If you’re planning to take a photography workshop, it’s critical you find one that’s right for you. Since photography workshops can be expensive, you need to make sure the workshop and your goals are aligned.  Follow this guide to learn steps you can take to get the most from your upcoming photography workshop. You will then gain the skill and experience you need to reach the next level.

Find an Inspiring Instructor

Finding an inspiring instructor is one of the most important parts of choosing a workshop. What inspires one person might not inspire someone else, so only you can decide what path makes sense for your goals. It’s therefore important to speak with the instructor beforehand.

An inspiring instructor will connect with you on a human level and understand what you would like to achieve. For the best results, consider working with an instructor who shares similar passions and long-term goals. An instructor who relates to you and your vision will help you improve your skill and boost your love for photography, so make a call and chat with the instructor.

Ask for References from Past Participants

Not all photography instructors are the same. Thus, it’s a great idea to ask for references.

Some instructors care about their students more than others, and you want to work with someone who values the time they spend with you in the workshop. Seek references to get an idea of how well other students enjoyed past workshops with different instructors.

You want to know whether the instructor gives students singular attention in the workshop and whether the instructor can adjust his or her approach to meet the unique needs of each student. While you are doing due diligence, consider whether other students felt the instructor was down to earth and personable. This is key.

Find a Workshop That Matches Your Skills

Research the workshops you have in mind to see if they match your skills and goals. For example, you don’t want to take an advanced workshop if you are just getting started.

You also want to find a workshop that specializes in the type of photography that appeals to you the most. On the other hand, workshops that offer a general overview of each type are helpful if you have not yet chosen a specialty. If you are already great at making quality images, you might want to investigate workshops that focus on post-processing.

Choosing a Photography Workshop or Photo Trek

Make sure you know the difference between a photography workshop and a photo tour or trek. Workshops focus on teaching you everything you need to know about photography and how it works, and they include lectures and coursework. A photography tour/ trek provides some information, but its focus is on giving you the opportunity to make great photographs of different locations by putting you in the right place at the right time.

Learn and Travel with Steinberg Photography

Have you ever considered honing your skills with a photography workshop? Now is a great time to go with professional photographers Jim and Lori Steinberg of Steinberg Photography. We offer numerous exciting workshops and tours that are great for photographers of all skill levels.

Thanks for reading!

Nighttime photography affords you a chance to capture stunning images quite different from your daytime options. The moon, the stars and the northern lights are just a few options. If you want to explore the cosmos with your camera, here are five ways to get started:

1. Choose a Subject

   This can be challenging. It’s hard to find things to photograph in the dark. Camera settings are different at night, too. It’s best to select a subject before you start and choose the place where you want to photograph it.

2. Experiment with Moonlight

   If you want to photograph the moon, you’ll have to consider its phases. Every phase will give you different lighting potentials, and all moon phases are equally photogenic. Full moons brighten the sky. They give you fewer dark shadows and a brilliantly lit landscape. To track the moon’s phases, check out an app called The Photographer’s Ephemeris. It can help you to plan where you want the moon to appear in your photos.

3. Select a Location

   By familiarizing yourself with a location during daylight, you’ll have a better grip on what you want to photograph after dark. Daytime location scouting will also save you the trouble of being unable to see your surroundings after nightfall.

   When you choose a location in advance, you’ll have a better chance of creating the right composition. You can augment your photograph by combining it with other elements like trees, architecture, mountains, a waterfall or a body of water.

4. Use a Tripod

   A tripod is a must to stabilize your camera and help you to create sharper and brighter images. If for some reason you cannot use a tripod, try placing the camera on a flat surface and use your timer or bulb setting, or better yet a remote release to keep the camera steady while you’re making your photo.

   Keeping the camera from moving is an essential part of nighttime photography. The tiniest movement can throw the image off. Even pressing the shutter button can move the camera slightly. Adding a remote trigger for the shutter button can keep your image from being disturbed, and if you have mirror lock-up, use that as well.

5. Increase Your ISO

   ISO gauges the sensitivity of the image sensor. The lower the number, the less sensitive your camera will be to light and the finer the grain in the image. A higher ISO lets you use a faster shutter speed, allowing the camera sensor to take in more light and that helps to freeze movement.

To capture distinctive nighttime photos, slower shutter speeds or longer exposures may be necessary. However, longer exposures might not compliment the images you’re photographing. In that case, you’ll have to increase the ISO setting to help you shoot faster in lower light.

Raising the ISO to 3200 or 6400 will give you a finer image and a brighter exposure with a shorter shutter speed. However, the higher your ISO, the more digital noise is created. For evening photos, try to find a slightly slower shutter speed.

