iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual

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Apple used to have a cute slogan for iPhoto: "Shoot like Ansel; organize like Martha." Today, of course, that slogan would never fly—and the reference to Martha Stewart is only half the problem.

The truth is, iPhoto doesn't help you shoot like Ansel Adams, either. In fact, it does absolutely nothing for your photography skills.

But this book will. The first three chapters cover both the basics and the secrets that the pros use to take consistently good photographs. After all, if you're going to the trouble of mastering a new program, then you should be rewarded with stunning results. Or, put another way: Beautiful pictures in, beautiful pictures out.

When you use a film camera, your pictures are "memorized" by billions of silver halide crystals suspended on celluloid. Most digital cameras, on the other hand, store your pictures on a memory card.

It's a special kind of memory: flash memory. Unlike the RAM in your Macintosh, the contents of flash memory survive even when the machine is turned off. You can erase and reuse a digital camera's memory card over and over again—a key to the great economy of digital photography.

At this millisecond of technology time, most digital cameras are slightly slower than film cameras in almost every regard. Generally speaking, they're slower to turn on, slower to autofocus, and slower to recover from one shot before they're ready to take another.

Once you've captured a picture, however, digital cameras provide almost nothing but advantages over film.

You can view a miniature version of the photo on the camera's built-in screen. If there's something about the picture that bothers you—like the telephone pole growing out of your best friend's head—you can simply delete it and try again. Once the shooting session is over, you leave knowing that nothing but good photos are on your camera. By contrast, with traditional film photography, you have no real idea how your pictures turned out until you open that sealed drugstore envelope and flip through the prints. More often than not, there are one or two pictures that you really like, and the rest are wasted money.

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When you use a film camera, your pictures are "memorized" by billions of silver halide crystals suspended on celluloid. Most digital cameras, on the other hand, store your pictures on a memory card.

It's a special kind of memory: flash memory. Unlike the RAM in your Macintosh, the contents of flash memory survive even when the machine is turned off. You can erase and reuse a digital camera's memory card over and over again—a key to the great economy of digital photography.

At this millisecond of technology time, most digital cameras are slightly slower than film cameras in almost every regard. Generally speaking, they're slower to turn on, slower to autofocus, and slower to recover from one shot before they're ready to take another.

Once you've captured a picture, however, digital cameras provide almost nothing but advantages over film.

You can view a miniature version of the photo on the camera's built-in screen. If there's something about the picture that bothers you—like the telephone pole growing out of your best friend's head—you can simply delete it and try again. Once the shooting session is over, you leave knowing that nothing but good photos are on your camera. By contrast, with traditional film photography, you have no real idea how your pictures turned out until you open that sealed drugstore envelope and flip through the prints. More often than not, there are one or two pictures that you really like, and the rest are wasted money.

Instant feedback becomes a real benefit when you're under pressure to deliver excellent photographs. Imagine the hapless photographer who, having offered to shoot candid photos during a friend's wedding reception, later opens the envelope of prints and discovers that the flash had malfunctioned all evening, resulting in three rolls of shadowy figures in a darkened hotel ballroom. A digital camera would have alerted the photographer to the problem immediately.

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Citizens of the world bought 96 million digital cameras in 2005, and their popularity shows no signs of stopping. Already, digital cameras outsell film cameras—a shift of culture-jarring proportions.

The major players in this market are Sony, Olympus, Nikon, HP, Kodak, and Canon. They're not alone, however. Every company ever associated with electronics or cameras—Panasonic, Casio, Leica, and so on—also has a finger in the pie. Each company offers a variety of models and a wide range of prices, which compete fiercely for your dollars. Some of these companies release new models every six to twelve months. And, exactly as in other high-tech industries, each generation offers better features, improved resolution, and lower prices.

If you're in the market for a new digital camera, the rest of this chapter is for you. It's dedicated to helping you find that diamond in the rough: the camera with the features you need at a price you can afford.

Don't worry about the different marketing categories for cameras: entry level, consumer, prosumer, pro, whatever. Just read about the features available in the following pages—presented here roughly in order of importance—and consider how much they're worth to you.

The first number you probably see in the description of a digital camera is the number of megapixels it offers.

A pixel (short for picture element) is one tiny colored dot, one of the thousands or millions that compose a single digital photograph. You can't escape learning this term, since pixels are everything in computer graphics.

You need at least one million pixels—that is, one megapixel—for something as simple as a 4 x 6 inch print. Thus the shorthand: Instead of saying that your camera has 4,100,000 pixels, you'd say that it's a 4.1-megapixel camera.

