The great weather in Death Valley last week brought out lots of tourists and made getting into dinner a tough proposition. So with an hour to spend before we'd be seated there wasn't enough time to go back and look at images, so my daughter Annie and I decided to have some fun with our flashlights and the old Twenty-mule team Borax wagon out in front of the Furnace Creek Ranch. If you've never done it before there is almost no limit to the fun you can have with a flashlight or two (or your flash units) and just about any subject you can light up...

Okay, so you've remembered to plan out your background, the light is right and your hoped for bird has just landed right in front of you. You wait until the right instant as it glanced at you and the light shines into its eye. Click and you're done. Right? Well not quite. There's something not quite right when you look at the image. You forgot the feet. Sure, it's happened to all of us countless times. And sometimes you can't work around it. But we'll share a few tips that will help...

 On every photo safari the second most common question (just after "what ISO are you using?") is "do you think this image is sharp?" To paraphrase an old saw, "If you have to ask, ..." But seriously, evaluating sharpness is a big part of assessing the quality of your images, so we'll take a closer look at it in this post...