An accomplished amateur photographer knows you to use light, composition, and technique to be what I refer to in my workshops as a deliberate photographer. However, there are times when even an accomplished photographer can feel that their photos are not inspired. They might just be going through the motions of capturing good technical photos, but they are not seeing the world with their best photographic eye. When you feel you might have lost your photographic mojo, you need to try to find it again somehow. Meanwhile, as a beginner, you love every photo you take, until at sometime you reach a learning plateau and you need to find inspiration to push through to the next level. In this article I give some simple tips to improve.

Today, I was sorting through my gear and putting my travel equipment together based around an Olympus Micro 4/3 camera. I put a Lee Filters ND.9 Hard Grad onto the lens and took a couple of pictures off my balcony as a test. A graduated neutral density filter is a piece of glass that varies in the amount of light it lets in across its surface.

What is Repeating Flash?

Many accessory flashes have a repeating flash mode that can be set on the flash (Speedlight or Speedlite) while it is attached to the camera, or set through a flash controller when the flash is off the camera.

Repeating flash mode causes the flash to fire several times during a single exposure. It is also called strobe lighting. If used in a low ambient light situation, it will have the effect of creating multiple frozen images of a moving subject in the picture. Since flash fires very quickly, we will not see motion blur in the image.

When it comes to surfing photography, I am no Brian Bielmann. I’ve never even been on a surfboard, even though I have lived in San Diego for nearly 20 years.

However, many of us have friends or family who surf and it would be nice to capture a picture of them that doesn’t resemble a dark speck in a vast ocean. With these photographers in mind, I set out to the ocean one morning to see what it takes to capture something acceptable.

I was out at Shelter Island the other day with my friend Patsy. She was trying out her brand new Sony 100-400mm lens and I was along for the ride with just a 28-70mm lens on my camera. I took a couple of half-hearted shots of the San Diego skyline. Seeing that it was very hazy and not having much reach in my lens, I expected I'd just delete the pictures later.

With many cameras, you can achieve a soft-focus look to your images, while still keeping features sharp. This done by taking one out-of-focus image, combined with an in-focus image of the same subject. Although my usual camera is a Nikon, I am sure that this feature is available in many cameras.