate, generous burst capacity, and effective noise control at high ISOs. “I like the Canon EOS 5D Mark III better than my Canon EOS-1D Mark IV because the 5D is lighter. Often, though, I end up using the 1D Mark IV for its 10 fps framing rate,” he says.

His favorite lenses vary with the setting and the look a client wants to achieve from the shoot. Generally, he relies on fast zooms like the Canon 16–35mm f/2.8L for in-close work and Canon’s 70–200mm f/2.8L for longer shots of shy or distant dogs. “I love the Canon 300mm f/4L since it’s lightweight for its size, plus it creates beautifully unsharp backgrounds. I often use the Canon 1.4X teleconverter with the 70–200mm and 300mm for an added layer of compression,” he says.

He’s also a huge fan of the Canon 50mm f/1.2L. “It allows indoor existing light photography in outrageously dark locations, catches focus in low light, and creates a beautiful look when used anywhere near f/1.2. At wide open, the lens is so fast, I can shoot using studio strobes’ modeling lights as my sole source,” Parker says.

Other items he brings to a shoot include waterproof blankets and gardening kneepads that let him lie flat on the ground or work while kneeling. “Since my style is to spontaneously react to photo opportunities, I need the ability to fall to the ground for the right angle. If the ground is wet or muddy, plastic sheeting can be a godsend,” he says.

When shooting a dog in available light, one of Parker’s main concerns is depth of field. He wants it as shallow as possible and suggests shooting wide open or closing down one stop to hedge your focusing bets. Shooting near wide open also allows the faster shutter speeds needed to freeze a dog in motion.

When he’s shooting with strobes, Parker sets the camera to manual. But if he’s using his Canon 580EX Speedlite, he’ll set his DSLR to the Aperture Priority exposure mode, which balances the overall lighting to include ambient light. In this mode, the on-camera flash acts as a fill light.

Pooch-shooting isn’t just for dog owners; it can be a practical solution for newbies looking for a model. “If you have access to a dog, you’ve always got a mostly willing subject that can challenge your skills at composing, focusing, and exposing,” says Parker. Dogs can teach you about human portraiture and sports photography, too. The only cost to you? A few bits of bacon.

Be Safe

In unfamiliar conditions, any dog can become aggressive. To avoid being bitten (or damaging your gear), watch for warning signs, such as hackles going up, and be ready to recoil. To defuse a tense moment, walk slowly toward the subject and place your camera on the ground. Walk away and let the dog sniff the camera.

NOW TRY OUT THESE TIPS AND SUBMIT THE RESULTS TO OUR DOG PHOTO CHALLENGE!

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Shooting in a massive public aquarium may be your only opportunity to net a sea creature as magnificent as Kyle Ford’s whale shark, above. The project will be fun, if fraught with challenges.

The good news? Ford, a fine-art shooter and photography professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY, has catalogued a set of techniques that makes shooting in large aquariums doable. Here we offer a handful of his best.

• Arrive early—as soon as the aquarium opens—to avoid crowds. And if you have the choice, stick with aquariums that permit the use of tripods.
• Avoid distortion by placing your camera parallel to the glass wall of the tank.
• Turn off on-camera flash to prevent distracting reflections.
• Focus on nearby creatures.The more water between your camera and your subject, the softer the focus will be.
• Include human silhouettes. They’ll inject an important sense of scale and dimension.
• Concentrate on light, silvery fish rather than darker species, which can blend into backgrounds.
• Use a high-speed lens so you can set fast, action-stopping shutter speeds. Slow-swimming fish are easier to capture sharply than darters.
• Consider combining images with software, as Ford did for the image shown here. Because it’s hard to catch multiple species attractively in a single shot, he made separate photos of the fish in this tank. He combined them in Adobe Photoshop later using layers and masks.

Step 1

Scout the aquarium. The day before you shoot, visit the aquarium and decide which scenes to capture. Determine where to set your tripod and what equipment to bring. Gauge visitor traffic and determine the best shooting times.

Step 2

Set up your rig. On the day of your shoot, set up your DSLR and tripod. Focus, then check it by zooming into a test image on the LCD. When the scene is adequately sharp, lock focus by switching to Manual Focus. Make sure the MF ring doesn’t shift as you shoot.

Step 3

Meter and set exposure. Ford recommends spot-metering the darkest subject area for which you want detail and then closing down two stops. Shoot in RAW at the lowest ISO that will allow a shutter speed no slower than 1/60 sec. If you intend to combine images, use identical exposures for each.