What you're describing is its resolution. For instance, a 5-megapixel camera has better resolution than a 3-megapixel camera. (It also costs more.)

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If your eyes are bleeding from the technical underbrush of Chapter 1—bells, whistles, megabytes—switch on your right brain. This chapter has little to do with electronics and everything to do with the more artful side of photography: composition.

What follows are four tips that photographers have been using for years to create good pictures regardless of the camera type. These time-honored secrets do wonderful things for digital imaging too. Good composition is just as important with a $199 digicam as it is with a $3,000 pro digital SLR—and just as enjoyable.

This chapter offers suggestions that will immediately improve your pictures. But first, a few words about composition itself.

Composition is the arrangement of your picture, the interplay between foreground and background, the way the subject fills the frame, the way the parts of the picture relate to each other, and so on.

Will the shot be clearer, better, or more interesting if you move closer? What about walking around to the other side of the action, or zooming in slightly, or letting tall grass fill the foreground? Would the picture be more interesting if it were framed by horizontal, vertical, or diagonal structures (such as branches, pillars, or a road stretching away)? All of this floats through a veteran photographer's head before the shutter button clicks.

It's easy to think, "Hey, it's a picture, not a painting—I have to shoot what's there." However, the fact is that photography is every bit as creative as painting. You have more control over the composition than you realize.

If the primary thrust of your photographic ambition is to take casual vacation pictures, some of the following suggestions for professional composition may strike you as overkill.

But read them anyway. If you let some of these tips rub off on you, you'll be able to apply them even in everyday snapshot situations. There's no law against casual vacation pictures being

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Composition is the arrangement of your picture, the interplay between foreground and background, the way the subject fills the frame, the way the parts of the picture relate to each other, and so on.

Will the shot be clearer, better, or more interesting if you move closer? What about walking around to the other side of the action, or zooming in slightly, or letting tall grass fill the foreground? Would the picture be more interesting if it were framed by horizontal, vertical, or diagonal structures (such as branches, pillars, or a road stretching away)? All of this floats through a veteran photographer's head before the shutter button clicks.

It's easy to think, "Hey, it's a picture, not a painting—I have to shoot what's there." However, the fact is that photography is every bit as creative as painting. You have more control over the composition than you realize.

If the primary thrust of your photographic ambition is to take casual vacation pictures, some of the following suggestions for professional composition may strike you as overkill.

But read them anyway. If you let some of these tips rub off on you, you'll be able to apply them even in everyday snapshot situations. There's no law against casual vacation pictures being good casual vacation pictures.

Most people assume that the center of the frame should contain the most important element of your shot. In fact, 98 percent of all amateur photos feature the subject of the shot in dead center.

Figure 2-1: Top: When shooting a head and shoulder portrait, frame the shot so that her eyes fall on the upper imaginary line a third of the way down the frame.
Bottom: When shooting a landscape, put the horizon on the bottom-third line if you want to emphasize the sky or tall objects like mountains, trees, and buildings. Put the horizon on the upper third line to emphasize what's on the ground, such as the people in the shot.

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There you sit, surveying your boxes of old photos. Snapshots of your family. Snapshots on vacation. Snapshots of tourist attractions. But they're all snapshots.

Then the professional photos in some magazine or newspaper hit you. There's the brilliant close-up of a ladybug on a leaf, with the bushes in the background gently out of focus. There's the amazing shot of the soccer player butting the ball with his head, frozen in action so completely that you can see individual flecks of sweat flying from his hair. There's the incredible shot of the city lights at night, with car taillights drawing colorful firefly tracks across the frame.

You can't help but wonder: "How do they do that? And why can't I do it too?"

Actually, you probably can. Some of these special shots require special gear, but most of them involve nothing more than good technique—and knowing when to invoke which of your camera's special features. With a little practice, you can take pictures just as compelling, colorful, and intimate as the shots you see in the magazines.

This chapter is dedicated to laying bare the secrets of professional photographers. May you never take another dull snapshot.

Everybody's seen those incredible high-speed action photos of athletes frozen in mid-leap. Without these shots (and the swimsuit photos), Sports Illustrated would be no thicker than a pamphlet.

Through a combination of careful positioning, focusing, lighting, and shutter-speed adjustments, this kind of photo is within your reach. As a handy bonus, mastering the frozen-action sports picture also means you've mastered frozen-action water splashes, frozen-action bird-in-flight shots, and frozen-action kid moments.

