If you live anywhere in North America, write down August 21st, 2017 in your calendar. This is the date of the next solar eclipse, one that is of particular interest to us living in this continent, as everybody will be able to experience it in some capacity regardless of location. The map below, from NASA, shows the swath of the United States in which the eclipse will be total, and what percentage of totality you will see anywhere else (click to see a larger version).

In this short article, I want to give you some ideas on how to prepare to view and photograph the eclipse in a way that is safe for you and your camera.

These days it is possible to take spectacular pictures of the night sky with regular cameras and equipment. For example, I took the above picture with a Canon 60D DSLR and an entry level 8mm fisheye lens (click on the picture to see a larger version). In this article I'll give you a few simple rules you need to follow to maximize the chances of getting breathtaking deep sky photographs.

In this article I'm going to show you how you can make high quality 3D pictures with a Canon DSLR, Magic Lantern and free software. If you have an old pair of cardboard red/blue 3D glasses at hand then put them on to view the image above and that will give you an idea of what you can do with the technique I'll show below. You can click on the image to view a larger version of it.

If you are itching to try your hand at HDR photography but don't know where to start then you came to the right place. In this article I will show you a simple HDR workflow with free software that will get you started. But first things first...

This year I had a very disappointing round of school pictures of my kids, and it isn't the first time. Being both my wife and I into photography a bit, every year we debate whether we should free ourselves from the ritual of buying severely overpriced and not so great portraits of the little ones, but in the end we always give in and do it.

Well, I think this time I had enough.

I did an interesting photographic experiment the other day. Below is the result, read on for details (click on the thumbnail to enlarge):

Lately I have been playing a lot with a little open source tool called Enfuse, which allowed me to obtain the following picture (click to enlarge):