It’s 2012 and time is ticking by…

Image by Myxi

This week your photography challenge is to take and share an image on the theme of ‘Time’. The idea came from Karin Schultz on our Facebook Page who suggested ‘timepieces’ but I thought I’d broaden it a little.

Feel free to interpret the theme in any way you like…. a timepiece, a calendar, something that symbolises how time is flying or how it may seem at a standstill. Or perhaps a series of shots in a time-lapse sequence? Anything you like!

Once you’ve selected your ‘Time’ image upload it to your favourite photo sharing site and either share a link to it or – embed it in the comments using the our new tool to do so.

If you tag your

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It finally happened. Recently I became a victim to one of the most heinous errors any digital photographer can make. I left behind all my digital memory cards.

Not just one. I own maybe a dozen. I left them all behind. You see, seven were set aside after a recent trip to Peru until I ensure all the images had been copied from the travel laptop to the network attached storage and then to the desktop. One was sitting beside my Mac for no apparent reason. Another was in the card reader from another late night project the day before. Four others were in their case in a different camera bag (testing bags as often as I do, it seems something always gets left behind).

Long story short: …

Employing long exposure photography techniques is a great way to create an image that makes others go “Wow!”.  If you’re unfamiliar with long exposure photography the major ingredient needed is low light conditions, which will require your camera to expose for longer periods of time. In fact it’s even possible to use filters to reduce the amount of light that comes through your lens so as to produce long exposures even during the brightest times of day.  Long exposures enable photographers to create an abstracted or surreal visual experience as opposed to reproducing a scene as we might see with our naked eye. In this regard long exposures allow you to artistically create something from a subject or scene that might otherwise seem ordinary with more standard photographic techniques.  With that in mind here are 5 tips to transform your …

Being a part of the UNDFIND ONE team, my job was to create the video and stills that would be used for the Kickstarter project.

We had a very tight budget, and I had recently done a behind the scenes video on creating and lighting a unique scene with just Home Depot lights. So, I thought why not do the same thing for the ONE project.

So, in this tutorial, I am going to show you guys exactly how we setup the lighting for this scene to pull off the final shots shown below. The entire budget for the shoot was $1,500, and lighting (including wiring) only cost a total of $265.

Final Result Samples

Samples from the final video – Shot 1080p 30fps on 5D Mark II w/ 100mm @ F/4…

Looking at your background when composing your photo is as important if not more important than looking at your subject. Photographers have a knack for visually filtering out everything but their primary focus when taking a photo. While this is great at times it also is a detriment in that unwanted background elements are only seen after the fact. This can prove to be frustrating as a photographer and jarring as a viewer. Below are 5 ways to think about backgrounds so as to improve your photography.

1.  Visual Distractions

One question that you can ask yourself that will allow you to capture a substantially larger number of “keeper” photos is, “What is around my subject that people will see?”.  Asking this question as you compose your image will allow you to take note of distracting elements that might otherwise go ignored. …