“This shot just looks flat.” Even an image shot during dramatic lighting can look dull after global adjustments. But with some inspiration from light painting, you can bring the image to life in post-production.
Every photographer today has a digital portfolio of some kind but only a very few have spent the time to create a printed book. In this video, we look into three very differently designed printed portfolios.
When photographing commercial interior images, a common issue is an unsightly glare on reflective surfaces. Removing these reflections by compositing image layers significantly improves your images, separating you from the pack of "run-and-gun" real estate and interior photographers.
Taking professional-level interior photos is a surprisingly difficult skill to master. Here are five tips for improving your interior photography.
Graphics are international, with photographic ideas and images spreading like wildfire. They speak a universal language, are pan-cultural, yet have their own local meanings and understandings. This sounds like the world of Instagram, 500px, YouTube, and Flickr, but it’s actually 1858, and the Abdullah Frères are setting up their photographic studio in Constantinople.
When photographing interiors, flash is your friend, but a friend who needs some management. While flash brightens rooms, reduces glare, and brings out true colors, it can also produce the frustrating issue of ugly shadows.
Compositing frames in your interior photographs can be extremely time-consuming. With this simple technique developed by Mike Kelley, you can quickly and easily lighten doorways in post-processing while freeing up your editing time.
Urban exploration has been a popular subject on the Internet for some time. Photographing abandoned buildings, however, can be trickier than you might imagine. Here are 11 tips to make sure you get the most out of your trip.
If you have never been to Copenhagen in Denmark, I highly recommend going in summer. All the locals are out enjoying the sun and heat. This 3 hour photo walk is only an introduction to the most common places you must visit.
If you photograph cityscapes and architecture, you know the importance of having straight vertical lines in your image. Check out this video guide and learn how to achieve them in post-processing using Adobe Lightroom’s Transform tool.
For the past two weeks, I had the honor of trying out Hasselblad’s new 21mm f/4 lens. I used this camera pretty much every single day and set out to capture as many different things as I could with it.
Last week Mike Kelley and I competed to see who could create the best images of the iconic dome house in Charleston. We released the images and allowed all of you to vote to determine who won. Today, the results are in.
I recently challenged Mike Kelley to a photography competition. We both had two and a half hours to photograph the iconic "Dome House" in Charleston, South Carolina. Today, you will get to vote on your favorite photographs and choose a winner.
For many landscape and architectural photographers, a good filter system can be an absolute godsend. The kind of results you can produce are very difficult if not at all possible without them and it's for this reason they are ever more popular. Wine Country Camera is a company that specializes in making filters and their system looks pretty special.
We've talked about this before on Fstoppers, but there still seems to be some debate about lens compression. Let's dive a little deeper into perspective distortion.
I was never really into photo series but over the summer that kind of changed with my island series. Today, I find myself shooting similar things over and over again. In the end, I think that photo series can be a really cool way to showcase your work and interests over time.
Imagine pursuing your dream but lacking the funds to do so, then coming across a technology so amazing that you see the opportunity to establish a new business as a market leader, creating a chain of branches. John Plumbe, the Daguerreotype portraitist, did just this in 1840 which led to some of the most enduring photos of Washington D.C.
Architectural photography isn't the cheapest genre of photography, mainly due to the fact that tilt-shift lenses are a little expensive. Sure there are cheaper options, however, they generally perform worse and may not be worth it. A company called Venus Optics might just have the solution with their Magic Shift Converter.
I don't mean hanging out of a car window untethered to get a shot of another moving car (although that sounds kind of fun). What I mean is don't be afraid to take your work in a direction previously unexplored. What's the worst that can happen?
Smartphone photography is fast becoming a significant genre within the industry. Many professionals actually use their smartphones for commercial purposes and for good reason. The portability and connectivity many smartphones offer, give it a great advantage in many scenarios.
For many architectural photographers, tilt-shift lenses from Canon are the go-to option. These particular lenses are quite possibly the best available, and although Nikon has their variants, they just don't seem to be as good as Canon. The problem, however, is that Canon doesn't currently offer the best camera to put those lenses on with cameras like the Nikon D850 and Sony a7R III offering much better noise performance and dynamic range. In this video, I adapt Canon lenses to Fuji's medium format camera.
