Around the corner from the PCMag.com office is a construction site for a hi-rise apartment complex. Last Tuesday, when I passed it on my lunch hour, I noticed one of the workers pointing his iPhone's camera up at the structure, so I tried to see what he was aiming at.

Above the building, I spotted a rainbow-like arc that I immediately recognized as a portion of a solar halo, and snapped a number of pictures of it (such as the one above) mostly with my Canon SD990 IS. (I even got a few good shots of it with my iPhone.)

In observing and photographing solar halo phenomena, the biggest obstacle, ironically, is the Sun itself. You must avoid looking at the Sun--even when partially obscured by thin clouds, looking directly at it can cause eye damage. As for photography, the Sun's glare can wash out much of the detail of the delicate arcs, and spots, as well as the structure of the accompanying cirrostratus (and sometimes cirrus) clouds. So be sure to hide the Sun behind a tree, a building, a street sign, or other object--even a hand will do in a pinch.

Note that in photographing a halo, you'll need to focus on the sky rather than the nearby object, or else the halo will be blurred. You can do this by pointing the camera at the open sky and engaging the autofocus if you're in automatic mode--usually, a green box will appear when the shutter is half-pressed. Then, while keeping the shutter half-pressed, you should return to your initial framing with the nearby object in view, and press the shutter fully to complete the shot) It's a good idea to move the camera around a bit to find the place with the least glare before you shoot. Although it's good to try both, I find that wider-field shots often work better than close-ups--for one thing, if you want to capture the entire solar halo, it may be necessary to go as wide as you can.

There is no right and wrong in photography. Seriously. Any advice I give is just that--advice. My goal is to get you to think a little differently before you snap the shutter. For instance, you've probably been told (more than once) to get off your butt. Not me. I'm telling you to get on your butt. It's often where the best shots lie.

In the two examples attached to this entry I'm shooting my subjects at eye level. For the single dog and master I sat on the sidewalk. For the little girl and dog I was on my belly! Eye level is the operative concept and the shots definitely benefit. In both cases being low allows the background to unfold and fill the top of the frame.

By the way, what works for children and dogs also works in landscape where being low allows you to include a little foreground color and texture. Try it, but not with your good pants on.

If you've got a DSLR you'll notice your lens will only focus so close. Maybe not close enough for you. That's especially true if you want to show detail in a flower or insect or some other small object. When your photo shows an object larger than real life it's called macro photography.

What's a shooter to do? Moving your lens farther from your camera's sensor with an extension tubes or bellows is an idea I've talked about before. That's a common method of reducing your minimum focus distance and getting macro shots.

There is another method--not always preferred. You can put corrective optics on your lens in the form of a close-up or macro lens. If you wear reading glasses the concept is exactly the same. Close-ups attach to your lens by the screw threads made for a filter. There are expensive close-up lenses and cheap close-up lenses. eBay is littered with the cheap kind, which is what I decided to try.

If you want to impress your friends and family, try shooting some panoramas. Panos are composites from multiple photos showing a wider field of view than a normal lens would provide. Because you're using multiple shots panos often have astounding detail. A pano shot of 100 megapixels or more is not that hard to achieve and you (Yeah, you) can do it with virtually any camera and free software!

Panoramas will be much easier if you're not shooting in "AUTO." Admittedly the purpose of this series is to get you to explore the other modes in your camera, but it's a really big deal here. You want your snaps to match shot-to-shot in depth of field and exposure. "AUTO" won't let you do that. You need to be in "MANUAL" or an aperture priority mode where your f-stop setting won't change between clicks.

I love this shot. It's totally unattainable in "AUTO." Your DSLR is crying for you to spin that dial and add some human intervention to the exposure process. With a little creativity you can use your DSLR to capture or create something that's not normally visible to the naked eye using a long duration exposure.

In Matthew Fang's "Super S." (above) you'll notice the headlight trails and other standing lights are overexposed. His decision was to run a long exposure, capture the detail in the naturally lit elements and not worry about the lights which have none. This 117.4 second exposure was captured at f/22 with a 14mm lens. With a wide lens and small aperture he got a huge depth-of-field which made focusing (often difficult in the dark) a lot less critical.

Most handheld pictures need fast shutter speeds otherwise the natural shakiness of your body will render shots blurry. You can fix a lot of things in photography. Blurry isn't one of them.

If you're just joining us, I've been writing a series of entries for neophytes with DSLRs--mainly people who have been too scared to move their camera off "AUTO." Think of me... think of us... as your online support group. We want you to succeed and start exploring what your camera can really do. Your knowledge is a whole lot more important than which specific camera you're gripping.

If you've had your camera any length of time you've probably pondered buying a new lens or lenses and you've been floored by the choices available. A friend of mine who worked his way through college selling men's suits says he used to bring them out one-at-a-time because with too many choices people would buy nothing at all! No one wants to make a mistake. It's that way with lenses. It would be easier to make a purchase if there were fewer to choose from.

