Light has color.

Most people don’t realize what difference light sources make in photography until they see the results–and then wonder why the picture looks absolutely nothing like what they remember pointing the camera at.

Light of various temperatures is associated with a temperature in Kelvin. For example, a candle is about 1500 K, a standard light bulb about 3400 K, and the flash on your camera about 5600 K. Light from a sunset, for example, is a rich golden yellow. Light from flourescent bulbs actually shows up as purple in some photos! If you really want your subjects to look like people and not refugees from a planet of purple-skinned strangers, you’ll need to keep White Balance in mind.

White Balance is an automatic setting on most digital cameras to account for these adjustments in light sources. Cameras come with a variety of pre-programmed settings. The camera recognizes that if the setting is for flourescent bulbs, then “white” is actually going to look “purple.” It will find an example in the frame that it thinks is supposed to be white, and adjust the spectrum for the picture accordingly. Then the picture will turn out with the colors that people expect to see. Unless your picture has wide areas of just one color, it’s generally safe to let the camera decide the white balance automatically.

But, if your camera didn’t do the white balancing job correctly, then you’ll get purple-people syndrome, and you’ll have to use your photo-editing program to make up for what the camera missed. Most programs have some sort of color balance control, and the majority of them work the same way the camera was supposed to. Select a point in the picture that was supposed to be white, and the computer will then adjust the entire color spectrum of the picture approprately. Presto, no more purple people.

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If you are a sports fan, you know what it means when a team goes into a “rebuilding year”. It is just when the owners or coaches decide its time to train new members and correct bad habits in others. And invariably, what team leadership says when they go into such a time is that they are going “back to basics.”

Sometimes it’s good for us as photographers to go back to basics. And, of course, if you are just getting started in the world of photography and want to learn “the ropes”, the basics are a natural start. But you want the basics of what the professionals know about the craft of photography.

Anybody can take a picture. I attended a wedding reception where the wedding party left a disposable digital camera on each table at the reception for guests to snap photos. Before the evening was over, it was the children who were running around taking pictures of everything from the dirty dishes to their own underwear. These were not photographers and while those pictures will no doubt get a few chuckles, these are not the kind of professional pictures people want for their long-term memories.

Obviously, the cornerstone of the basics of photography is the camera. When you see a camera geek walking around with enough equipment on his neck to launch a space shuttle, you get the impression that cameras are phenomenally complex, more than mere mortals can grasp. But look at the professionals and you see them working with portable, relatively easy to operate cameras. That is because the basics of running a camera come down to aperture and shutter speed.

Now don’t get nervous about fancy terms. Aperture is just a term for how wide your camera lens is open to let in light. And shutter speed is just how long you let the light come in to affect the picture. For getting a shot of a fast moving event, you want a wide aperture to let in a lot of light but a short shutter speed so you capture the event quickly and close the window so the picture is caught before more light hurts the quality.

Photography is really all about light. You can and will get learn a lot about lenses and flash photography and other ways to turn the control over the lighting of a shot to you. So add to your core skills of photography a willingness to never stop learning. The better and more sophisticated you get in your ability to work with the equipment, the more you will learn and the more you will want to learn.

You can get a greater control over these basic controls of the camera such as aperture and shutter speed by learning how to switch from automatic settings to manual settings. The automatic settings of any camera are just there for the general public who are not interested in learning the basics. So they give you some basic settings like landscape, portrait and sports settings. By switching to manual, you can learn what settings work best in different situations.

And that takes us to the most important basic about becoming a great photographer and that is practice. Take some time with your equipment and play with it. Take it to situations and take photos with different aperture and shutter speed settings, in outdoor and indoor settings and different orientations to light. Don’t get upset when some shots don’t work. That’s part of the learning curve.

By learning by doing, you will build your confidence in your work and eventually become a great photographer. But don’t get cocky, there is always more to learn. And that is one of the fun things about photography, isn’t it?

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Photochopping involves using a photo editing program to edit a picture. It’s regarded by many as a visual parody, though some people feel it isn’t much better than copyright infringement. Photochopping is photo fakery, but the goal is humor, and not outright fraud.

In general, the goal of photochopping is to produce a visual joke of some sort. This could involve changing a product cover (like changing the Coca Cola label from “Coke” to “Croak” or inventing Jalapeno flavored baby food jars), adding elements to a picture (like people who weren’t there or items that change the meaning of the picture), or even distorting a familiar image so that it’s recognizable but different.

Since the idea is to change an existing photo, most photochopping projects don’t involve creating anything from scratch. The main focus is on merging existing images or making changes to recognizable ones.

Photochopping isn’t the original name, of course. Originally, it was called “Photoshopping,” but the people who enjoy it have changed the name to avoid receiving angry letters and emails from Adobe. Of course, it’s still pretty easy to find websites that still use the original name.

Several famous (or infamous) images sent around as email jokes originally started out as photochopped images. One, showing a historical supercomputer complete with steering wheel, and another, showing a shark apparently attacking a helicopter, were both good enough to fool quite a few people.

Some websites sponsor photochopping contests. The site sponsor will post an original picture, as well as any rules or restrictions. The entrants are then given a set amount of time to return their submissions, and the prize goes to the best image that stays within the rules. Some sites even take the concept further, with “Tennis” matches, where people take turns making further a series of changes to the picture.

In the past, photo editing was time consuming and tedious. Anything beyond simply lightening or darkening a picture meant hours of painstaking work. Something as simple as painting away a feature involved creating an entirely new picture, with the object being replaced by tiny bits cut out of other parts of the picture. The extensive work involved in, say, painting out one of Stalin’s former colleagues, probably took days.

The world of photo editing today is completely different. Paint programs like Photoshop make it easy to improve the features of a photograph, giving the photographer a bit more leeway with lighting and exposure. Unfortunately, they also make it very easy to change the photo, and present something that wasn’t really there when the picture was taken.

Photojournalists have a responsibility to present facts, not fiction. Editing the picture to correct a color cast is not the same as changing a dull grey sky to a brilliant red sunset. Adding smoke, or multiplying the number of people in a scene, do not make the picture more “dramatic” or “more representative” of what happened–they lie to the viewer, in the same way that putting a celebrity’s head onto another person’s body is a lie.

At what point does the photographer cross the line from “improving” a picture to “improving upon” it? When he adds or subtracts elements that change the message or meaning of the picture. Adding or removing information, even by simply cropping out damage or blurring critical information, is the line that photojournalists must not cross.

Keep these facts in mind when editing photos. If a picture is “artwork,” and not meant to be a scene of reality, then the artist is free to edit as he chooses. But a photojournalist is not an artist, and news photography is not supposed to be art.