Photo by wvs – 10mm
Many digital photographers get a little obsessed by the ability that their zoom lenses give them to get in nice and close to their subjects.
While there’s a lot to be said for the power of zoom lenses (in fact many manufacturers are developing cameras with bigger and bigger lenses like the 20x optical zoom on the Olympus SP-570 that was announced this week) photographers who exclusively shoot at the longer focal lengths that their camera and lens offer could be missing out on some wonderful …

For this month’s DPS Writer’s Critique, I thought I’d turn things around.  It has been suggested before that there should be the opportunity for blog readers to not only voice their critique of the monthly photos, but that they should also show the rest of us what they were thinking.  And that’s what we’re going to try this month!
With that concept in mind, here is one of my photos I am releasing under a Creative Commons license.  You are free to take it, play with it, adjust it and, generally …

Butterfly Lighting is one of the most flattering and artistic ways of lighting the face. As it’s name would denote, Butterfly Lighting is created by the way in which you angle the light to fall on the face of your subject. Often used by celebrity photographers, this style of lighting can be achieved by a single off camera light and a reflector.

Image by Kathleen Thomas Photography

Here’s a step by step guide of how to achieve perfect butterfly lighting:
1. Face your subject at 7.8 view: Start by facing your subject directly …

Weekly Assignment
The Economy is on everyone’s mind at the moment, and our forums are no exception. This week we wanted you to show us photos that represented the troubled economy. Our winner this week was bmjesus’s dropping coins. The depth of field in this shot was very effective with a strong focus on the coins, and the movement of the coins was nicely captured. …

I’ve been asked a few times why I’ve decided to use flickr as my image hosting site instead of some of the many other options available to me.  If I’m going to be completely honest, it’s that it was the only one I’d heard of when I got my account back in 2005.
But let’s forget about that for a second, and instead concentrate one …

Image by BrittneyBush

Kitchens – we all have one (or at least should have access to something resembling one) – so lets make our kitchens the focus of this weekends photography challenge.
The task is simple – take the best possible shot that you can in your kitchen.
Let your imagination run wild – you might take a macro shot of something in your kitchen, you might …

Looking around for something to shoot with your camera? Feeling a bit shot-out? This book could be your salvation.
For many, the problem with photography is that we rarely step out of our comfort zone, rarely take risks and all too often shoot the same subjects over and over again.
Lee Frost’s book should fix those glums as he sets out a plan of 50 projects …

Many DPS readers are fans of photography author David duChemin and have bought his previously released ebooks.
As a result I’m sure many readers will be excited to hear that he’s just released another one in the last few days called ‘Chasing the Look: 10 Ways To Improve The Aesthetics of Your Photographs’.
It’s available now on in David’s Bookstore (it’s the top one) for his …

It’s been a while since I last wrote about finding daily photography inspiration on the web through photo blogs.  Since that initial post, a number of other high quality sites have come across my radar and I’d like to share them with you.  This list contains blogs that provide a daily photo and have an RSS/Email feed for easy ingestion.  I personally like them …