Don't get frustrated if, despite learning all of the following techniques, many of your pictures don't come out well. Sports photography produces lots of waste. Pros shoot dozens, sometimes hundreds, of frames just to get one good picture.

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Everybody's seen those incredible high-speed action photos of athletes frozen in mid-leap. Without these shots (and the swimsuit photos), Sports Illustrated would be no thicker than a pamphlet.

Through a combination of careful positioning, focusing, lighting, and shutter-speed adjustments, this kind of photo is within your reach. As a handy bonus, mastering the frozen-action sports picture also means you've mastered frozen-action water splashes, frozen-action bird-in-flight shots, and frozen-action kid moments.

Don't get frustrated if, despite learning all of the following techniques, many of your pictures don't come out well. Sports photography produces lots of waste. Pros shoot dozens, sometimes hundreds, of frames just to get one good picture.

In short, a very low good-to-bad ratio is par for the course in this kind of shooting. But what the heck? It isn't costing you anything, and one great shot can make the entire effort worthwhile.

If your digital camera has a zoom lens, it's probably a 3X zoom, meaning that it can magnify the scene three times. Unfortunately, if you're in the stands at the football game, hoping for action shots of an individual player, 3X is not powerful enough. What you really need is one of those enormous, bazooka-like telephoto lenses that protrude three feet in front of the camera (see Figure 3-1).

Figure 3-1: If action photography is going to be a regular part of your shooting, consider a digital camera with an 8X zoom or greater. Better yet, look into digital SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras, which can accommodate a telephoto lens. This shot, for example, was captured with a 200mm lens on a digital SLR.

But that doesn't mean you can't still capture good shots. Find a position on the sidelines that puts you as close to the action as possible. Zoom in with your camera and then use the trick shown in Figure 3-2.

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You may have noticed that in most professional photo portraits, the background is softly out of focus. Unless you have the cheapest camera on the planet, you can create a similar great-looking effect yourself.

In photographic terms, a shot with a soft-focus background is said to have a shallow depth of field. The term " depth of field" refers to how much of the picture is in focus. When you're photographing your family in front of the Great Wall of China, you'll probably want a deep depth of field, so that both the people and the background remain in focus. But in typical headshot-type portraits, you'll want a shallow depth of field—and a blurry background. Figure 3-5 should make this point clearer.

So how do you control the depth of field? Here are a few ways.

It might not seem logical that you'd want to use your camera's zoom lens (if it has one) for a portrait. After all, you can get as close as you want to the subject just by walking.

But thanks to a quirk of optics, zooming in helps create a shallow depth of field, which is just what you want for portraits.

The farther away your model is from the background, the softer the background will appear. If you choose an ivy-covered wall as your backdrop, for example, position your subject 10, 20, or 30 feet away from the wall—the farther, the better.

You may remember that two factors determine how much light fills a shot: how long the shutter remains open (the shutter speed) and how wide it opens (the aperture).

In sports photography, what you care about most is usually the shutter speed. In portrait photography, what you care about most is the aperture setting—because the size of the aperture controls the depth of field. Low-numbered aperture settings like f-2.8 or f-4 are referred to as wide aperture settings by photographers because they let lots of light through the lens. These wide settings also help create soft backgrounds for portraits.

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Cameras love light, that's for sure. And in general, you need the flash for indoor shots.

But not always. Some of the best interior photos use nothing more than light streaming in from a window. Images that use only ambient light without adding flash are called existing light or natural light photos.

This technique isn't right for every situation. But when it's appropriate, existing-light photos have these advantages over flash photography:

More depth. The problem with the flash is that it illuminates only about the first ten feet of the scene. Everything beyond that fades to black.

In existing-light photography, on the other hand, your camera reads the lighting for the entire room. Not only is your primary subject exposed properly, but the surrounding setting is too, giving the picture more depth.
Less harsh. The light in an existing-light photo generally comes from a variety of sources: overhead lights, windows, lamps, and reflections off walls and ceilings. All of this adds up to softer, more balanced light than what you get from the laser beam generated by your built-in flash.
More expressive. Too often, flash pictures produce the "deer in the headlights" look from your subjects—if indeed the close-range flash doesn't whitewash them completely. Existing-light pictures tend to be more natural and expressive, and the people you're shooting are more relaxed when they're not being pelted by bursts of light.

An existing-light indoor portrait has a classic feel, because it's reminiscent of those timeless paintings by great artists like Rembrandt.

In a natural-light portrait, keep the flash turned off (that's why it's called natural light). The camera's shutter will have to remain open for a relatively long interval to admit enough light for a good picture. As a result, you'll need to keep the camera very steady—which often means you'll need a tripod.

