This is Garrett Murray's Maniacal Rage

alexleiphart asked:

What tips do you have for taking beautiful photographs like you do? How do you achieve the perfect sharpness, depth, color, exposure, etc when taking a photo? I own a Canon T3i.

I appreciate the compliment! First and foremost: I shoot everything in raw format. Raw images are like digital negatives and you can edit their settings and attributes with little to no loss of quality. Most memory cards are so fast and large these days that the larger filesize isn’t a big concern. Get a big, fast card and shoot raw.

Exposure is pretty easy with a DSLR because of the built-in light meter. On point-and-shoot cameras, it can be a little harder because sometimes that back screen lies to you a little bit. Most of the time, even with my 5d, I’ll take a photo, look at the result, and take several more. Sometimes, if I’m particularly worried about exposure, I’ll take a few extra pictures on the light and dark side.

Focus is just vigilance. I mostly choose my primary focal point, use the auto focus system to grab initial focus and then adjust if it doesn’t look right. Some cameras have a focus help system where they’ll pop up a magnified version of your shot so you can check focus (the X100, for instance), and if that’s available it’s a great tool.

The second half of this is editing photos. I use Adobe Lightroom 3. It’s a terrific photo catalog manager, and its built-in editing tools are terrific. I modify exposure, black levels, colors, noise, vignetting and more. I often add gradients of light and spot-fix issues. It takes time, but it yields much more polished results.