Step 4

Get their best sides. Shoot when the fish are close to the glass and their body language is colorful and indicative of the species. “It’s a bit like hunting,” says Ford. “I wait for a series of decisive moments. It took three hours to make the 10 images that I combined for this shot.”

Final Step

Fine-tune in post. Adjust sharpness, contrast, and color balance, and clean up debris and bubbles. Making a realistic-looking composite image takes a lot of practice and patience to build your skills. “It’s a meticulous process that actually feels a lot like painting,” says Ford.

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Miami Pro Paul Marcellini is no stranger to Pop Photo. Readers may remember his high-impact black-and-white wildlife photos. What you may not know is that Marcellini (www.paulmarcellini.com) is a contributor to an international nature portrait project called “Meet Your Neighbours.”

Using the talent of accomplished nature photographers from all over the world, the project (meetyourneighbours.net) presents commonplace—and usually backyard—wildlife and botany in rather uncommon portraits reminiscent of Richard Avedon. Marcellini’s project covers much of southern Florida, and has contributed amazing images of numerous plants, insects, snakes, alligators, turtles, and even undersea creatures­—all cleanly posed against bright white backgrounds.

For the Portuguese man-of-war shown here, Marcellini started by building a customized aquatic tank to hold and photograph such creatures. Made from panes of acrylic, three of its sides are white translucent panels through which he can pop shoe-mount flash units, essentially turning the tank into a water-filled softbox. He shoots the subject through the clear front pane.

If building your own fish tank seems daunting, buy an aquarium from any pet shop—a 5-gallon version should do—and line three of its sides with a white translucent material.

When the shooting starts, you will need an additional transparent acrylic or glass pane, freestanding within the tank. This will help you nudge your subject closer to the front. The reason: To give you as little water as possible between the front panel and the subject, assuring a sharply rendered specimen. As long as it is clear and scratch-free, this moveable pane will disappear when your flash units fire.

Another must? Clear water. “In the field, this can be tough to find,” says Marcellini. “I usually use a white T-shirt, doubled over, as a particulate filter when pouring seawater into the tank.”

In the field is exactly where this photograph was taken. Marcellini shot on Key Biscayne, an island just southeast of Miami. He netted the man-of-war on the beach where it had recently washed up. Then he carefully avoided its stinging tentacles, photographed it, and immediately returned it safely to the Atlantic Ocean.

No men-of-war near you? No problem. Marcellini uses the technique described here for all types of aquatic and semi-aquatic creatures such as small fish, frogs, and salamanders.

Follow Marcellini’s steps to turn your tank into a fish-friendly studio:

Step 1
Gather your gear. In addition to the tank, you will need a macro lens that puts ample distance between you and your subject. If too close, your rig will throw a shadow across the subject.

Step 2
Set up the tank. On location, fill the tank with local water, filtering it through a white T-shirt folded in two. Catch your subject and carefully introduce it into the tank. Let it accustom itself to its new surroundings while you continue setting up.

Step 3
Place your lights. You will need at least two accessory flash units on light stands: one placed immediately behind the tank and the other in front. Fire them wirelessly, if possible.

Step 4
Work out the exposure. Set your shutter to its maximum flash sync speed, use a low ISO, a small aperture for depth of field, and start with the flash units at full power. Find the rear flash exposure by lowering its power until it just barely blows out the translucent white background. Do the same for the front light: Lower its power until it lights the subject, without blowing out color or subject detail.

Final Step
Shoot the photo. Keep your camera parallel to the front glass to prevent distorted proportions. When you’ve finished, return your subject safely to the wild.

The post You Can Do It: Turn Your Aquarium into a Fish Photo Studio appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Young photographers today find inspiration, share expertise, and develop their photography in ways that previous generations couldn’t have imagined. To learn how this group of teens has become so successful so quickly, we spoke to some of the most talented (and most followed) photographers of the under-20 set. Though they all have plenty in common, each in this cross-section has their own unique relationship to photography.

It’s All About Play

Ann He

Nineteen-year-old Ann He took the Marie Antoinette-inspired image above when she was a mere 17-years-old. Now a student at Stanford University, this enormously talented fashionista has been hired by the likes of Nike and America’s Next Top Model, and has been published in numerous blogs, online zines, and print publications.

For He, the passion for fashion photography grew out of a childlike desire to play. She and her school friends would descend on local shopping malls, forage for clothing and accessories, and then organize ad-hoc fashion shoots. Her sometimes spirited, sometimes poetic images ultimately found their way into her Flickr stream and then beyond.

“I guess you could say that I was ‘discovered’ on Flickr,” says He. “The pictures often ended up on Flickr’s ‘Explore’ tab, and that led to lots of traffic and followers.” Today, her work is all over the internet with substantial presences on Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, BlogSpot, and of course, Flickr.

