As Yanik puts it, the luminance sliders allow you to adjust the brightness of specific colors in a photo.

Link via Jeremy Hall of FriendFeed. See also: “And Now On The Subject Of Lightroom – What In The World Is Luminance?” by Digital Protalk.

In “Buying Digital SLR Cameras“ TechnoSailor editor Aaron Brazell makes the case for ignoring high-end digital photography equipment until one knows exactly what they need. He also offers a few tips for understanding the basics of exposure.

End of the day, rookie photographers can go and buy top of the line equipment but without a firm understanding of the techniques, it will not help them take great shots.

Aaron is certainly correct about the fact that great photos can be taken with any camera — hit up the Flickr Camera Finder choose any low-end DSLR or point & shoot camera, and take a look at the sample photos that Flickr chooses. You will surely see some amazing work by some very talented photographers no matter which camera you pick.

Diana Pappas is a talented photographer working out of the New York City area. Her images are those of an artist whose eye can see the details present in everyday life that others cannot. After experiencing many of Diana’s photos, one cannot help but wonder how many countless photographs are hiding in the world around them, waiting to be discovered and captured.

Diana’s Photo-A-Day photography mailing list puts a new image in your inbox each day, with each photo available for purchase. A gallery of her photographic work is displayed on her web site, and she is a regular Flickr contributor.

This is a friendly reminder that the Sacramento Neon Photowalk is going down on Friday, October 3^rd. Photowalking.org has more info on the photowalk, as well as a map with points of interest.

photo: *sean

The tips offered in this article range from advice on seeing scenes that would make excellent black & white photos, to knowing what image elements to bring out when process or developing your pictures.

Link via Tamar Weinberg on FriendFeed.

“Photo Backup: An Intro to Data Security” by Brian Auer of Epic Edits Weblog runs through 10 different tutorials about backing up your photos.

Hard drives are prone to failure, so practicing digital photography without a good backup strategy is surely tempting fate. The tutorials mentioned by Brian cover a variety of backup strategies — network backups, DVD backups, and backing up to external hard drives. In general, I would say that you want to have at least two copies of your data, and it is a very good idea to keep a copy in a location other than your home or office in order to prevent theft or damage.

Link via JA Castillo on FriendFeed.

How, then, can we take a good photograph in a low light situation? The optimal settings depend on whether or not the subject is moving. In this article we will prepare to take a picture with no movement, so we are only concerned with getting enough light to the lens. In Part 2, we will try to catch a moving subject, which will shift some of our focus to ISO settings.

In this article from Ritz Camera, we can get a great deal of detailed information on various factors to consider when taking low light photos.

The following photo was taken late at night, looking out of a window onto the street. Unlike the dark photograph, this picture was taken with a 16 second exposure.

Obviously, taking a picture of a moving object, or even a breathing person, is not feasible with such a long exposure, but works very well for a shot like this. For high resolution copies of this photo, click here for full size, or here for wide screen. See you next time with Part 2!