6. They Look Like Toys
Hero: Vincent Laforet
Haggart: It's called selective focus. Tilt the focal plane for things that are far away and everyone looks like Barbie. Your brain tells you you're looking at dolls, because shallow depth of field is usually associated with objects that are very close. It's a gimmick. But it's also a cool way to see something that's been shot a million times.

Quick Tips

Get Some Taste They say you can't teach it, but we're going to try anyway 1. See the frame as a two-dimensional window. 2. Fill the frame. 3. Use a short lens instead of a telephoto whenever you can. 4. Capture tension—events set in motion. Hucks count, sort of. 5. Look for strong diagonal elements running through your compositions. 6. Avoid tilting your camera off axis to create those elements. 7. People's faces usually make the most interesting pictures. 8. Full-length portraits look natural when shot from the subject's waist height. 9. Honest and natural is better than staged and stylized. 10. Yoga anywhere but in a yoga studio is staged and stylized. The Pro Says … Use a Normal Lens A 50mm lens is "normal" for a 35mm camera. It's referred to as such because it offers a field of view close to what your eyes deliver. The resulting pictures don't offer up any obvious effect and, therefore, run the risk of being, well, normal. Yet most great photographs have been taken with normal lenses. Those pictures are great because they're about something; they have content. No lens, camera, technique, or gadget can replace something extraordinary happening within the borders of the frame. A normal lens is anything but. —Kurt Markus Markus has photographed everything from supermodels to the Grand Canyon using a normal lens.

Hobby: Ordinarily, the plane of focus is parallel to the film (or digital sensor). To alter it, you've got to tilt the lens in relation to the camera. There are several ways to do this. With old lenses mounted on a bellows, you can tilt the lens like the side of an accordion. For modern SLRs, you can buy a tilt/shift lens that allows you to do the same thing, only with greater precision. (Laforet does it this way.) There's also a new aftermarket device called a Lensbaby—essentially a 50mm lens mounted to a bellows that snaps onto your 35mm camera body. Another option is to use the blur tool in Photoshop to fake the out-of-focus part of a frame. But the result tends to look, well, Photoshopped.
Equipment: Lensbaby 3G, $270; lensbabies.com; Canon Tilt Shift TS-E 24mm, $1,150, and Nikon PC-E 24mm, $1,850, both available at adorama.com

7. Moody Lighting
Hero: Jeff Lipsky
Haggart: You don't need any of this crap. If you can wake your friend at 6 a.m., you'll have perfect light for free. Trouble is, if your friend is a lush, or if you're a pro shooting Tom Cruise, you might get only ten minutes at midday. Most outdoor, off-camera lighting techniques arose to address this. You block out the ugly light that's coming down out of the sky with your own beautiful light. In the hands of amateurs, it's usually overdone. But a master can get dark skies and perfect skin tones every time.
Hobby: The high-power battery packs that pros use (like the Profoto Pro-7b) are capable of overwhelming midday sun. To overpower ambient light with a AA-battery-powered flash, you'll have to wait until sunset. Place your subject in front of the brightest part of the sky and put your flash on a stand (better yet, have a friend hold it) at a 45-degree angle to the subject. Sync the flash to your camera with a PC cord, a PocketWizard transceiver, or one of the built-in syncs made by Nikon and Canon. Set your shutter speed at or slower than 1/250 second, which is the maximum sync speed for most flashes. Expose for the sunset rather than your subject. Normally, that would turn anyone standing in front of the sunset into a silhouette. But your flash will correct for this. Move the flash closer or farther until you get the perfect exposure. The first time you nail it, you'll think you're the best photographer in the world.
Equipment: PocketWizard wireless radio slave, $185 per unit (you'll need at least two); pocketwizard.com

8. Antique Vignetting
Hero: Teru Kuwayama
Haggart: The biggest problem with digital photography is that it looks too perfect. Perfect is boring. Vignetting emulates a crappy old camera, which adds a level of authenticity. Teru shoots his magazine assignments with $25 plastic Holga cameras, which don't even have reliable shutter speed. He can do that because he's a master. Since you're not, do what Hobby says.
Hobby: Vignetting happens when the spherical image projected by the lens doesn't evenly cover the rectangular film or sensor. Rather than abruptly stopping, the image simply fades out at the corners. If you want to create this with a modern camera, you can buy a cheap plastic Holga lens and mount it on your $1,000 SLR. You can also do it in Photoshop. Select the rectangular marquee tool. In WINDOWS>OPTIONS, SET FEATHER to 60. Drag a rectangle over the entire photo or just the portion you want to remain clear. Now select INVERSE from the menu bar, then select LAYER>NEW>LAYER. In MODE, select HARD LIGHT, and click the box that says FILL WITH 50% GRAY. Click OK. Select the paint-bucket tool with the color black and an opacity of 30, and click to fill any corner of the frame. Keep filling until it's suitably dark. If you want to darken the exposure of objects in the frame, like, say, clouds in a sky, select SOFT light instead of HARD LIGHT. Equipment: Holgamods Canon Rebel adapted lens, $41; holgamods.com