Each of the large sheets of paper shown in the photo below represents a signature of 16 or 24 pages that will be bound into the final, printed version of my new book, Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers. The book is due out in the next few months from O'Reilly, and is being printed in Italy. In the photo,...

OK. I'm going to give the punch line away. I love my new Nikon D300. I love this camera with a passion that rivals that of my feelings for some film cameras in the days of yore like my Leicas, my Nikon FM2, and my large format Deardorf. This is the first digital Single Lens Reflex (dSLR) that I've used...

Recently I needed to photograph flowers with a very specific look for an ongoing project for a client. These were controlled, studio images. While it may seem unusual to photograph flowers in a studio mode, in my experience it's not that different from studio product photography of small objects such as watches and jewellery. Except that, in my opinion, flowers...

O'Reilly authors Mikkel Aaland, Harold Davis, Derrick Story and special guest Rick Smolan will have a panel discussion on digital photography at the SF Apple Store, Wednesday at 4:30.

When a photo is about pattern, the thrill of composition can come from a dissonance in size. Is the subject big or small? What is the sense of scale? In these kinds of photos, that which seems to be big is actually small, or that which appears to be small is actually big. The viewer gets a thrill when the...

In my spring release from O'Reilly Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers, I show that image noise can be used creatively. This material is in the ISO and Noise chapter. For example, the noise in this close-up capture of a tiny Lobelia flower is what makes the photo interesting. View large size. Photoshop Nyet: see my blog entry for backstory...

I sometimes wonder how I end up with images that are elaborate photo composites, having more visually in common with paintings than photographs. These images are born of photographic parents but brought up differently. It is nature versus nurture. In this case, the influence of nurture is so obviously non-photographic that the resulting composites must stand or fall on their...

Forgotten in the mythology of Oakland--the high violent crime rate, and the barrios that gave birth to the Black Panthers--is the fact that this is a thriving city. San Francisco, across the Bay, casts a long shadow. It's hard to compete with a sibling so graceful and talented. It's also hard to overcome Gertrude Stein's pithy epigram about the lack...

I've been researching all sorts of fun photography trivia for my upcoming book, Digital Photography Companion, and one that I though you'd enjoy is this nifty chart that compares Raw, DNG, and Jpeg file sizes on a handful of of DSLRs

As an argument for keeping photos on file, and being prepared to revisit their treatment in the digital darkroom, this image is a good case in point. The original was a wild flower along the lines of a dandelion in a field near Sea Ranch. I photographed it this summer in the early morning, covered with drops from a heavy ocean mist.