Articles - Lighting

It has been a few years since I shot any portraits, and in recent months, the desire to shoot some more portraiture came back to me.  A friend of mine has a very photogenic daughter, Anabelle, who I thought would make a great subject.  In terms of location and conditions, I want to photograph her [ continue reading ]

Here is a still life image I shot back in 2008, but which I only published recently: This was from a series of wine glass images I captured.  At the time I only published one image, but I liked the drama and contrast in this different version of the same subject.  The lighting setup was [ continue reading ]

Photographing guitars is difficult, as I discovered during a frustrating, but ultimately fruitful excercise in photographing one of my guitars today.  Why are guitars difficult to photograph?  Well, they make great subjects, and are rich with beautiful colours, patterns and details; but many of them are highly reflective, which makes lighting them, or capturing them [ continue reading ]

It has been a while since I shot a macro image.  Photo macrography is a form of photography which has traditionally frustrated me, because it is very challenging in terms of depth of field.  My past efforts have produced images where focus is very selective, and with a 180mm macro lens at minimum focus distance, it [ continue reading ]

We have been back from Africa for over two months now, but it has taken a while for Xenedette to get around to working with her images.  With a little help today, Xenedette has made her African wildlife photography début on 500px, with the upload of her first image — a stunning portrait of Makepisi male [ continue reading ]

By day four of our time in Africa, and day three of our safari in the Motswari Private Game Reserve in greater Kruger Park, the motions of waking before 5am, driving in the bushveld for three hours, coming back for breakfast, a rest, lunch and then going out for another game drive from 3:30pm until [ continue reading ]