Piracy is a major issue among all types of creatives. Regardless of if you make handbags, design websites, create beautiful paintings, produce movies, or craft amazing photographs, at some point or another, someone is going to steal and rip off your work. Recently, we decided to run a social experiment; we actually pirated one of our own tutorials and put it online for free before it was even released to the public. What happened next was pretty interesting.
Oxford is quite the most beautiful city. It has history and is full of stories that will enchant you and the non-photographers traveling with you. Just a tour of the main colleges would be enough to fill your camera with stunning images.
Photographers could talk about soft light and color temperatures all day long, but what could we bring to interior design? Could photographers do a better job than an interior designer?
A few months ago, Fstoppers released “Photographing The World 3” with Elia Locardi. This 18-hour tutorial covers everything you could want to know about landscape and cityscape photography.
Rooftops hold a certain allure but it's not just urban explorers and extreme sports narcissists that are drawn to the tops of buildings to capture this alternative view of the city. Photographer and Artist Alain Cornu drags a 4x5 field camera onto the rooftops of Paris to create stunningly beautiful images that feel like portals into another world.
One of my regular gigs is photographing the training events hosted in London by Parkour Generations. Winterval, a day of hard training outdoors regardless of the conditions, takes place every January and shooting it can be a daunting prospect; winter in London is often grim, with short, dark days made grimmer by drizzle or worse. This year we got lucky with glorious sunshine, albeit accompanied by a biting breeze.
City life is always fast-paced, and plenty can change in three years. Seattle is no different, as the footage in this four-minute video proves. Check out just how drastically the city has changed.
Real estate photography, while not the sexiest of photography genres, is quite accessible and a handy way to earn some cash, especially if your starting out. Many interior design and architectural photographers cut their teeth taking photos for estate agents and holiday home companies, but much of the high volume stuff looks way too flashy. In this article I'll show you a relatively easy way to get natural looking light without blown-out windows.
For first time travelers to Kyoto, it can be a bit confusing to choose where to shoot. Unlike my previous posts on Madrid and Barcelona which are about three-hour photo walks, this article will be similar to my Tokyo article which involves five different locations. Here is a link to a great website to give you a better overview of each location and other locations worth a look. For those of you who have been to Kyoto, I would expect you to share your photos or suggest other locations.
In 2016, David Strauss wrote an article on Fstoppers about how purchasing an ND filter holder set might be a better option. I, being the smartass that I am at times, left the following comment, "Or you can be really cheap and just mean stack exposures :P, plus it prevents long exposure noise." Without doing any actual comparisons between the two, I had made up my mind about filters and decided against them. Recently, however, a close friend of mine, Imran Mirza, asked me to keep an open mind and give neutral density filters a try. For that reason, I have been testing some filters from NiSi over the last few weeks. In my latest video, I compare using neutral density filters to using Photoshop techniques such as mean stacking.
German photographer Max Leitner travelled to Warsaw, Poland alongside an urban gymnast to capture this series of unconventional architectural shots that possess an air of optical illusion.
A few months ago we released "Where Art Meets Architecture 3" with Mike Kelley, a photography tutorial that covers photographing hotels and resorts as well as the business of high-end architectural photography. For the past few months, we have also been releasing a behind-the-scenes series on the creation of this tutorial. Today we are finally releasing episode 8 which is also the final episode of this series.
Sometimes we photographers get caught up in things that we think will help our work: the latest camera, more powerful lighting, lighter tripods, etc. It’s easy to forget that keeping it simple and getting an idea executed properly is the most important part of what we do.
We have all come across a beautiful or interesting building in our life, it’s another subject of art. There are many architects that spend a lot of their time designing these amazing structures, and there’s even a whole genre of photography to capture and share the beauty in these buildings.
When Atlanta and their NFL franchise announced that they will be breaking ground to a new stadium, they wanted to shoot for the stars and redefine the benchmark. After nine years of planning and constructing the new stadium, Atlanta last night debuted their first big game at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. While it's a magnificent piece of architecture, one feature in particular catches the photographer's eye more than others. Let's take a look!
When it comes to homes and designs like this, they need to be shown in a way that makes them unique. Emile Rafael from Nowness is by far one of the best at showing these homes and giving us a brief overview of why they are designed in such a way. Over the past year or so, I have shot for several real estate agents, seen many homes, and have learned to appreciate different things about each and every one.
