General Photography: Expert Guides and Resources

When you photograph a scene with a wide-angle lens, you always get a larger depth of field than you would with a longer focal length. The figure shows an example of a scene photographed with a 24mm lens.There’s a wide variety of lenses out there, each suited for specific tasks. Lenses fall into the following categories: super wide-angle lenses that have a focal length from 10mm to 20mm wide-angle lenses that have a focal length from 20mm to 35mm normal lenses with a focal length of 50mm and that are close to the range of vision of the human eye short telephoto lenses with a focal length from 85mm to105mm long telephoto lenses that have a focal length of 150mm or greater A short focal length captures a wider view of what’s in front of the lens.

Have you ever looked through the photos you shot during a vacation or important family get-together and wished you had better pictures to frame, share online, or use in a photo book? For example, that really cool picture you took of your husband in front of the Eiffel Tower? Not so cool after all. You can’t really see him; he’s way too small in the frame.

Many digital cameras can capture images in the camera raw file format, or just raw. This format stores raw picture data from the image sensor without applying any of the usual post-processing that occurs when you shoot using the JPEG format. Shooting in the raw format offers a number of benefits because you are capturing absolutely all of the data received by your camera's sensor.

Photography is a fun and gratifying hobby that can make you very popular with the people in your pictures — or very unpopular. To get the most of a point-and-shoot camera, digital or not, the first skill to master is locking the focus. You can fine-tune your photography skills so that your photos come out sharp, colorful, and more interesting.

Believe it or not, most of the technical and creative innovation in the photographic industry is coming not from the DSLR household name corporations, but from a mobile phone manufacturer! Your Android smartphone is a brilliant mixture of art and science, and its camera is ready and able to help you capture that next stunning photo op.

When you create a high dynamic range image, you’ll often be given the chance to save it as an HDR file for later use. Whether you save it as an HDR file depends partly on preference and partly on what you plan on doing. Normally, you’ll jump right into tone mapping, save the final low dynamic range result, and never miss not having an HDR file stored on your hard drive.

Uploading photos from a camera to your Windows computer is a simple process, but it helps to understand what’s involved. (This is similar to the process you can use to upload movies from a camcorder — in both cases, check your manual for details.) Here are some highlights: Making the connection: Uploading photos from a digital camera to a computer requires that you connect the camera to a USB port on your computer using a USB cable that typically comes with the camera.