How-To

As I write this, I'm sitting on my porch swing in the warm night air working on my old iBook with a tolerable amount of processing power but a woefully exhausted battery.

Q) My son will be playing varsity basketball this coming senior year. I started shooting his basketball games a year ago and have gotten some good images. I know they don't want flashes going off under the basket during games. I've seen some photographers use strobes mounted high up, at least 15 or so feet in the air on special tripods. They usually have two set up, one on each corner of the basket and fired wirelessly. What do you call these contraptions? Where can you buy them? What's the best setup for a Canon EOS 5D that I'm thinking of buying?

We've come a long way from sharing photos with a slide projector over muffled yawns. Our digital photos can move from camera to computer to phone to iPod and be shared instantly with practically anyone, anywhere. With all of the options for sharing and displaying images, we've gathered the essential gear you'll need for a variety of sharing situations. Here are some suggestions on how to bring it all together.

Q) When I bump up the ISO setting in my camera, am I changing its sensitivity? If it does, couldn't I just leave it there and adjust my aperture or shutter speed?

Photoshop and most other digital-imaging programs offer you many options for image enhancements. With a few clicks of your mouse, you can change, improve and rescue (to a degree) your images. These programs also can help you create works of art. Here, I'll share with you the several basic Adobe Photoshop/Photoshop Elements image enhancements and adjustments that you can quickly and easily use to improve your images.

I've traveled to some amazing places. But to visit North Korea, which has been largely closed to the outside world for more than 50 years, presented special challenges, particularly as an American. The public face the Democratic People's Republic of Korea chooses to present to the few visitors allowed in, and the unscripted moments glimpsed, are all the more fascinating for the country's closed and defensive stance as a "hermit kingdom," a nickname originating in 19th-century Korea's closed-border policy, which attempted to limit foreign encroachment.

Apple and Adobe have developed new approaches to image processing that strip away deep menus and focus on the typical digital workflow, from importing to output, and placing the tools needed for common digital darkroom work in easy reach.

Portraiture can be one of the most difficult, yet also one of the most rewarding challenges as a photographer. Unlike photographing an inanimate object, when you're shooting a portrait, you first have to put the subject at ease. Whether it's a person or an animal, you'll get the most rewarding photo if you've built a level of trust with the subject.

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Q) Often, I work with transparencies, making  a montage by cutting parts of a photo in Photoshop and mixing them with other shots. Sometimes, I can't see them in other programs such as ACDSee or Bryce. Instead of the picture with the transparency, I see a black square in which it says: "This layered Photoshop file was not saved with a composite image!" I just can't figure out what I did wrong and why it's different from my other transparencies! How can I change these files into "composites"? I'd immensely appreciate your tips to resolve this problem!

This column is about how to use the digital darkroom to transform a straight-out-of-the-camera shot into the image you envisioned when you pressed the shutter-release button. First, I'll share some techniques for working in a high-contrast situation—getting an image to appear how it actually looked to our eyes when we initially took the picture. That's mainly my objective when working with image files in Photoshop. Then we'll see how we can bring a fanciful idea to reality to create an out-of-this-world image!

Q) My new lens came with a weird-looking lens shade. When do I use it? I'm told I should use it to avoid flair with the sun. Is that the only time?