This photo is an illustration of having a shutter speed that's JUST fast enough to prevent image blur.

The key to preventing blurry images to always make sure that your shutter speed is faster than 1/focal length of your lens.

The more you take natural light photo indoors, the shorter the focal length of the lens you should be using.

In this case, I set my focal length at 60mm, which allows me to use a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second or faster. It turned out the final shutter speed WAS faster, but just by a bit: 1/80th of a second.

Getting this shutter speed also required boosting the ISO up to 400, an additional step you must take if your shutter speed isn't fast enough at a lower ISO setting.

I deliberately over-exposed this photo to make a point.

While the white flowers in the foreground are way too bright, take a quick look at the green foliage in the background.

You'll notice that the green areas appear as they should and are not bright as well.

This is an example of the fact that direct sunlight in the middle of the day creates VERY strong contrast. In fact, the contrast from light to dark is so severe that there is NO WAY for you to get both the light and dark areas correctly exposed.

In these instances, you have to make a choice about whether you're going to over-expose the highlights (as I've done here) or under-expose the shadows (this would have made the green leaf in the background darker - almost black).

This photo is an illustration of shallow depth of field.

In this shot you can clearly see that the foreground is out of focus, the background is out of focus, and that there's a band of clarity that cuts through the photo right where the milk carton is located (the primary subject).

Using shallow depth of field is a great technique for isolating your subject from a busy background.

You can create shallow depth of field in of of three ways: use a wide aperture setting on your lens, use the telephoto setting of your lens, or get right up close to your subject (this image uses BOTH a telephoto lens as well as a wide aperture).

Sometimes you've got to work fast.

As I was getting home from work one day, I noticed that the light on these posts in our front yard was especially nice - the setting sun added a warm glow to the wood.

I ran inside, grabbed up my camera and took some shots. It's a good thing I did too - just 4 minutes later this light was gone.

I've been terribly sick for quite a long time, which explains the total and utter lack of new images added to this web site.

I've still managed to take a photo a day, but the additional work of uploading them to the site has proven beyond my capacity.

In order to play catch-up, I'm going to post the next set of images with fewer comments than usual so that I can bring the site up-to-date.

With that in mind, here's what I can say about this image: when dealing with fire, use a REALLY fast shutter speed (1/2500th of a second). Fire moves a LOT faster than you might think.