Shoot for a setting between 10 seconds to 4 hours and a medium ISO of between 1000 and 3200 depending on the effect you wish to capture. Working with meteors or the Milky Way will require a higher ISO and shutter times of between 7-30 seconds depending on much star movement you are willing to tolerate. Shooting the moon will require even shorter times, while star trails can take hours.

Bonus tip: While scouting your location try to find a flat place so when you come back in the evening you can bring a chair to set up for some comfort and relaxation during your shooting session. And speaking of comfort and relaxation, beverages are always welcome during a long evening of shooting. Additionally, bring a flashlight and comfortable clothes. In northern climes that means some warmer clothing and during the summer months, plenty of covering and bug juice to keep the evening bugs away.

Learn and Travel with Steinberg Photography

Now that you’ve learned about nighttime photography, you’re ready to get out there and create somewomderful pictures! Have you ever considered honing your skills on a photography adventure? Now is a great time to go with professional photographers Jim and Lori Steinberg of Steinberg photography. We offer numerous exciting workshops and tours that are great for photographers of all skill levels.
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Smartphone cameras are turning everyone into a photographer. Learning about the photography features of your smartphone will help you to use your device to best advantage. Here are 10 ways to make your photos look professional:

1. Keep it Clean

Ensure that your camera lens is clean before you start to snap. Clean the lens with a soft cloth to prevent scratches.

2. Learn More About Framing

If you’re not sure how to frame a photo, your camera can help. Choosing “Grid” or “Grid Lines” in the camera app will create an overlay that will help you to compose your image. It will keep your shot parallel with any vertical or horizontal lines. It will also help to keep unwanted objects out of your photo.

3. Rethink Digital Zoom

Zooming in to capture a distant subject before taking a photo will give you grainy, cropped and resized images. The photo will also be affected by your hand movements. Zooming in can reduce resolution to the point where the final image looks nothing like the real thing. Avoid digital zoom. Use your camera’s telephoto lens if it has one.

4. Scope Out the Lighting

Employing the flash of an LED light won’t enhance your photo. It will give it a harsh quality. Instead, consider sunlight, indoor lighting, candlelight, moonlight or city lights after dark. Even the flashlight of another smartphone will usually deliver better results.

5. Beware of Cloud Storage

Although cloud storage allows you to snap away without overloading your phone, there’s a downside. Not all services preserve the resolution of your images, and you might be charged a fee if you store a lot of photos. Keeping photos in their proper format by paying for a premium service can be a worthwhile investment.

6. Use a Tripod

Tripods can prevent blurry images and off-kilter photos. Tripods are unmatched for time-lapse photography, long exposures and photos with low lighting. They come in pocket sizes and work well with any kind of smartphone.

7. Add a Shutter Button

Tapping the button to capture a shot disturbs the image. Shutter buttons eliminate this problem. They also help with night photography and long exposures.

8. Let AI Do It For You

You can instruct your Android phone to take a picture. It’s already listening and eager to help. Instruct your Google Assistant to take a selfie, and Google’s pixel smartphone will capture the perfect image at just the right time.

9. Explore Exposure

Exposure is an important element in a photo that can help you to capture a subject perfectly. To prevent dark shadows, tap the screen to lock focus on the subject. To get silhouettes, tap the sky, and your subject will be underexposed.

10. Experiment With Portrait Mode

Shooting in portrait mode produces a more appealing photo. This is especially true for photos of people. However, you need to have enough light.

Employing these tips can take your smartphone camera photos to a more refined level. If nothing else, you’ll have a good time.
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Learn and Travel with Steinberg Photography

Have you ever considered honing your skills with a photography workshop? Now is a great time to go with professional photographers Jim and Lori Steinberg of Steinberg Photography. We offer numerous exciting workshops and tours that are great for photographers of all skill levels.
Thanks for reading!

In the early 1860s, William Mumler, a young and enterprising Boston engraver that dabbled in photography, claimed to have captured the spirit of a deceased relative while developing a photograph. It unleashed one of the odder epochs in the relatively short history of photography: the age of ghost photography.

Mumler had stumbled into a phenomenal business opportunity, and much of it had to do with timing.

Spiritualism in the 1860s was mainstream. People across the country believed that the deceased could be summoned with séances, mediums and clairvoyants. Mary Todd Lincoln, a prominent spiritualist, was communicating with spirits in the White House.

At the same time, the American Civil War was raging, and grieving relatives of soldiers killed in battle, many of them quite young, were looking for anything that might comfort them. Mumler’s business boomed and soon he was doing nothing from morning to night but taking spirit photographs, as he called them.

But not everyone was happy with his sudden success.

Photography in the 1860s was still quite new, and the number of practitioners was still relatively small. That meant photographers were incredibly competitive. Jealous of Mumler’s success, numerous photographers and investigators visited his studio to investigate his methods and prove, they hoped, that he was a fraud.

Yet they were forced to concede that his results were legitimate. Soon Mumler was providing mail-order service. All you had to do was send him seven dollars and fifty cents and a description of the spirit you wished for him to summon.

Then it all came crashing down.

A passer-by of Mumler’s studio noticed something odd in one of his spirit photographs. The spirit was his wife, who has still alive and who had posed for Mumler years before he’d taken his supernatural turn.

Mumler fled Boston for New York, slipping into relative obscurity to escape prosecution in the later 1860s, though he briefly appeared to fulfil a request for a high-profile client: Mary Todd Lincoln. Mumler’s picture shows an ethereal President Lincoln resting his hands over the shoulders of the seated First Lady.

Learn Landscape Photography from the Pros

Learn the stratagems, ghostly and optherwise, of photography from an award-winning photographer! Join other aspiring photographers on a photo adventure with Jim and Lori Steinberg of Steinberg Photography.

To see where we are headed next, visit our Workshops and Photo Tours page!

Appelsin! Ouistiti! Buncis!

These are just a few ways people around the world say say cheese! to get people to smile for pictures. Of course, those words don’t literally mean “cheese” in Norwegian, French or Indonesian. (It’s orange, marmoset and green beans.)

What matters is that they contain a close unrounded front vowel (/i:/) that’s nearly impossible to say without smiling. Which brings us to this question: When did people start smiling in pictures, and why?

When smiling in pictures was frowned upon

The first pictures were taken in the 1820s, but it wasn’t for 100 years, until the 1920s and 1930s that smiles became the standard expression in photographs. The typical explanation is that long exposure times on early cameras made smiling impractical. It’s a logical explanation, but there’s not actually much evidence to back it up.

In the earliest photographs, long exposure time certainly was the explanation. Photographers told their subjects to get comfortable and not move for up to a minute. But by the 1850s, camera technology had advanced to the point where exposure time was down to a few seconds — certainly long enough to hold a smile.

A few pictures from the period do show people smiling, like this one showing a positively cheesing soldier in the Mexican American War, but they are the exceptions.

Which leaves about 60 years unaccounted for.

This gave rise to the poor dental hygiene theory — that people didn’t smile in pictures because they didn’t want their crooked, mangled or missing teeth captured for eternity in the form of a photograph. Others have argued against this theory, pointing out that because lousy teeth were so common they were hardly something one would have thought to try and conceal.

The most convincing argument is made by Christina Kotchemidova, a professor of culture and communication at Spring Hill College, who wrote an article about the history of smiles in photography. Kodak, she says, the company that revolutionized photography by bringing it to the masses, also revolutionized how people thought they should appear in pictures.

It had a lot to do with Kodak’s advertising. Dating to as early as the 1890s, Kodak ads showed happy people using their cameras while doing fun things. Everyone was smiling in the ads, and people got the idea that that was what you were supposed to do when you were in a picture.

For more photo-history, check out our history of the camera in a flash.

Learn Landscape Photography from the Pros

Learn the tricks of landscape photography from an award-winning photographer! Join other aspiring photographers on a photo adventure with Jim and Lori Steinberg of Steinberg Photography.

To see where we are headed next, visit our Workshops and Photo Tours page!

What is the Rule of Thirds? Picture drawing the lines for a game of tic-tac-toe on your viewfinder. Now your composition is divided into thirds both vertically and horizontally and you have an image divided into threes both vertically and horizontally.

The Rule of Thirds, one of the best known compositional strategies, says that the most visually appealing and engaging pictures are those that have the subject in either the left or right third or especially in one of the “power points,” where the lines intersect.

Imagine drawing a game of tic-tac-toe on the image below. You’ll notice that the two race cars are on two power points: where the bottom and left lines intersect and where the top and right line intersect.

Pictures that follow the Rule of Thirds convey tension and energy. They fulfill our natural desire for order, and provide a sense of balance that allows the eye to wander about the composition with ease.

Pictures with off-center compositions looks far more natural than those where the subject is right in the middle of the frame. Think of it like covering up your work and turning yourself into a fly on the wall.

Placing an object in either the left or right third of your composition provides an anchor, a focal point from which the eye can travel through the rest of the picture. Imagine the two pictures below if the tree or telephone poles were in the center of the frame. The image would feel split in half, divided.

It’s not really a rule, you know. The Rule of Thirds is just another tool in your toolbelt, another weapon in your arsenal, that can be used if and when it’s advantageous to do so. And when you forget to follow the Rule of Thirds while you’re shooting, you can always come back to the picture and play with the cropping to position it where you want.

Learn Landscape Photography from the Pros

Learn the tricks of landscape photography from an award-winning photographer! Join other aspiring photographers on a photo adventure with Jim and Lori Steinberg of Steinberg Photography.

To see where we are headed next, check out our Workshops and Photo Tours!