Prima Gallery

1. Low lighting

Lighting is always an issue indoors so use it to your advantage. Choose an area or location in your house that has good natural lighting, enough to light your subject but not too much that will overpower it. Switch off your flash and any other artificial lighting. This low lighting is going to help you get a moody effect with just natural light. An image doesn’t always need to brightly and evenly lit and shadows will only add something extra to the photo. A half lit face adds drama to a portrait shot indoors using just natural light.

2. Abstract art

This is a really an easy photo opportunity and lends itself to macro or close-up photography. What’s great about the home is that there are many items that can be given a new artistic perspective when shot close-up. Choose part of the object, get in really close and see if you can shoot it in such a way that someone would not recognize it for its intended purpose. Most of us have seen those ‘guess what this is’ photos in magazines of an object where readers have to guess what the image actually is. Change your white balance settings for some interesting color casts.

DSLRs are complex pieces of photographic equipment and it is easy to get lost or fail to take full advantage of their capabilities. Looking beyond the user aids such as scene modes in entry level DSLRs, they are still capable of stunning results in the hands of a competent photographer even if they come in designer colors. .

Scene modes appear helpful but hey apply a one size fits all approach to more complex photographic situations and fail to take full advantage of the camera’s capabilities. Presumably, photographers choose DSLRs so they can produce excellent images under all conditions.

To learn how to cope with the complexity and powerful capabilities of your new DSLR try taking small steps. This means taking plenty of photographs of the same things in your neighborhood. This is how professionals try out new equipment and techniques.

Read the Manual

But not all at once. The aim is to read small sections of the manual, only as they are needed. Only read far enough to read the “Getting Started” or “Quick Start Guide” section. This should be enough to start taking photos and having fun with new camera. As the confidence in the camera builds move on to other sections in the user manual, one at a time.

P Mode

The first step is to leave all the menu settings on default so that the camera is in auto everything mode. Then set the mode dial to P and start shooting. This is a basic automatic exposure mode where the camera decides on the exposure settings and is good place to start for the first pictures. In the picture of the Nikon d3000 below, the P mode is grouped by the line on the mode dial with the serious photography modes.

This allows practice with all the other basic operations of taking a digital photograph and using it on the computer and printing it. The P mode is like training wheels on a bicycle, handy when learning, but they do prevent the user from using the device to its full capabilities.

Use The Viewfinder

When photographers use the viewfinder they are holding the cameras properly, minimizing the possibility of camera shake. Live view is largely a marketing gimmick designed to appeal to photographers graduating from cameras lacking a good optical viewfinder. Live view is useful when using a tripod, but for hand held shots use the viewfinder.

Exposure Compensation

This is a good first step in taking control of the DSLR as it allows finer tuning of the camera’s suggested exposure settings. Exposure Compensation is useful when lighting conditions become a bit more complex.

Using the EXIF Data

EXIF data is a marvelous feature of all digital cameras; they keep the shooting notes for photographers. Novice photographers often have no idea what shutter speed or aperture to use. Review the photographs made using the P mode, noting the settings the camera chose, and see the resultant picture. This gives a good starting point for photographers choosing these settings.

Aperture Priority

The most popular exposure mode amongst advanced photographers is Aperture priority, usually indicated by A or Av on the mode dial. Here the photographer sets the lens aperture to suit their Depth of Field needs and the camera decides the appropriate shutter speed.

Shutter Speed Priority

This is for capturing moving subjects, usually T or Tv. The photographer sets the shutter speed to suit the speed of the subject and the camera sets the lens aperture for a good exposure.

ISO

This is the sensitivity of the cameras to light. Higher the sensitivity is good for lower light conditions but image noise increases as the ISO increases. Set it to the lowest value or use the Auto ISO function which only raises it when low light conditions require more cameras sensitivity

Only the Start

DSLRs are incredibly powerful photographic tools and these first steps are long way from complete mastery of the digital camera. The main aim in any long-term project is to break down into small manageable steps. Suite 101 are continually adding more photography Feature Articles for photographers ranging from novice to expert.

Buying a DSLR lens based on brand image ignores the range of quality levels often found within a brands range. Most lens manufactures offer range of quality levels from their premium lenses ignoring cost and convenience in search of optical and mechanical performance.

Then there are the budget class lenses aimed at more occasional photographers who put greater emphasis on price and convenience. This results in smaller, lighter lenses with greater zoom ranges and smaller maximum apertures.

There is a perception of the superiority of camera manufacturer’s lenses over specialist lens manufacturers. Often the specialists offer advantages to DSLR lens buyers in the form of price, smaller size, or better quality. Their budget offerings that compete on price often reinforce the belief that they only offer low quality products. However, many also offer premium interchangeable lenses with quality suitable for professional use.

Manufacturers Clues to Quality

Most but not all manufacturers give a clue where a particular lens sits in their quality hierarchy, these are some indicators of premium lenses;

• Olympus: offer two levels of premium quality High Grade and Super High Grade
• Canon: L series
• Sigma: EX
• Tamron: SP
• Pentax: * and Limited ranges
• Sony: G series and Carl Ziess designed

Nikon is the notable exception but price and specifications are a good guide to differentiate their budget from premium lenses.