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The preceding discussion about blurring the background applies to pictures you take of yourself, too, of course. But there are a few other considerations.

The reason photographic lighting is such a challenge is that you have two different systems operating at once: your eyes and your camera.

Your pupils are super-advanced apertures that constantly adjust to ambient light. Even in extreme conditions, such as when you go from a completely dark theater to the bright lobby, it only takes seconds for your optical system to adjust.

Furthermore, you can look at a scene that contains both deep shadows and super-bright highlights—and see detail in both areas simultaneously. Your eyes, optical nerves, and brain are constantly adjusting to interpret the ever-changing landscape around you.

Too bad your camera can't do the same.

Whereas your eyes can pick up the entire tonal range of a scene (the shades from brightest white to darkest black), a camera can pick up detail in only a slice of it. For example, if you're shooting a bright sky filled with clouds and trees casting deep shadows on meadow grass, you have a decision to make. Which parts of this scene are most important to you? The bright sky, the trees, or the deep shadows? On a good day, your camera will be able to record detail in two out of the three.

With practice, you can learn to see the world the way your camera does, to the great benefit of your photos. For example, try setting up a natural-light scene, such as a still life with fruit. Put the camera on a tripod. Study the scene with your eyes, and then photograph it. Compare what the lens records with the image in your head.

Are they the same? Probably not. How are the two images different? Make a few notes about your perceptions as compared to what the camera captured, and then repeat the exercise with a different scene.

When the image in your head begins to match the one on the camera's LCD screen, then you've truly begun to see the world with a photographic eye.

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Children are challenging for all photographers. They're like flash floods: fast, low to the ground, and unpredictable. But with a little patience and perseverance, you can keep up with them and get the shot (Figure 3-9). Here are some tips:

Be prepared. Rule one for capturing great kid pictures is to have your camera handy at all times, charged and with memory-card space to spare. Great kid shots come and go in the blink of an eye. Parents don't have the luxury of keeping their equipment snugly stowed away in a camera bag in the closet.
Get down there. The best kid shots are generally photographed at kid level, and that means getting low. (Flip screens are particularly useful for kid shots, because they let you position the camera down low without actually having to lie on the ground.)
Get close. Your shots will have much more impact if the subject fills the frame, plus you won't have to do as much cropping later in iPhoto.
Prefocus. Shutter lag will make you miss the shot every time. In many cases, you can defeat it by prefocusing—that is, half-pressing the shutter button when the kid's not doing anything special. Keep your finger on the button until the magical smile appears, then press fully to snap the shot.
Burst away. Use your camera's burst mode to fire off several shots in quick succession. Given the fleeting nature of many kids' grins, this trick improves your odds for catching just the right moment.

Figure 3-9: If you want great-looking kid shots, you've got to play on their turf. That means getting down on your hands and knees, or even your tummy.

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Capturing stage performances is difficult even for professional photographers. What makes theater lighting tricky is that the bright main light on the actors is often right in the same frame with a subdued or even darkened background. If you photograph this composition "as is" in automatic mode, then the camera calibrates the exposure, brightening up the image enough to display the dominant dim background. As a result, the spotlighted actors turn into white-hot, irradiated ghosts.

Your built-in flash is useless under these conditions (unless you climb right up onto the stage beside the actors, which is generally frowned upon by the management). The typical range for the camera's flash is about ten feet, after which it's about as useful as a snow-cone machine in Alaska. Turn your flash off at theater performances—because it's annoying to the rest of the audience, because it's worthless, and because it's usually forbidden.

To overcome this challenge, use the other tools built into your camera. If you have a spot meter mode, you have a fighting chance. As noted previously, your camera generally gauges the brightness of the scene by averaging the light across the entire frame—a recipe for disaster when you're shooting the stage.

Spot metering, however, lets you designate a particular spot in the scene whose brightness you want the camera to measure. (You indicate what spot that is by positioning a frame marker that appears in the center of the frame.) Point the spot-metering area at the brightly lit actors. The camera then sets the exposure on them instead of on the vast expanse of the dimly lit set.

Not all cameras have a spot-metering mode. But even basic cameras generally offer some kind of exposure compensation, an overall brightness control. For theater situations, try lowering the exposure to -1 or -1.5, for example. The objective is to darken the entire scene. The background will be too dark, of course, but at least the actors won't be "blown out."

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Water is the mortal enemy of digital cameras. Still, you can buy waterproof enclosures for many camera models, which opens up a whole new world of photographic possibilities.