HDR is a beautiful but rather complicated editing process, or at least that was the case until Aurora HDR was designed by Macphun and photographer Trey Ratcliff. It’s now become an effortless and unintimidating retouching technique to bring the most out of your architectural and landscape images. Today, the California-based developer announced the release of Aurora HDR 2018 and it promises to make HDR photography even easier and more fun!
Medium format systems are widely known as being the best, producing the most detailed and technically superior images. The lenses are supposedly the best available too, such as the 40mm from Rodenstock which is praised for its amazing performance. If you want the best in image quality, the widest dynamic range, and the deepest depth of field with the least amount of diffraction, then medium format is the answer... or is it? Is this simply perception? If you repeat something enough does it become fact? How many people who believe this to be true have actually tried and compared the best from medium format to the best available from full frame?
Our Behind the Scenes series continues this week with Episode 7. In this episode, we continue filming WAMA 3 with Mike Kelley in Charleston, while I also teach him how to kiteboard.
Lukasz Palka, a Polish travel photographer currently residing in Tokyo, embarked on a photo series aiming to document the more intricate details of such a gigantic metropolis. We chatted with him to find out more about his thought process throughout the project.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has long warned tourists of “arrest and long-term detention.” Despite the threat, around 100,000 people visit the hermit kingdom annually. In 2016, Photographer Raphael Olivier was one of those people. Here we showcase some of his most surreal photos from the trip.
When it comes to architectural photography, tilt-shift lenses are quite possibly the best option available. The flexibility and amazing image quality make them very popular amongst architectural photographers and even some landscape photographers. Having said that, there are occasions when you may want to push these lenses to their respective limits by shifting right to the edge. Sometimes the building you're shooting may be a little too close and the lens just isn't quite wide enough. In these circumstances getting the most out of your tilt-shift lens really helps. Doing this, however, creates a vignette in the image and due to tilt-shift lenses not having correction profiles, they can be tricky to remove in post.
Our behind-the-scenes series on the filming of "Where Art Meets Architecture 3" continues today with episode 6. In this episode, Mike Kelley flies to the Fstoppers office in Charleston to start working on the post-processing portion of this tutorial.
If you've ever been out and about and taken a photo of a tall building with a wide angle lens, you've probably noticed a weird phenomenon in which buildings appear to be falling away from you or into the center of the frame. This helpful video will show you how to correct perspective distortion using only Lightroom.
With the launch of Mike Kelley's 3rd Architectural tutorial, we released eight new episodes of behind the scenes madness. In this episode, Mike continues shooting one of the most extravagant homes on the Mayan Rivera, Lee's nightmare trip becomes worse when he comes down with food poisoning, and I make the most of the situation and explore everything the coast of Mexico has to offer.
This method is widely used in editorial magazines. It's a fun way to look at different perspectives of your work combined. Sometimes it’s just not possible to capture everything you want in a single shot. The solution is simple – shoot two photos and display them side-by-side. I find that displaying two images side-by-side is a great way to tell a story photographically, and to create ideas that are not necessarily evident when one or the other image is displayed by itself. If you're interested in trying this technique with your own images, here are some of the tricks I’ve picked up along the way. Make small prints and lay them out on a large table to play the mix and match approach.
Libraries. Not a photographic subject I ever thought I’d be getting excited about. But one landscape photographer has released an undeniably beautiful series featuring some of the most structurally complex buildings from around the world.
Last year, right around this time, Patrick and I booked a flight to Mexico to film Mike Kelley photographing the most expensive house ever sold in Playa Del Carmen. It certainly had the potential to be an incredible trip. The day before we were set to leave I decided to go out kiteboarding and I ended up breaking my tibia internally at my knee. For some reason I still went to Playa Del Carmen the next day.
The third episode of Mike Kelley's Behind the Scenes series from his architectural tutorial is now live. In this episode, Mike shows you how you can turn an overcast day into a sunny afternoon, how to photograph a resort from a helicopter, and also teaches you an effective way to make a hotel lobby look more inviting. You can also watch as the Fstoppers crew goes night diving with massive manta rays off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.
