Shooting

To master the art of digital photography, there are some essential terms and concepts you need to know. Here you'll find explanations of the key technologies and photography terminology to help you get the most from your camera and equipment.

If you've ever been snorkeling on a tropical reef, you know how incredibly beautiful and full of life the world is beneath the surface of the ocean. Until recently, if you wanted to take pictures in that environment, you either had to buy extremely expensive and temperamental gear or settle for a single-use film camera with a cheap plastic lens that you bought from the hotel gift shop. For casual vacationers, neither option offered much of a chance to get good pictures. The pro-level setup had potential, but required lots of difficult trial-and-error work, and the disposable camera...well, let's just say they were right to call it disposable.

You're on a dream vacation in Europe, on a walking tour of an old walled city. You've got your camcorder, so naturally you want to tape everything. But will you want to watch everything again?

Though it's easy to believe that a movie is totally made on a location or set, a film actually comes together in the editing room. The shoot produces the raw material needed for the final result, but it's the editor who puts the pieces together into a seamless, interesting package. Yet, no matter how talented the editor, his or her skills mean little if he or she doesn't have enough to work with, and this applies to editing your own videos, too.

There's power in movement. While a sharp action image can be dramatic and beautiful, a blurry photograph that captures the energy of a moment can be equally as stunning. Blur softens the details of an image and, although normally we try to avoid this when creating a shot, it becomes an invaluable tool when interpreting movement.

If you've snorkeled or scuba dived on vacation, you already know about the amazing world that lies beneath the water's surface. The remarkable creatures and seascapes are so stunning that they beg to be captured in photographs. Thankfully, you don't have to be a professional photographer with expensive gear to take dramatic underwater images.

Up until a few years ago, there was no question—you used a still camera for stills and a video camera for motion. Now that boundary has blurred. Many digital still cameras have a Movie mode, and many digital video cameras include a still-photo button. So, when you want to travel light, can one camera do the job of two? As with most things in life, it depends.

To create exciting images at night, a flash is an indispensable tool. Stunning results are possible by simply using a camera's built-in or auxiliary flash unit. Yet there's so much more that you can do with a flash beyond merely turning it on.

Black-and-white images always have held a special place in photography. Although color photographs comprise the majority of the images that are created and printed, a monochromatic print produces a much different reaction than does a color version of the same scene.

One of the challenges we face as photographers is making the subject stand out from its surroundings. An effective way to do this is to use the selective focus technique, which allows us to choose one part of the image to be sharp and in focus while making the rest out of focus. It's the opposite of getting a lot of depth of field. While this technique lets the viewer know what's important in the photo, it's also a way to make interesting compositions that can't be duplicated any other way.