What the heck is a guide number and why is it important? In essence, a guide number, or flash factor, is a measurement of light output for a given flash at a given film speed. In this article, Contributing Editor James Booth is your guide to the guide number system.

This week, we’ve got a thank you for James Booth’s wonderful Photography Basics series, as well as this month’s inevitable letter from a reader pointing out our lack of basic grammar skills.

What is depth of field? I often wondered this myself. Early in my photo "career," I was often told that I needed to work on my depth of field. I didn’t even know what it was. I was learning all this photography stuff pretty much on my own. Finally, I figured out what the term means. Put simply, depth of field is the range of sharpness from the nearest object to the farthest.

Last week, we ran an article by Contributing and News Editor James Booth entitled "What’s an SLR?" This week, we continue our series of photography basics article by explaining a term some folks have heard of, but not everyone’s familiar with: medium format.

You may have heard the term "SLR" tossed about, or seen it in an article and wondered what it meant. Well, sit back while Contributing Editor James Booth explains what an SLR camera is and why he think an SLR camera is far superior to point-and-shoot models — whether digital or film.

How much do you have invested in your camera lens? Depending on how many you have and what focal length they are, several hundred at the very least, right? You protect the lens with a cap when you’re not using it, don’t you? Sure you do. But what about when you’re using it? What can you do then? You can reach for the sky. Skylight filter, that is.

Do you have one of those old box cameras sitting on your shelf? Maybe you found it in the basement, garage, attic, or thrift shop. It makes a nice little knick-knack doesn’t it? But surely it isn’t worth anything in this day and age? It doesn’t even work, does it? Well, that may not necessarily be so. Wouldn’t you like to find out?

Do you think you need to spend hundreds of dollars on seamless muslin backgrounds to have studio-quality portraits? Well you don’t. In this helpful article, Contributing Editor James Booth shows you a few methods that work well for him and yield rather nice results for very little money.

Every so often, I want a text to use as a backdrop for some project. Here at ZATZ, I’ll often need a background for our cover images on the home pages of the magazines. While you could buy texture CDs from a variety of vendors, sometimes it’s fun to create your own out of your own pictures and a few simple filters. This article shows you how.

No one ever said photography would be cheap, but at least there are some ways we can keep the cost down. One of our friends recently turned us on to an online merchant that sells frames for pretty low prices. This merchant is our Site of the Month for March.