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| © Ed Nuñez |
| SUNRISE, SUNSET: Ed Nuñez captured this sunset near his home in San Francisco from Point Lobos in Carmel, CA, using a tripod-mounted Nikon D200 and a soft-edge graduated neutral-density filter on a Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 lens. Exposure, 20 sec at f/18, ISO 200. Click photo for more images. |
You can't just learn to take amazing pictures overnight, can you?
Ed Nuñez did. In July 2006, the San Francisco resident bought a Nikon D50, his first DSLR. Now he spends his spare time taking beautifully composed and exposed images.
How did this 37-year-old software engineer and family man get so far so fast?
Read Right
Rather than wasting time making poorly exposed images, Nuñez hit the books before even starting to use his camera. He spent two weeks learning his D50's manual by heart. Next, he read Bryan F. Peterson's Understanding Exposure. "The lessons were easy to practice on my own," Nuñez says.
Peterson (a Pop Photo contributing editor) includes a tutorial that shows how by varying shutter speed you can create many visual effects with a single subject, such as a ferris wheel at night. "I photographed my daughter in motion on a swing set," says Nuñez. "When I saw how she went from sharp at one setting to nearly a ghost in another, it all clicked."
Self-assign
Starting out, it's smart to choose subjects that are easy to shoot. Sunsets (Nuñez's pick) are great. They happen every night; they don't mind being photographed; and you'll get good results even on your first try. They're also good for practice because a small change in exposure can make a radical difference.
Nuñez learned fast that getting a precise exposure of a sunset works only in manual mode, so he taught himself to read the viewfinder's analog exposure scale and to shoot in manual.
Make a Connection
Nuñez soon discovered photo-sharing sites such as Photo.net, but at first he was shy about posting images for critique. When he got up the nerve, he was encouraged by how positive -- and helpful -- many critiques were. And it boosted his confidence to find users saving his images as Favorites.
"I also learned a lot from the photography of others," he says. "Not just from good images, but from comments and critiques." Other helpful sites include luminous-landscape.com, Nature Photographers Network, and, of course, PopPhoto.com.
He also learned to make better exposures using histograms on his camera's LCD. When he wasn't capturing enough shadow detail, he read an online tutorial on "exposing to the right" -- adjusting exposure to move the histogram's highlight curve as far to the right as possible before it falls off the axis and clipping sets in. This preserves shadowy foregrounds in his sunsets, while letting him fix washed-out highlights later with Curves and/or Levels adjustments in Adobe Photoshop.
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