Teen photographers tend to truly enjoy photography, says He. “Present-day technology has made for the democratization of the medium. Everybody has great cameras and software, and can produce technically compelling images. We’re often not all that perfection-oriented, and the attitude is more casual than it possibly once was,” she says.

But He warns against drawing broad conclusions about young photographers. “Sometimes they seem to pull from the same pool of image types,” she says. “You have people doing road tripping, documenting teenage life, flowers, and Alice in Wonderland or mythical shoots. I’ve seen a million Ophelias. I don’t think it’s important to focus on an individual photographer or one body of work. What’s interesting is that companies like Levis and the New York Times are hiring young photographers, because, in a cultural sense, they see us as important and worth paying attention to.”

_**

__Ann He**
This fashion photographer from Dallas, TX has been published in international fashion magazines, blogs, and websites, and was also one of five finalists in Seventeen magazine’s 2011 Pretty Amazing contest and a 2012 American Visions medal winner in the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards. She is a freshman at Stanford University. See more at www.annhe.com._

The Fine-Art Attraction

Felicia Simion

Like Ann He, Felicia Simion of Bucharest, Romania, dove enthusiastically into photography at a very young age. Photo sharing sites introduced Simion to compelling photography and inspired her to attempt to make her own images. The creator of the dream-like scene on the opposite page, Simion discovered photography (and photo illustration) as a visitor to the DeviantART website when she was thirteen. “I remember falling in love with [photography] instantly,” says the now-19-year-old. “I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.” She purchased her first camera, the Canon EOS Rebel XTi, because, among other reasons, “it was popular among my favorite [online] photographers.”

Simion does little to actively grow her followings on Facebook, DeviantART, or on her personal website, but her online presence has catapulted her to phenomenal success by Internet standards. Her Facebook page boasts 73,000 Likes and over 4,500 comments. Her DeviantART pages have garnered over 2.3 million page views and 43,000 comments, and have led to image sales for book covers for bestselling authors such as Paulo Coelho and Elizabeth George, as well as online usage by the BBC, Yahoo, the Irish Times, and other news websites. She looks forward to the day when she can support herself through her photography. “It will always be the greatest passion for me. Receiving commissions and assignments will only help me develop my style further.”

How does Simion see “young” photography? “I think today’s photographers have somewhat nontraditional goals. They’re not motivated by the desire for gallery shows or money, but they want to create for the love of art, with a desire to share. They want their art and experiences to inspire others.”

_**

Felicia Simion**
Born in Craiova, Romania, this 19-year-old is a student at Bucharest’s National University of the Arts. She has either won or been a finalist in competitions including Travel Photographer of the Year, Sony’s World Photography Award, and the 2013 Teen Photo Photography Contest at teenagephotographer.com. See more of her work at feliciasimionphotography.com._

A New Approach

Brendon Burton

Brendon Burton, the 19-year-old from Eugene, OR, who created the large, composited group portrait on page 53, also sees teenagers as taking a new approach to photography. “I think a common trait among young photographers is a shared perspective on the world around them, along with a fascination for storytelling and documentation of [our] lives. [We’re] pushing the boundaries of art and how it can be shared by a community,” he says.

Photo sharing sites and apps have also been instrumental in the development and dissemination of his photography, says Burton. Both Flickr and Tumblr have produced large and avid audiences for his work. He wields online resources for distinctly different ends. He uses Flickr and Facebook for showcasing individual pieces, while “Tumblr is a great way to keep a [running] blog of all your work, almost like a photo journal.” Instagram, he says, is invaluable for its utility as a mobile photo platform.

Says Burton: the Internet has made the art community “an even playing field” and presents enormous opportunities for young artists. He believes that success and popularity are based on the merit of their images, and not on who they know, what school they attended, or their access to major media markets.

_**

Brendon Burton**
Now 19, Burton developed an online following in 2011 with a 365-day self-portrait project that was featured in articles at the Huffington Post, PetaPixel, and on MyModernMet.com. He currently resides in Eugene, OR, where he attends the University of Oregon and majors in photography and journalism. Visit his website at www.brendonburton.com._

Taking a Different Path

Max Wolens

Unlike his peers, 18-year-old Max Wolens of North Dallas, TX, could be the exception that proves the rule: While he posts his photography on a personal website, he otherwise makes only limited use of Internet resources. Instead, this young photographer finds almost everything he needs in his St. Mark High School’s photography program.

“I have such strong support for my work from my teacher and classmates, I really haven’t had to rely on the Internet for it,” says the photographer.