Price – You Get What You Pay For.

The quality of lenses differs not only between manufacturers but also within their own lens ranges. This reflects the compromise between quality, convenience, and price.

Sometimes photographers base their lens buying decisions based on poor performance of the budget lens of one brand. They compare the budget lens with the professional image of the cameras manufacturer branded premium lenses and then buy a budget lens from the camera manufacturer. This ignores the spread of quality levels within a manufacturers range. If photographers want professional level quality then they need to pay a professional level price whatever brand of lens they choose.

Lens Specifications

Very often, the names of lenses consist of strings of strange letters and number. Some are reasonably self-explanatory and others require more explanation of what they are and why they could be important in your lens buying decision.

Remember the basic premise of this article is no single factor should be the only consideration in any lens buying decision. These specifications have varying importance to prospective lens buyers depending upon their individual photographic requirements.

APO (Aprochromatic )

This is when the lens elements produce the same amount of refraction on the different wavelengths, or colors, of visible light.

ED,UD, ELD

These letters are different lens manufacturers way of referring to low dispersion glass used in the elements of the lens. This relates to the sharpness of the resultant image.

f/

A number follows this symbol indicating the maximum aperture size of the lens. The smaller the number the larger the aperture and the more light the lens can gather. It is only one number for a prime lens but some zooms have two, for example; f3.5-5.6 indicating the effective aperture becomes smaller as the focal length of the lens increases. Generally, the lower the f number the better the image quality of the lens. Zooms with the same effective aperture over their zoom range are usually better quality lenses.

USM, HSM, SWM

These refer to lenses with inbuilt autofocus motors. They usually operate faster and quieter than lenses where the autofocus system uses the motor in the camera body via a drive shaft.

Weight and Size

Maximizing the performance indicators in premium lenses usually results in larger and heavier lenses. In price conscious consumer grade lenses often the goal is to make them smaller and lighter without sacrificing too much image quality.

With all the galleries sprouting up along H Street NE, the neighborhood may be on its way to becoming Washington's next big arts district, and another addition this weekend will certainly help the area's credibility. G Fine Art, formerly housed along 14th Street, is taking up residence in the up-and-coming neighborhood.

The gallery celebrates its move to Northeast Washington on Saturday with a new exhibition and an opening reception. The work of A.B. Miner goes on display in "Naked," a show that strips down in more ways than one. In one diptych, Miner pulls back the curtain on his creative process, while a massive 12-panel painting shows a year in the life of a post-surgery expanse of skin from a landscape of stitches to a healed, though scarred, chest. Meanwhile the video piece "Fly 08" -- a riff on Yoko Ono's "Fly" -- features the interaction between an insect and a reclining nude figure.

Much of photography’s past is on display at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers Photography Show, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary. But if you are concerned about the future of the medium, there are only a few hints of what might be to come.

Mainly it is a show for collectors of vintage prints. Among the 72 dealers, scores are presenting usual-suspect inventories: Evans, Weston, Arbus and so on. Some, however, have exercised more creativity.

Photology, for one, has a marvelous display of small, sexually provocative Polaroids by a select few, including Helmut Newton, Carlo Mollino, Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe. At Hemphill there is an understatedly poetic series of pictures of old buildings in the South taken in the 1970s with a Kodak Brownie by William Christenberry.

Two galleries present remarkable, though very different, triplets.

Monroe has Eddie Adams’s famous 1968 picture of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a Vietcong suspect in the head, flanked within the same frame by shots in which the prisoner is being escorted by soldiers before his execution and has fallen to the ground after.

Bruce Silverstein has three variations on a subtly surreal 1948 portrait of a preteen girl with strangely bright eyes and curiously dark skin (she’s white). She seems an eerie blend of innocence and witchy experience.

Similarly weird pictures of children by Loretta Lux are at Yossi Milo, but they are in color and slightly distorted digitally. “Marianne,” in a neat powder-blue coat, is lovely if a little spooky, but the strangely solemn, big-eyed twins in polka-dot dresses in another image are scary. They look as if they escaped from Stanley Kubrick’s film “The Shining.”

There is a lot of work in the show that blurs the line between commercial and fine art. Danziger has pictures of the punk goddess Patti Smith by Annie Leibovitz. At PDNB Gallery there are still-life pictures of food by Robyn Stacey. A watermelon with a chunk cut out of it simultaneously calls to mind Baroque-era Spanish Realist painting and illustration for a contemporary gourmet food magazine.

As for the future, Bryce Wolkowitz offers a variety of electronically animated works, including a self-portrait by Shirley Shor that appears on a framed flat screen. Using a program she wrote, Ms. Shor created a composite image in which randomly changing pixels from pictures of herself and about 40 relatives and friends combine into a shimmering, constantly shifting single portrait.

One photographer who definitely has a future is Alex Prager, a young Los Angeleno who makes staged color photographs of women that synthesize the influences of Cindy Sherman, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Douglas Sirk. Her coolly romantic pictures are at Yancey Richardson, and she will be included in a show of new photography at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall.