You are here: Home / Archives for Tips and Techniques / General Photography Tips

Handholding: Making Sense of the 1/f rule

August 10, 2009 By 5 Comments

Polar Bear Walking. Without familiarity with the 1/f rule and how to use it, this 300mm shot would have been a blur.

Polar Bear Walking. Without familiarity with the 1/f rule and how to use it, this dusky 300mm shot would have been a blur.

I got some questions over the weekend about the details of the  1/f rule and I thought I’d share some of my answers with you. It is a simple formula which allows photographers to roughly estimate how fast a shutter speed they’ll need to prevent camera motion from blurring an image.

The “1/f rule”  simply says that the longest shutter speed you can handhold a 35mm camera, with careful technique but without a tripod or other support, without getting blur from camera motion is about one second divided by the focal length of the lens (in millimeters). For a 100mm lens, the rule suggests that you’d have a shot at getting a sharp handheld shot at 1/100 of a second (or a 1/1000), but not a 1/10, or 1/50. This is fairly intuitive. Telephoto lenses magnify more, magnify motion more, than wide-angle lenses, and so you need a proportionally faster shutter speed to get a sharp image with the longer lens.

The rule is not  particularly  precise, though, and it is helpful to keep a few caveats in mind.   [Read more...]

Filed Under: General Photography Tips, Tips and Techniques Tagged With: , ,

The Tuesday Composition: Sometimes Centering Does Work

August 4, 2009 By 2 Comments

Badwater Reflections

Badwater Reflections

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

As I’ve said before (and will keep saying), these photographic “rules” we talk about are more like dozens of tools in a large toolbox, and the vast majority of your images will only use a small subset of those tools. In fact, often there are very good reasons to do precisely the opposite of whatever one of these guidelines might seem to suggest, sometimes the rules themselves are contradictory. Today’s column is a case in point. Last week I explored a number of reasons you’d usually be better off not centering things vertically or horizontally in your images. This week, I’m going to mention some exceptions, but those exceptions are no more hard-and-fast as the original “rule” was. As such, I hope that you’ll not only get some ideas about why images might work well centered, but also that you’ll get a little better idea of what I mean by the “toolbox” metaphor. [Read more...]

Filed Under: General Photography Tips, Nature Photography, Random Thoughts, The Tuesday Composition Tagged With: , ,

Rules for Good Photography

July 30, 2009 By 6 Comments

I think now, more than ever, it’s hard to tell what makes a “good picture.”

Photography, like all art, is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, etc, etc. And with Photoshop becoming such an integral part of the work process, it’s getting to the point where the old “rules” for good photography are being tossed out the window. I think that’s just fine, and I’ll tell you why. [Read more...]

Filed Under: General Photography Tips, Photojournalism, Portraits and People Photography, Wedding Photography Tagged With: ,