Being lazy is one of my favorite traits, so walking needs to be avoided at all costs. I'm kidding... well, not really. This wireless remote for my camera has saved me quite literally thousands of steps in my light painting processes.
Just when you thought you needed that crazy portrait lens, along comes someone shooting with nothing more than a drop of water. Check out this cool portrait series shot in a very unique way.
We have all been there: you see an image online that gives you the best perspective of a location but you have no idea exactly where it is located. Sometimes the photographer lists the location on social media, but more often they leave you wondering where exactly they were standing. Last week I set out to film a time-lapse of one of the most photographed skylines in the world. However, finding the exact location I wanted required me to use multiple resources. Welcome to project "New York Harbor."
Printing images almost became a thing of the past with the digital era. However more and more photographers are helping their clients embrace the idea of hard copies to hang on the walls rather than in a drawer on a flash drive. New mediums for printing are becoming popular as unique options compared to the standard print. Are you sure you are setting up your files correctly for the color shift issues with printing on these new mediums?
It’s always important to stop and smell the photos – but what happens when your stop is at night, in complete darkness without any lights to help you out? You improvise. There are a few things you can do to help you compensate for lack of proper lighting equipment.
How many times have you seen a video or photo where a subject or even the artist themselves appear in it multiple times and wondered how they did that? Having a background in graphic design, I always guessed you just merge the footage or photos together and mask sections out to reveal the subject in each area. Well, it is as simple as it sounds but if you are not sure how to get started or how to do that, Peter McKinnon shows how he cloned himself in both photo and video using Photoshop and Premiere, respectively.
We all know the pictures on the packaging of food you buy usually is a lie. It's not how it's going to look when you open it, and it's not going to taste as good as your imagination was telling you it would based on the photo of the package. But it surely works to get people interested and buying one product over the other. How do they do it? This video shares 10 tricks food advertisers use when shooting the images to be used in advertising and packaging. A picture of a piece of bread being broken open, hot and steaming out of the oven, sure looks delicious. Did you know wet cotton wool will steam longer than bread would? Yes, me neither.
When I moved in to my studio a little over three years ago, I needed a place to hang, store, and use my rolls of seamless paper. I didn’t have many — just a few nine-foot rolls of white, gray, black, and green — but I wanted them out of my way. Storing them vertically wasn’t a good option in the space, and storing them laying down is never a good idea. So, I wanted to figure out a simple system that I could build that would do the trick. Here’s what I came up with.
When a D1 collegiate athlete becomes a photographer, you should watch out. Zach Ancell is a commercial sports photographer from Portland and has been shooting for almost 10 years now. As any self-respecting creative, he does his own personal projects between the commercials he shoots. Pan"Tone," which is one of Ancell's recent shoots caught my attention, and he kindly agreed to share all we want to know about the set.
When I first started out, I always used to see color that I wanted to replicate. It seemed there was some magic preset or tool that helped. There isn’t and really what it boils down to, is first really “seeing” the color. What is it about a certain look you like? To help with this I have always been a fan of side-by-side comparisons, both for photo and video.
You can do a lot with photographs in Adobe Premiere Pro: create and customize a time-lapse with the automate to sequence feature, import a layered Photoshop file as a complex layered video sequence, or animate your images in 2D or 3D space. These are just a few of the things you can accomplish. I'm going to show you seven tips I utilize when working with still images in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Capture One offers quite a few tools to adjust your raw files. It’s best known for its color editing capabilities, but luminosity adjustments are also very well designed. One of them was introduced last year with Capture One Pro 9, and it’s called the Luma Curve. It’s a powerful feature to adjust contrast manually while avoiding any color shift. Let’s see how it works and how it compares to an RGB curve.
Bokeh, it’s something that we all love, whether we like to admit it or not. It seems like every other client I work with asks me to "make the background blurry" or tells me "I want everything behind me to be out of focus." The obvious solution would be to shoot wide open, but the truth is, having your aperture wide open can actually have a negative impact on the quality of your image.
If you're just getting into video, one of the most important things you can tackle to improve both the look of your footage and the efficiency of your editing is LUTs. This helpful tutorial will get you off and running in very little time.
Posing is an art entirely itself, one that many photographers spend hours upon hours perfecting. However, one photographer says that the secret isn't in posing at all, it's in directing.
Apps for working out the best times to shoot in natural light based on your location are not new, but the GoldenHour.One App by Hana Kusova brings together the perfect ingredient of features to compliment any photographer’s planning process for outdoor photography.
Working with a second shooter has a ton of advantages: you can cover more moments, you get different angles and perspective on the same moments, and they even allow you to try new things during the day that you normally couldn't afford to do. One of the more frustrating things about working with a second shooter though, is when you get back home to later find out that your cameras were not synced to the correct time. What you're left with is images from the reception all intermixed with images from getting ready.
In 2006, Leah Caldwell was eating at a Chipotle near the University of Denver when a photographer took her picture. When she got up to leave, the photographer asked her to sign a release form for use of the images, but she said no. Eight years later, when Caldwell went into a Chipotle in Orlando, Florida, she saw her picture on one of the restaurant’s walls, and subsequently in two other locations in California.
Perhaps this article is a risk to my career by virtue of being too honest, but it's a subject I have wanted to discuss publicly for some time. In the era where social media is the backbone of perception, it's all too easy to feel you can never measure up. This isn't new information and in fact, it's a rather well-trodden path. Even armed with the knowledge, however, I still feel I walk in to the trap of taking the world that is presented to me as the only facts worth knowing. I want to sacrifice my self-consciousness to do my bit to rectify this.
Getting clients is one of the most difficult parts of being in business. Unfortunately, marketing knowledge doesn't just appear once you have your license in your hands. As a result, many of us look at what our competitors are doing and try something similar, never realizing that there is a good chance that our competitors are also operating from a place of marketing ignorance. One of the most common marketing mistakes I've seen is photographers spending too much time talking about themselves, and not enough time talking to their clients. This means many photographers are shooting themselves in the foot by making their landing pages self-centered, rather than client centered, and they may be losing out on business because of it.
As the phone rings, I breathe easy to calm my nerves. I'm about to interview one of the most successful modern portrait photographers in the world. I'm halfway through leaving a stuttering mess of a message when he cuts in. "Hello? Hi, I had the music going and didn't hear the phone ring..." Buck has built a career over the past 30-plus years photographing some of the biggest names in Hollywood and politics. He has carved out a space for himself in the upper echelon of photographers working today. And he has a land line. Somehow, given his old school, dogged approach to portraiture and his recent switch to digital, I think that's just perfect.
In various forms of photography, being able to composite several photos into one final image is an important skill set. In the world of portraiture, composites are often used to create group shots in which the lighting situation is difficult or not every subject of the photo is available at one given time. Here I’ll show my process for blending several shots of people into a final image.
So, you're thinking of dropping that stack of cash you've been saving up on that light-guzzling bokeh monster of an 85mm you've been eyeing. But how do you know it's the right lens for you? This great video will give you a model to follow.
You are at a crossroads again. Every now and then, you arrive at a point in your photography where you are left uninspired. It’s that moment when you feel like you’re drawing blanks even as the conditions are just right. Stages like these occur every once in a while, no matter your experience in photography. Feeling uninspired can be daunting and seemingly endless. But once you realize that these are the best moments for self-reflection, there’s another opportunity for personal growth. It’s times like these when you ask yourself: “What is your reason for pursuing photography in the first place?”
It's an ancient art-form, and it's something you need to know to get your location photography set ready for action. Have you ever needed to put up a scrim while being able to tighten it after the knot's been made? This video is for the photography and film industry
There was a time when smooth, stable footage was the stuff of Hollywood, while us lowly plebeians dabbled with our shaky VHS home movies. But now, I can order laundry detergent delivered to my door by pressing a button on my washing machine and those magical devices in our pockets shoot in 4K. Here are four great ways to get with the times and give your footage that smooth, cinematic look.
A warm sun glow effect in portraits is a highly popular look that can create a lot of interest in an image if done right. This great tutorial shows you a quick and easy method for adding the effect that produces a nice result.
Composition is tricky business: there are rules to follow, but they are not hard and fast per se. Nevertheless, knowing them is a great starting point, and this helpful video will get you up and running.
Photographer Nicolas Bruno suffers from sleep paralysis, a condition where a person experiences the inability to move or to speak during waking or falling asleep, sometimes for a few seconds and sometimes for several minutes. In more frightening instances, one might experience hallucinations or imagined physical experiences that one is unable to react to. Bruno decided to show the world the effects of this puzzling condition.
Macro photography is one of those genres that almost all of us want to try, but few of us specialize in. If it's your niche, you've probably already invested in dedicated equipment, but if you're just dabbling, you'd likely prefer to avoid purchasing an entire setup. This great video will walk you through the process of shooting and show you what can accomplish with a minimal setup.
Having options is always a good thing, especially when it can save you from a costly mistake. In this quick tutorial, Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens shows us the importance of shooting background plates to give yourself options in post production and help speed up your workflow.
Not every photographer needs lavish resources and an army of helpers to create dramatic images that belie their basic production. Lia Konrad is a 23-year-old fine art photographer based in a small town in Germany, but she hasn’t let modest resources stop her from following her passion to create epic images inspired by her love of fairytales, myths, and fictional stories for her website Liancary.
The YouTube channel Rideable Entertainment may just have created the most impressive DIY camera slider I have ever seen. It's made partially of wood but not in a cheap way. It has more of a Steam Punk look to it with some effort put into the finishing. The most impressive part is that they even managed to make it motorized, something that a lot of affordable sliders in the early days couldn't even do.
So you got into filmmaking, and you want brands to pay for your work? Many of you are probably in this case and are wondering where to start to get paid jobs. Matti from TravelFeels gives us a few tips and requirements to make it possible and start receiving brand collaboration offers.
