Photographs of lightning aren't particularly difficult to take. It's mostly a matter of being prepared to get a good image when lightning appears.

My friend Christina Lawrie is much better at photographing lightning than I am. Here's how she does it.

We're teaming up with Focal Press to give you some reading material to polish your photo skills. You'll have a chance to win The Photographer's Eye Field Guide, The DSLR Field Guide, The Bird Photography Field Guide, The Exposure Field Guide, The Landscape Photography Field Guide, and we're also throwing in the Wedding Photography Field Guide. Three lucky winners will have the chance to win all of these titles. Details to win are after the jump.

"You absolutely need to sharpen all of your photos if you're shooting RAW on your DSLR," that's what Matt from Kelby Training says. Sharpening your images will help to make them pop for a more appealing look. As always, balancing is also important to make sure that it isn't overdone. Matt from Kelby Training explains sharpening in the video below in one of the best ways I've ever seen and continues on to explain that we sharpen for the print.

Take a look at the video after hitting the read and discuss button and for more in-depth training please visit Kelbytraining.com. They also have full one day seminars at Kelbytraininglive.com.

Losing images is perhaps one of the biggest, yet little-thought-about fears of many professional photographers and hobbyist shooters. Unfortunately, there are people out there that do not know how to recover images if they are lost. I talked to a few industry experts, asking them to share their knowledge about image recovery and software.

Seth Resnik, David H. Wells, Ziv Gillat (creator of the Eye-Fi card) and John Christopher of DriveSavers, Inc. all shared their insights with me.

We've all heard the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words." And if we didn't believe in the power of images to communicate, we wouldn't spend so much time capturing and sharing them. But photographs don't happen in a vacuum. There's the photographer, who interacts with the subject and their surroundings. That's where the trouble with photography comes in—managing the effects we as photographers have on our subjects and their environment, whether they are ancient historical sites, natural wonders, people or wildlife.

The topic is huge and filled with controversy, but I'd like to share with you some common ethical problem situations that arise in travel and wildlife photography, and provide some perspective on how you may want to address them on your own adventures.

When I started out in photography shooting slide film, I was trained to carry two "mandatory" filters: a polarizer and a set of graduated neutral density filters (ND-grads). Polarizing filters not only increase contrast in skies, but they are indispensible in removing glare and reflections from water and foliage. ND-grad filters offer a way of compressing tones in scenes with a large dynamic range.

One of the limitations of today's digital cameras is that they cannot capture the dynamic range of the human eye. Indeed, our eyes are very sensative organs and have much more latitude than an imaging sensor. Back in the film days, we used to dodge and burn accordingly to get what we wanted. But these days, we just create a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo. In the video below, the experts over at Kelby Training give us an intro to this process and show us how it can be useful in practical situations.

Take a look at the video after hitting the read and discuss button and for more in-depth training please visit Kelbytraining.com. They also have full one day seminars at Kelbytraininglive.com.