Sometimes these enclosures are made by the camera manufacturer; for other models, you can often find enclosures for sale at Web sites like www.ikelite.com or www.uwimaging.com.

The good news is that these enclosures protect the camera at depths down to 100 feet, for example, and provide access to the camera's controls. The bad news is that the underwater housing can cost as much as the camera!

When shooting underwater, force the flash to turn on; it's dark down there. You might also want to play with the color balance adjustment to help offset the bluish tint of the water. If your camera has a dial that lets you call up different lighting presets, try the Cloudy setting to warm up the tones.

Oh, and don't try to change the batteries while you're down there.

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Digital cameras are perfect vacation companions. Memory cards are easy to pack, there's no film for airport X-rays to wash out, and when the day is done, you can review all of your images on the camera's LCD screen, on your laptop, or on the hotel room TV.

Shooting on the road presents unique photo opportunities that simply aren't available at home—like museums, fjords, and Cinderella's Castle. Here's how to master those moments and add a little spice to your vacation slideshow.

Digital cameras may be small and compact, but they're often accompanied by just as much accessory junk as film cameras. Here's a pre-trip checklist:

Batteries.The laws of photography dictate that you'll run out of juice at the precise moment the perfect shot appears. If your camera comes with its own proprietary, rechargeable battery, consider buying a second one. Charge both batteries every night, and take them both with you during the day. (Pack the charger, too.)

If your camera accepts AA-type batteries instead, you have much more flexibility. Bring your set of NiMH rechargeables, as described as Section 1.2.4, and their charger. Also pack an emergency set of disposables, like alkaline AAs or Duracell CRV3 lithium disposables, if your camera accepts them.
Memory cards. Nobody ever said,"Oh, I wish I'd bought a smaller memory card." As a rough rule of thumb, figure that you'll wind up keeping 50 shots a day (not including the ones that you delete right off the camera). If you have a 4-megapixel camera, a 128 MB card might be enough for one day of shooting. If you brought a laptop on the trip, you can rush back to the hotel room each night and offload the pictures into iPhoto, freeing up the card for the next day's shooting.

If you don't plan to take the laptop along, buy a much bigger memory card (or several). It's generally cheaper to buy two 256 MB cards than one 512 MB card, but shop around to get the best deal possible (

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Everybody knows what the camera's built-in flash is for, right? It goes off automatically when there's not enough light.

Unfortunately, everybody also knows how ornery and feeble these flashes are. If you're too close to the subject, the flash blows out the picture, turning your best friend into a ghost face that looks like it was photographed during a nuclear test. If you're farther than about eight feet away, the flash is too weak to do anything useful at all.

Figure 3-14: Bright backgrounds often fool your exposure meter. The camera might expose the background properly, but throw your subject into darkness. The solution: Force the flash to fire. (This technique is called a fill flash, and it's represented in your camera's mode options by a single lightning bolt.) It's a terrific way to properly expose both the background and the subject—as long as you're within flash range, of course.

No matter what kind of camera you have, however, you'll take your best pictures when you decide to use the flash, not when the camera decides. Believe it or not, the camera's automatic mode is wrong about half the time.

Outdoor portraits represent a perfect example. If you leave the flash setting on automatic when you shoot outdoors, you can guess what will happen: The camera will conclude that there's plenty of light and won't bother to fire the flash.

The camera has correctly concluded that there's enough light in the entire frame. But it's not smart enough to recognize that the person you're photographing is, in fact, in shadow (Figure 3-14).

The solution in this situation is to force the flash on—a very common trick. Provided you're close enough to the subject, the flash will provide enough fill light to balance the subject's exposure with that of the surrounding background. (If you're using your on-camera flash, stand within about eight feet of the subject so you can get enough flash for a proper exposure.)

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Over the years, you've probably seen plenty of indoor flash pictures that have a pitch-black background and an overexposed, practically nuked subject.

Many factors conspire to produce these stark, unflattering shots, but one of the major contributors is, once again, your camera thinking on its own. You're letting it decide when to turn on the flash and which shutter speed to use.

First of all, you don't always need the flash. Indoor photography offers many opportunities for stunning existing-light portraits and moody interior shots, as described earlier. And when you do have to turn on the flash, you can make certain adjustments to preserve the ambiance of the room so that your background doesn't fall into a black hole.

For years now, camera manufacturers have been inflicting red-eye reduction mode on their customers. It's a series of bright, strobing flashes that's not only annoying to the people you're photographing, but it doesn't even work.