Some of Wolen’s strongest images are studio still lifes built around a concept such as an implied cause-and-effect relationship between objects. Like his shot of the umbrella-shaded sunflowers on the facing page, his pictures are deceptively simple, solidly composed, with clean upbeat color palates, and sometimes a delicious streak of humor. The sunflowers belong to his Self-Destruction series, in which, he recalls, “I brainstormed causal relationships between common objects that could be juxtaposed in a way that clearly spelled doom. Plants and their need for sunlight and water immediately came to mind.”

_**

Max Wolens**
An 18-year-old high school senior in North Dallas, TX, Wolens was twice honored as one of Texas’ top ten high school students by the state’s Association of Photography Instructors. He has won more than 40 photography awards, including First Place in Adobe’s Teen Photo International Contest. You can see more of his work on his website, maxwolensphoto.com._

Natural selection

Alex Berryman

Alex Berryman, a 16-year-old A-Level student from Fleet, Hampshire, UK, specializes in wildlife photography and has a closet full of awards to show for it. “I dedicate the vast majority of my spare time in trying to achieve the best images I can and using [them] to share amazing wildlife with others,” says the photographer, who captured the fledgling robin below.

This intense desire to share—if not profit—from his images is something Berryman has in common with many of his generation. One of its hallmarks, Berryman feels, “is [that for us] photography is increasingly seen as a hobby rather than a career aspiration. One reason, I think, is the unpredictability of the industry, [but also] because well-paid areas of photography are seen as so highly competitive.

“Young photographers are also very willing break rules and experiment,” he continues, “which undoubtedly results in unique images.” He cites his unusual series of kingfisher portraits which we hope will soon to be uploaded to his website. In them, he shoots the birds directly from below for strikingly abstract depictions of the creatures that are usually portrayed more realistically. He’s grateful for the ability to share them and for the help he received in the form of tips for photographing kingfishers from—yup—a nature-oriented photo-sharing website.

**_

Alex Berryman_**
This 16-year-old from Fleet, Hampshire, UK, started shooting at age 12, focusing on wildlife, birds, and insects. Among the dozens of photography awards to his credit, he’s most proud of being dubbed Junior Photographer of the Year (2013) by the Zoological Society of London. See more of his wildlife and landscapes at www.alexberrymanphotography.co.uk.

The post Five Under 20: Young Photographers You Should Know appeared first on Popular Photography.

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As Stan Horaczek reported here last week, the newly configured online photo storage service Google Photos is a mash-up of Google+ and Picassa, with a dollop of drastically-enhanced search capabilities thrown in.  We have had some time to use the service and got a guided look at it from Google reps. Here are some things that have stood out so far.

The cloud-based image back-up and organizer offers free unlimited and automated backup of still files up to 16mp in size and video clips up to 1080p.  It accepts larger files, and Google Photos automatically downsizes them to 16mp. (This is a time-saving feature.  Some cloud hosts simply reject larger files, forcing photographers to do the resizing.)  Once they’re uploaded, you can view and edit the files across most of your digital devices.  Delete a file from your smartphone, and you’re given the option of deleting it from all other devices as well.

Yup, Google compresses the uploaded files, but claims there’s no visible difference between uncompressed and compressed images, even at  large magnifications. In 14×17 prints from the compressed files, we saw plenty of detail and no artifacts; color and contrast were weak for our tastes, however.

If you’d like to upload larger, uncompressed files, select Google’s “original” upload option; storage fees will kick in when your collection tops 15 gigabytes, but they will gladly sell you more. The online photo storage service’s image organizing and editing features are standard.  Google offers no tagging, but provides searchable captioning. Cropping, saturation, contrast, exposure, filters, and other editing options are built in.  The Auto option was somewhat underwhelming in the few images that we processed, but it’s not often an auto-fix method impresses us.

Google Photos’ barebones interface can feel overly basic, but offers a number of unusual and welcome features for an online photo storage service. Auto backup works as you would expect, automatically drawing all newly captured images from cameras, memory cards, and linked devices up into the cloud. No internet connection is required for viewing most files. A new twist is auto delete. If Google senses that you haven’t viewed a set of old, but already backed-up images, as memory fills, it will offer to delete them from the device.

After uploading, it can take up to 24 hours for Google to process a set of images, depending on their resolution and number.  When that’s finished, several promising new ways to search, organize and share open up.  You can search by faces, places, and things, for example, with no tagging, id’ing, or even GPS data required.  Touch a portrait, for example, and Google’s sophisticated face recognition algorithms quickly gather pictures of that person.  Google demonstrated a search that combed numerous unrelated images for pictures of a selected person.  Amazingly, face recognition was able to find pictures of that person in ages ranging from infancy through adulthood.

