Harry Guinness

As you get better at photography, you need to start making deliberate choices about the composition of your images. The rule of thirds just won’t cut it anymore. One of the simplest and most powerful composition techniques ...

Read any good photography tutorial—including all the ones on this site—and you’ll see one bit of advice repeated over and over again: shoot using Aperture Priority mode. So, why do so many professional photographers lov...

When you use your camera in some automatic modes like Program—or one of the semi-manual modes like Aperture Priority or Shutter Speed Priority—you don’t give up total control over everything: you can still control the e...

One of the most common problems photographers face is nailing focus. It’s always annoying when you think you’ve taken a good image on location and then go home to find your subject is slightly blurry. Here’s how to make...

I’m a big fan of film photography, but one problem is that physical photos are hard to share. Everyone uses Instagram or Facebook now. Thankfully, it’s relatively simple—though not necessarily cheap—to digitize film p...

Crushed shadows and blown highlights are two sides of the same coin. When you crush your shadows, you underexpose your image so much that there are large areas of pure black in your image, like in this shot....

The “rule of thirds” is a concept that you’ll find in a lot of Intro to Photography books and guides. The idea is that you imagine a grid that divides your composition into thirds, both vertically and horizontally, like...

Film photography is making a comeback—Kodak has just relaunched Ektachrome, a film they discontinued five years ago—and for a good reason: when everything is digital, going analog is fun. It can also make you a much bette...

There are few things more annoying than getting home after a long day photographing, importing your photos, and then seeing that you didn’t get the photo you wanted. Maybe you overexposed it or missed focus or didn’t nail...

Focusing is easy when you’re using an aperture of f/8 or narrower: most things in the scene will be pretty much in focus. When you start using wide apertures like f/2.8, f/1.8, or even f/1.2, however, you’ll start to miss...

Back button focus is just what it sounds like. Instead of using a half-press of the shutter button to activate autofocus, you hold down a dedicated button on the back of your camera instead. When you let go, the focus stays ...

Here at How-To Geek we usually recommend you shoot RAW format images instead of JPEGs because you capture a lot more information about whatever scene you’re shooting. Let’s look at how to make the most of the RAW for...

DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have a lot of buttons. If you’re just starting to get the hang of manually controlling your camera, you’re probably wondering what all the—seemingly non-essential—ones do. Let’s take a l...

Optical image stabilization—also known as IS, OIS, or VR—is built into some lenses and cameras. It lets you take photos at slower shutter speeds than you ordinarily could. There are, however, some situations when you sho...

One decision that a lot of improving photographers face when it’s time to buy or upgrade their DSLR or mirrorless camera is whether they should buy a new crop sensor camera or an older, second-hand full frame camera. There ...

Windows might seem clear when you look through them, but when you take a photo, you’ll notice that the glass has quite a significant effect on how things look. There’ll be reflections, flare, and all sorts of weird stuff...

Camera lenses are more important than the camera they’re attached to, at least in most situations. An entry level DSLR with a great lens will take great photos while a $10,000 professional camera with a terrible lens will t...

Something always looks off about photos where the horizon isn’t straight. It’s possible to fix it in Photoshop (or another image editor like Lightroom, Pixelmator, or Capture One) but it’s better to get it as close as y...

It sucks when, after a day or week taking photographs, you come home, look at your shots, and realize you’ve messed up the exposure. You might be able to fix things with a bit of work in Photoshop, but it’s not a situatio...