What causes red-eye? In a dimly lit room, the subject's pupil dilates, revealing more of the retina. On cameras where the flash is close to the camera lens (as it almost always is), the light from the flash shines through the dilated pupil, bounces off the retina, and reflects as a red circle directly back into the lens. (The same thing happens to animals, too, except that the color is sometimes green instead of red.)

The solution is to move the flash away from the camera lens. That way, the reflection from the retina doesn't bounce directly back at the camera. But on a camera that fits in your pocket, it's a little tough to achieve much separation of flash and lens.

Since camera makers couldn't move the flash away, they went to Plan B: firing the flash just before the shutter snaps, in theory contracting the subjects' pupils, thereby revealing less retina. Alas, it doesn't work very well, and you may wind up with red-eye anyway.

You have three ways out of red-eye. If you can turn up the lights, do it. If you have that rare camera that accepts an external, detachable flash, use it. And if none of that works, remember that iPhoto has its own red-eye-removal tool (Section 6.7).

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Twilight is a magic time for photographers. The setting sun bathes the landscape in a warm glow, providing a beautiful backdrop for portraits. This is an ideal time to shoot any type of shot.

First, you'll need a tripod or some other means to steady the camera. There's far less light during this time of day, and therefore the shutter slows down considerably.

Now inspect your camera's flash options. Look for an option called either Slow-synchro or Nighttime—a setting that synchronizes your flash with the very slow shutter. Look for a "stars and mountain" or "stars and person" icon.

Now position your model in front of the most beautiful part of the landscape and take the picture.

When you push the button, the camera opens the shutter long enough to compensate for the dim twilight lighting, capturing all of the rich, saturated colors. The flash, meanwhile, throttles down, emitting just enough light to illuminate the subject from the front.

The result can be an incredibly striking image that will make your travel pictures the talk of the office. It's a great technique when shooting somebody standing in front of illuminated monuments and buildings at night, sunsets over the ocean, and festive nighttime lighting.

If your subject is rendered too bright (overexposed by the flash), move back a few feet, zoom in, and try again. Conversely, if your subject is too dark (underexposed by the flash), move in a couple of feet.

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Unlike portraiture, where you have to arrange the lights and the models, landscape photography demands a different discipline: patience. Nature calls the shots here. Your job is to be prepared and in position.

Photographers generally covet the first and last two hours of the day for shooting (which half explains why they're always getting up at five in the morning). The lower angle of the sun and the slightly denser atmosphere create rich, saturated tones, as well as what photographers call sweet light.

It's a far cry from the midday sun, which creates much harsher shadows and much more severe highlights. Landscape shooting is more difficult when the sun is high overhead on a bright, cloudless day.

Ansel Adams, the most famous American landscape photographer, looked for scenes in sweet light that had alternating light and dark areas. As you view one of these pictures from the bottom of the frame to the top, you might see light falling on the foreground, then a shadow cast by a tree, then a pool of light behind the tree, followed by more shadows from a hill, and finally an illuminated sky at the top of the composition.

A lighting situation like this creates more depth in your pictures (and, yes, lets you "shoot like Ansel").

Sometimes you can lend nature a helping hand by turning on your flash to illuminate an object in the immediate foreground. Remember, just because your eyes can see detail in the dark area at the bottom of the frame doesn't mean that your camera can. Look for an interesting object—a bush, perhaps. Move the camera close to it and zoom out. Then turn on the flash and shoot. The effect can be stunning.

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Your camera usually does a good job of exposing the sky during sunset, even in automatic mode. Keep the flash turned off and shoot at will.

Keep an eye on your shutter speed (if your camera shows it). If it goes below 1/30th of a second, you may need a tripod or some other steady surface to prevent camera shake. Activate the self-timer or remote control to avoid jiggling the camera when you press the shutter.

The biggest mistake people make when shooting sunsets has nothing to do with the sky—it's the ground that ruins the shots. Your eyes can make out much more detail in the shadowy ground than your camera will. Therefore, it's not worth trying to split the frame in half, composing it with the sky above and the ground below. The bottom half of your photo will just be a murky black blob in the final image.

Instead, fill your composition with 90 percent sky and 10 percent ground or water. This arrangement may feel funny—at least until you look at your prints and see how much more dynamic they are with this composition.

Many photographers make the mistake of leaving the scene right after the sun dips below the horizon. Hang around for another 10 minutes or so; sometimes there's a truly amazing after-burst of light.

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Weddings dominate special event photography, not to mention being the primary income source for a huge percentage of professional photographers.