For place recognition, Google Photos relies on geo-tagging, but also on an inventory of thousands of street views from around the world, presumably gathered for Google Maps.  Search for “Madison Square Garden,” for example, and, assuming you’ve shot there, pictures of that structure should populate your screen—very useful if you’re searching for a portrait made there. No prior tagging required, and you can instantly share the collection across about a dozen social media sites.

In addition to faces and places, you can perform searches for things: birds, dogs or food, for example.  You can also go granular by searching for a specific dog or bird species. Eagles, say.  Multiple search terms are also possible. If you’re searching for a portrait of someone astride a horse in Albuquerque, for example, the terms “Albuquerque” and “horse” should find it.  As usual, these capabilities should be taken with a grain of salt.  Searching for a particular face doesn’t mean Google’s technology will find all the pictures of that face or a particular shot you’re looking for.

Google Photos’ platform-and-device-agnostic sharing options are surprisingly creative for a tech-centric company like Google.  (If only the online photo storage service’s bland UI was as creatively conceived.)  Share by simply swiping across a group of pictures.  Then have the app create a link to Google Photos that you can broadcast via email.  Almost any browser will display the linked photos, and if your recipients have the Google Photos app, with permission, they can download the original files, too.

For creatively sharing pictures, Google Photos provides a feature dubbed “Photo Assistant.” It can take a set of selected images and present them as an album, a collage, or a slide show—including video clips—with transitions and background music.  If you’ve photographed a sequence of images, the Photo Assistant can recognize this and group the stills into an animated Gif.

These options are extensively user-editable…and they’re free.  Also to remember:  Despite what’s been reported elsewhere, the site’s TOS don’t allow the tech giant to use or share uploaded photos.

So, with its online photo storage service, Google is hoping to do for cloud storage what it did for search engines and e-mail clients.  Time will tell, but it’s off to an impressive start.

Download the app: iTunes Store or Google Play

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Readers who protest that digital special effects are not your cup of tea, this one is for you. It’s an in-camera project harkening back to the film era, and it doesn’t necessarily require computer time. While Sara K. Byrne, a Portland, OR, wedding pro (www.dylandsara.com), didn’t invent the idea of a double-exposure silhouette, she has certainly mastered this captivating echnique.

ENTER OUR MONTHLY PHOTO CHALLENGE: DOUBLE EXPOSURES

Byrne combines two images in her DSLR. One is a silhouette, in this case a head-and-shoulders portrait; her second, “fill,” image, is a colorful snippet from nature, here a blossoming cherry tree. Her camera’s multiple exposure mode did the grunt work of merging the two frames, automatically filling the second, textured image into the black areas of the silhouette.

Not all digital cameras have this capability. Current models that do include the Canon EOS 5D Mark III, 1D X, and 70D; most Nikon DSLRs; Fujifilm’s X-Pro1 and X100s; and the Olympus OM-D E-M5, among others. With some, combining exposures works only with RAW captures.

Aligning the images is easier, says Byrne, when you work in live view mode. Avoid overexposure, which can flare the outline of your sil­houetted subject, and compose against a pure white background for a perfect fill. And take your time to find the right fill for your double-exposed silhouette—if your camera allows, you don’t need to make the two shots at the same time. Save one to your memory card until you find its complement.

For more tips, watch Byrne’s video.

Step 1

Shoot the sillhouette. Make it against a white sky or a white studio backdrop. When shooting outdoors, a low camera angle can help get a clean white background with no intruding clutter. Byrne recommends shooting about an hour before sunset on sunny days. You can line up the dimmer afternoon light behind your subject and, with proper exposure, produce no flare.

Step 2

Find the background texture. Color helps, and so do line and complementary shapes. As with the silhouette, find a texture that can be captured on white, with a minimum of surrounding clutter.

Step 3

Prepare your camera. When you’ve found the texture to place within the silhouetted figure, you’re ready to make the composite. Dig through your camera’s settings to find the multi-exposure mode. Select it and switch your camera to live view. Find and select the base silhouette on the memory card. It will be displayed on the LCD screen.

Final Step

Line up the images. With the silhouette displayed on your camera’s LCD screen, aim your lens at the textured subject. The texture (i.e., leaves, trees, flowers, bark, or rocks) will appear within the black silhouette. Finesse the texture’s effect by adjusting the camera angle, zoom, and exposure settings. When the textured overlay complements and fits well within the silhouette, fire away. Your camera will automatically merge the two.

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