Postproduction is often so integral to a photographer's style that many photographers wouldn't dream of allowing their raw files to be seen by clients because they feel that their editing process is what makes the photo look like "their work." While I find postproduction just as important as any photographer, the unfortunate truth is that spending too much time in Lightroom or Photoshop might actually be damaging your business.
Whether it's a style or a genre, film noir has that signature high contrast look we've seen in many old black and white films. Modern filmmakers also adopted that style of lighting and post-processing in their drama and thriller movies. In this video you'll go behind the scenes of how to achieve that film noir look in camera.
Recently I found myself setting up lighting for a headshot session only to find out my flash was stuck on full power. The "on" switch for the flash worked just fine and it fired as normal but all its buttons simply didn't work, presumably because they were worn out. I had several backup flashes back in my truck but I wasn't looking to make the client wait while I walked back to where I parked, so I figured it was a good time to flex those problem solving muscles and make the shoot work with an un-adjustable flash.
Ever wonder how you can elevate your senior portraits beyond the standard cap and gown pictures? Think about lifestyle photography the next time you book a senior portrait session.
Image sharpening is one of the most important steps in a postproduction workflow. However, with a myriad of options and methods to do it, it can be a daunting understanding exactly what you're doing and why. This great tutorial will show both what sharpening an image does and how to do it.
It can be easy to pull our cameras out of our bags and start shooting, leaving the fate of the shoot to our post-processing skills and imagination after the fact. However, to really ensure we always get quality images that match our vision, it's important to be prepared. Making a habit of these 14 things will ensure that you consistently get those shots.
The film versus digital debate has raged on for over a decade now. Digital cameras are so capable that it seems silly for anyone to go back to an archaic medium like film. Film is slow, expensive (sort of), lacks many game-changing features found in today's digital cameras, and has lower resolution (sort of). But it has some qualities to it that make it an entirely viable medium for working photographers and enthusiasts alike. One of which that I firmly believe in is that it will make you a better photographer.
A while back I reviewed the Godox AD600 which I thought was going to be the all-in-one solution I was after. Even after comparing it to the Profoto B1, I was more impressed with the AD600, especially at its price point. It had a few construction issues, but overall was a flash to compete with the big boys. As I said, I thought it was going to be the solution I was looking for. Then Godox dropped the bomb: the Wistro AD200. This little flash promised to be less than half the weight and powerful enough for most of the work its big brother was made for. So, is it all it's said to be and how does it stack up against other options?
Last week, I posted an article about how to create amazing portraits with on-camera flash. My hope was to help anyone who was on the fence about shooting with flash feel more comfortable and confident in their ability to shoot with flash. Granted, shooting with on-camera flash has its caveats, so in this article, I am going to go over some of the benefits of shooting with off-camera flash.
When getting into video, filming may not be the biggest issue. Post-production plays a significant role and can be quite overwhelming. There is tons of software out there, and it’s difficult to know which is best for what. Learning how to use these programs is even worse when you are a photographer. The interface looks totally different than what we are used to with Photoshop, Lightroom, or even Capture One. So it’s always nice there are people such as Casey Faris producing comprehensive videos to help us out in getting started. If, like me, you can’t seem to get a perfect grading with Premiere or Final Cut Pro, this crash course on DaVinci Resolve is exactly what you need!
A common saying among proponents of prime lenses when confronted with the versatility of zoom lenses is: "Zoom with your feet!" However, that does not produce the same effect. Learn about the difference between changing your crop and changing your perspective in this quick lesson.
There are a lot of variables to consider when discussing the income we generate from our photography. Aspiring professionals often site a lack of work when defending their status as either hobbyist or part time photographers, but the truth is often a little more complicated than that. When times get tough, many creative photographers use the skills they’ve collected to generate income in other ways.
So, you decided to kick iPhoto to the curb and step up to Lightroom, but you need a little help getting started. This great tutorial will show you the ins and outs of the application and get you up and running in no time.
The video has some great points with practical tips on how to get your creative juices flowing and basically setting yourself up with some barriers to challenge yourself and making the best of the situation. Peter McKinnon goes through a list of things he does to challenge himself to keep being creative and to get out of the comfort zone and push your creative being to another level.
As a professional wedding photographer, I spend a lot of time with people in front of my camera. But because I grew up racing motocross and driving fast cars, I have always been intrigued by automotive photography. So when I was asked by a friend of mine if I wanted to help shoot a 80s-styled cafe racer motorcycle, I jumped at the opportunity. Add to this that the shoot was going to be inside of an arcade filled with old-school machines, and this shoot sounded like one amazing time.
Whether you're shooting for a client or just creating something for your portfolio, working with a team of people can be one of the most difficult and intricate parts of the job. Don't worry, because there is a simple piece of paper that can make your life a whole lot easier; it's called a Call Sheet, and I'm going to tell you why you need one.