If you can shoot an entire wedding, then you're prepared for any other event that comes your way. For example, graduations are just weddings without the reception. Birthday parties are just weddings without the ceremony.

If you're a guest, one critical element of successful photography at a wedding is not interfering with the hired photographer's posed shots. Introduce yourself to the photographer and ask if it's OK to take a couple of shots right after the pro has finished each setup. You'll generally receive permission—and the opportunity to capture the highlights of the day.

As a digital photographer, you can bring a new dimension to the celebration that most pros don't even offer: immediacy. If you like, you can hook up your camera to a TV to play the pictures back while the reception is still going on. Or, thanks to iPhoto, you can have shots on the Web before the pro even gets his film to the lab. Put your favorites together and add a little music; suddenly you have a QuickTime movie for downloading.

In part, your success at shooting a wedding depends on your ability to anticipate the action. If you've been to any weddings recently, you probably know that you can expect classic photo ops like these:

Before the wedding. Bride making final dress adjustments, alone in dress, with mother, with maid of honor, with bridesmaids, and so on. The groom with his best man, with his ushers, with his family.
During the ceremony. The groom waiting at the altar, his parents being seated, the bride's mother being seated, the processional, the bride coming down the aisle, the vows, the ring ceremony, the kiss, the bride and groom coming back down the aisle. Oh, and of course the obligatory adorable shots of the flower girl and ring-bearer boy walking down the aisle looking dazed.

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Most people usually photograph people and places. Every now and then, however, you'll need to photograph things: stuff you plan to sell on eBay, illustrations for a report, your personal belongings for insurance purposes, and so on.

The macro (close-up) mode of your digital camera makes it easy to shoot objects. All you need to do is set up and light your shot; the camera does the rest.

The trick to lighting any object professionally, whether it's a painting or a teapot, is to position two lights, each at a 45-degree angle to the plane of the subject.

At a hardware store, buy a couple of lamps. Sometimes called shop lights, they have clamps and ball joints to lock the lamp at a certain angle.

Buy lamps that accommodate regular lightbulbs, not the high-powered halogen models that melt everything within 50 yards.

Regular 100-watt "soft light" bulbs work fine. While you're at the hardware store, look for some white butcher paper or some other paper that will give you a seamless background at least six feet long and four feet wide. (Camera stores also sell paper backdrops for about $30 a roll.)

Figure 3-17: You don't need to build a home studio to produce great product shots. This picture was created by setting a table next to a north-facing window. A piece of white cardboard was used as a reflector to bounce some light back onto the shadow side of the object.

Now you're ready to set up your temporary photo studio. Slide a table against the wall, then hang your butcher paper about three feet above the table. Tape it to the top surface of the table, making sure that it has a gentle curve as it goes from vertical to horizontal. Place the item that you want to photograph in the center of the table, about a foot in front of the paper curve.

Next, it's time to set up your lights. You can use chair backs to clamp your lights, which should be pointing directly at your subject at a 45-degree angle, about three feet away from the subject, pointing slightly downward.

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Nighttime pictures can be the most spectacular ones in your portfolio. City lights, river lights, sky lights, and even car lights can stand out like bright colors on a black canvas.

Unfortunately, you won't get far in this kind of photography without a tripod. You can practice the following techniques by bracing the camera against a wall—but you'll find the job infinitely easier with a true tripod.

You've seen this shot on postcards and in magazines: neon bands of light streaking across the frame, with a nicely lit bridge or building in the background. The trick to these shots is to keep the shutter open long enough for the cars to pass all the way from one side of the frame to the other (Figure 3-18).

When using film cameras, photographers rely on the camera's B setting, in combination with a cable release (a shutter button on the end of a cord). The B setting (short for bulb) keeps the shutter open for as long as you hold down the release. Many a photographer has stood out in the cold, thumbs pressing down on icy cable releases, softly counting: "One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three…"

A tripod has two parts: the legs and the pan head. The camera attaches to the pan head, and the legs support the head.

You can buy a tripod with any of three pan head types. Friction heads are the simplest, least expensive, and most popular with still photographers. Fluid heads are desirable if you'll also be using your tripod for a camcorder, as they smooth out panning and tilting. (This means you, iMovie fans.) They're more expensive than friction heads, but are well worth the money if you're after a professional look to your footage. Finally, geared heads are big, heavy, expensive, and difficult to use.

The tripod's legs may be made of metal, wood, or composite. Metal is light and inexpensive, but easier to damage by accident (thin metal is easily bent). Wood and composite legs are much more expensive; they're designed for heavier professional broadcast and film equipment. The bottoms of the legs have rubber feet, which is great for use indoors and on hard floors.