So, what's it going to be? I'm not going to steer you toward a specific brand or size, but I do have some advice to help you narrow your choices. I can see this is going to take more than one entry to cover properly, so lets start with prime lenses versus zoom.

If you've got a snazzy DSLR and you've been slavishly relying on the camera's judgement by dialing up "AUTO" you may not have noticed there's more than one way for the camera to save your photo: JPEG¹ or RAW. By default most cameras save your files as JPEGs.

That's a good first step since RAW files aren't always handled natively by our computers. Imagine shooting photos and not being able to view them! That would give you a different appreciation for the word "RAW." Of course I'm here to convince you RAW is the way to go. Let me make my case.

Are the built-in flash units on your DSLR (or any camera) awful? I'll let Canon, which includes them on its cameras, answer that:

"We've all seen it in snapshots we've either taken ourselves, or been shown by others: the pupils of your subject's eyes are lit up in a devilish bright red color, unlike anything we're used to seeing in real life. And of course, you never saw it in your camera's viewfinder when you took the picture."

Red-eye! It's the bane of amateur photographers worldwide. The pros don't have the problem, because they move the flash away from the lens so a bolt of light doesn't illuminate the very red back of your eyeball. But red-eye is only one of the many bad features built into every on-camera flash.

I've been posting some advice for photographers who own DSLRs but are stuck on "AUTO." "AUTO" is the equivalent of having training wheels on your camera. "AUTO" makes educated guesses to get your shot right, but they're often the wrong guesses, and your photos suffer.

One of the more typical "AUTO" problems is bad white balance--also referred to as color cast. Your shot looks reasonable, but the colors aren't what you remember. Maybe you've seen an indoor shot with a reddish tint; that's a common example of bad white balance. The camera has improperly guessed at the color temperature of your shot's light source.

Got a DSLR? Still shooting in "AUTO?" Let me push you toward a more hands-on approach. More than likely spinning the dial off "AUTO" will get you better shots. This is part three of my three part series. Part one covered shutter speed. Part two was all about aperture. This third piece deals with ISO. The shot at the top of this entry wouldn't have been possible had I not ramped the ISO way up!

Setting your camera correctly for a shot begins with making sure sufficient light passes through the lens to the sensor. Within reason you can control how much or how little light gets there with your aperture and shutter controls. Those are physical controls. The aperture relates to the size of the opening your light passes through, and the shutter speed controls how how long light can pass. ISO is a little more ethereal, because it's a totally electronic parameter.

Got a DSLR? Still shooting in "AUTO?" Let me push you toward a more hands-on approach. More than likely spinning the dial off "AUTO" will get you better shots. This is part two of my short series. Part one covered shutter speed.

The trinity of camera adjustments I'm writing about (shutter speed, aperture, ISO) all do one thing. They effectively control the volume of light that hits your DSLR's sensor. More light means brighter pictures. That's simple.

Got a DSLR? Still shooting in "AUTO?" Let me push you toward a more hands-on approach. More than likely spinning the dial off "AUTO" will get you better shots.

I suspect most people are frozen with the photographic equivalent of training wheels because they don't know what readjusting their camera will produce. Valid point. Let me help. There are really only three adjustments to think about (I'm assuming your shots are already in focus and you don't want to change that)--shutter speed, aperture and ISO. Each of them acts to control the light or the effect of the light that reaches your camera's sensor.

I love my camera. To prove it, I took around 1,000 photos this week. OK--I'm obsessed. Shoot me. Often when I'm out I'll run into other amateur shooters. I always peek to see if their camera is set on "AUTO." Usually it is.

I know why you're not trying things. Fear! Don't be fearful. There is little bad you can do by turning the knobs and pressing buttons. Getting back to a safe setting is always easy--honest.

If you're shooting in "AUTO" I can almost guarantee you're getting blurry shots from time-to-time. Of all the things that can go bad blur seems the worst. There's little you can do to correct it after-the-fact. That's why my goal is to shoot at a fast enough shutter speed to keep things sharp.

Kathy Nemec-Lucas' snowflake at the top of this entry is a beautiful example of macro photography (here's a larger version). If your camera has a pictograph of a flower on it (most point-and-shoot cameras do) or your DSLR has a lens with the word macro on it this is a type of photo you can take!

Let's define terms first. Macro photograph is really nothing more than close-up photography. Typically in macro photography the image seen by your sensor is at least 50% of its real size--abbreviated 1:2. Some macro lenses can bring you 1:1 or more! Unfortunately, companies in pursuit of quick sales have taken it upon themselves to 'dumb down' the entire macro concept. Be careful.

I just queried Flickr for pictures of the moon and got 1,110,995 hits. OK--some of those were probably pictures of mooning, but the vast majority were of the Earth's favorite satellite. It's a rite of passage for new DSLR owners to go out at night, point their cameras skyward, and get a (usually not great) photo. Here are some ideas on how to do a better job, so you can impress friends and neighbors.