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Brightness problems – distracting elements in photographs – Photography podcast #46

June 29, 2008 By 8 Comments

Photography podcast #46 talks about being really careful about NOT including distracting elements in your photographs. The eye naturally wanders toward the bright elements in photographs so being aware of brightness problems, unwanted highlights and other distractions will improve your photography.

Links mentioned in this podcast:
Transcript to photography podcast #1 – being aware of the background
Histograms in digital photography

The 2 images below show how brightness issues and distracting elements can take the viewer’s eye away from the subject. Shot 1 is unmanipulated. Shot 2 has the brighter elements burned in (darkened) very quickly just to illustrate the point. Many thanks to merman from our photography forum for allowing me to use his photograph as a teaching tool.

brightness problem in photographs

brightness problem corrected in photograph


Thanks as always to Cybasumo, Chris, Sergey and De3montecarlo for recent comments and suggestions. We LOVE comments and suggestions so please send more.

You can download this photography podcast directly by clicking the preceding link or listen to it almost immediately with the embedded player below.

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Filed Under: Photographs, Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: , , , , ,

Histograms in digital photography – Photography podcast #41

March 19, 2008 By 3 Comments

Photography podcast #41 offers a primer on histograms in digital photography. A histogram is just a graph showing the distribution of tones in a photograph. We discuss how to ‘read’ histograms and how much attention we should pay to them.


Images courtesy of cambridgeincolour.com

The images above reveal the histograms associated with them. Notice how in the right photograph there is still texture in the white in the dog’s face and in the sand. If the histogram was closer to the right edge we’d lose detail in the dog’s face and start losing detail in the sand.

Photography links mentioned in this podcast:
More in depth histogram explanations:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/histograms1.htm
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/histograms2.htm
HDR Photography

Thanks as always for the comments and suggestions. We LOVE comments and suggestions so please send more.

You can download this photography podcast directly by clicking the preceding link or listen to it almost immediately with the embedded player below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Filed Under: Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: , ,