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Time-lapse photography is an effective way to depict a subject changing from one state of being to another: a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, the unfurling of a rose bud, and so on. Obviously, the result you want is a movie, not a still picture—but that's just fine with you. You've got a Mac, and the Mac has QuickTime.

The idea is that you'll take a picture at regular intervals—once an hour, for example. At the end of eighteen hours, you'll have eighteen images that you can upload to iPhoto for processing. (You'll also be very tired, but that's another story.)

You'll then be able to use iPhoto's Export to QuickTime command, which turns your still frames into a live-action movie at the frame rate you specify. Chapter 11 details this process.

If you really want to impress your friends with your budding photographic skills, try capturing star trails. Surely you've seen these dramatic shots: one star, located in the center of the frame, remains a point of light, but all the other stars in the universe seem to carve concentric circle segments around it, as though the galaxy were spinning dizzily.

That one fixed star, in case you were wondering, is the North Star. It remains steady as all the other stars seem to travel in a circular path around it, thanks to the rotation of the earth.

Find some place dark with a clean horizon line. If you want the ground in the shot at all, compose the frame so that the sky fills 90 percent of it, and the ground occupies only the bottom 10 percent.

The setup for this shot is the same as for the taillight trails, except that you have to keep the shutter open much longer—at least fifteen seconds for very short trails as in the example here, or (if your camera can handle it) up to fifteen minutes for dramatic star trails. The photo here, showing the Pleiades constellation (sometimes called the Seven Sisters), was captured with a shutter speed of just a few seconds. The stars are already beginning to "trail."

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Movie making probably wasn't what you had in mind when you bought a digital still camera. Even so, most cameras offer this feature, and it can come in handy now and then; life is filled with situations when a little movie captures the moment far better than a photo would.

Movie mode lets you capture QuickTime video, often with sound, and save it to your memory card right alongside your still pictures. Some cameras permit only 30 seconds of video per attempt; others let you keep recording until the memory card is full. Most new cameras these days capture video with frame dimensions of 640 x 480—big enough to fill a TV screen on playback. Once you've transferred the movie to your Mac, you can play it, email it to people, post it on a Web page, or burn it to a DVD.

iPhoto 6 gracefully imports the movies along with the still photos. You can find details on importing and playing them in Section 4.2.7.2; details on editing them are in Chapter 11. (You can use either iMovie or QuickTime Player Pro.)

Just keep these pointers in mind:

Remember your memory. Digital movies, even these low-quality ones, fill up your memory card in seconds. Remember, you're shooting 15 or 30 little pictures per second. This is 512 MB, 1 GB, or 2 GB card territory.
Steady the camera. If you don't have a tripod, put the camera strap around your neck, pull the camera outward so the strap is taut, and only then begin filming. The strap steadies the camera.
Don't try it in the dark. The flash doesn't work for movies, so look for the best lighting possible before composing your shot.
Set up the shot beforehand. Most cameras don't let you zoom or change focus during filming.

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There's an old photographer's saying: the best camera is the one you have with you. The day you're faced with a photo op and your multi-megapixel wonder machine is stashed in your sock drawer at home, you'll be thankful if there's a cameraphone in your pocket—a cellphone with a tiny, built-in lens that takes tiny, built-in pictures.

Of course, cameraphones don't have all of the whiz-bang settings that you've come to adore on your digicam, but you can still take perfectly good shots (see Figure 3-19). Here's a look at the most common cameraphone settings and how they can help you take better pictures.

Picture size. This option gives you the choice between two resolution settings: large and small. (They would be more accurately labeled small and smaller, but that wouldn't fly with the marketing department.) Choose large, which is usually about 640 x 480 pixels or 1.3 megapixels. You can't make a very big print with these images, but they're handy for emailing.
Effects. You may get a menu of oddball settings called effects like sepia, black and white, or even negative, which is perfect for that X-ray look you've been yearning for. Don't bother with the options in this menu; shoot your pictures in living color. You can always add an effect later in iPhoto—with much greater control.

Figure 3-19: Cameraphones are designed for moderately close portraits. Head-and-shoulders compositions usually turn out well. But avoid super-closeups, especially of friends and family. Those wide-angle lenses built into phones (shown at right on a Treo 600) can distort your subject, potentially resulting in estrangement from loved ones. Compose your portraits as shown at left; you'll get the shot and keep your friends.
When all looks well, hold steady and squeeze the shutter button (often the phone's Enter button, shown here on a Sony Ericsson cameraphone).

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