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My First Considerations Prior to Bidding on a Commercial Photography Job

In today’s article, I thought it might be helpful to those just getting into the business to take you through my real-time thought process when bidding on commercial assignments, from the initial query email to whether or not I take a job. Over the years, I’ve made a lot of good decisions and a lot of bad decisions, and hopefully, you can learn from my journey.

A Beginner's Guide to Using Lightroom

Lightroom is the program of choice for tons of photographers for cataloging and editing their photos, and it is a multidimensional application with a lot of different features and capabilities. If you are new to using Lightroom, this excellent video will show you the ins and outs of the important aspects of the application and have you up and running in no time.

5 Tips to Master Your Wide-Angle Landscape Photography

The wide-angle lens is very well known to be “the” landscape photography lens. That being said, it can be a little hard to figure out how to use it in the beginning. Here are five tips.

Looking After Your Most Precious Piece of Equipment When Shooting: Your Body and Posture

It's one thing to meticulously look after our photography gear, but if we don't take care of our bodies, there's only so much we'll be able to do in the future if we can't get up from our chair or lift our camera. Take a look at this video which explains how to make your photography more enjoyable and safe for as long as possible.

How the Datacolor SpyderX Photo Kit Can Improve Your Photos

Color is one of the most important things to photographers, but surprisingly, we often do not do everything we can and should do to ensure our colors are accurate and consistent. Datacolor's SpyderX Photo Kit makes it easier than ever to make sure your colors are spot on from the moment you press the shutter to the final export, and Datacolor is offering it for 50% off. Let's look at how it can help you.

Learn How to Blend Exposures in Lightroom

Learning how to properly and convincingly blend exposures will enable you to have much more versatility in your process, particularly when you are dealing with scenes with a high amount of dynamic range. This great video will show you how to use Lightroom for exposure blending and how to ensure your edits are smooth and convincing.

How Not to Photograph Sex Workers

Two recent photographic projects focusing on sex workers stand in stark contrast to one another. One exploits them as a commodity, the other seeks to give them a voice. Why does the art world seem to value one so much more than the other?

How to Photograph the Milky Way in 5 Simple Steps

Learn how to photograph the Milky Way galaxy by choosing the correct equipment, using the right camera settings, and planning ahead with precision to avoid disappointment. You can also use these tips to photograph other astrophotography shots such as meteor showers.

7 Common Landscape Photography Mistakes

Landscape photography has a lot of potential pitfalls to it, and it takes the confluence of a variety of techniques and creative ideas to make a successful image. This great video details seven common mistakes landscape photographers commonly make and how you can avoid and/or fix them.

5 Advanced Techniques for Making Eyes Sparkle

The eyes in a portrait often make or break the whole image, so when you're retouching them, it's worth going the extra mile. Here are some advanced techniques for making sure the eyes in your images pop.

5 Common Mistakes Beginner Photographers Make

We are all unique people, but there are some mistakes that almost every new photographer makes at some point. Here are five common mistakes to watch out for in your own work.

How to Overcome Your Anxiety With Taking Portraits

An email I received this week stopped me in my tracks. For two things so important to me — mental health and photography — I don't do enough to discuss it. So, I'm going to change that.

6 Office Conveniences That Will Make Your Life Easier as a Photographer

We spend a lot of time discussing camera gear and the like, but given the amount of time we spend at our computers for our work, it is also worth talking about ways to make our lives easier in our office, whether that is at home or in a dedicated studio. Here are six things that make my office life easier and more enjoyable.

How I Improved My Photography Sales by Learning to Think Like a Client

I worked hard when I first started in photography to become competent both behind the camera and when interfacing with clients, but a subtle error I was making worked against me for a long time until I realized how to fix it. Here is why learning how to think more like a client can improve your work.

The Usefulness of the Detail Panel in Lightroom

The Detail panel in Lightroom often does not get as much attention as it should, with many photographers opting to leave it at its default settings. However, it can make an appreciable difference in your final images, and this great video tutorial will show you everything you need to know for using to sharpen your photos.

Why I Won't Ever Price-Match

In this video, I talk about my rejection rate for jobs and my ethos on pricing and price matching. I also go over a real-life quote that I sent off and got rejected for and give a breakdown as to why this happened.

How to Use Instagram to Get Commercial Work

There are loads of articles and videos about how to grow your Instagram following, but that doesn't directly correlate to getting more work. In this video, I go over how I use Instagram to get booked for ad campaigns.

How to Build a Commercial Portfolio

Commercial photography is notoriously hard to get into. In this video, I go over my complete workflow for shooting commercially viable portfolios from inception, through the shooting process, and into post-production.

The Bad and the Beautiful: Where Does Helmut Newton Fit Into Our New World?

Over the last few years, we've increasingly and very publicly questioned our behaviors, our politics, our history, our heroes, our statues, and our art. It's only reasonable that we question our photography idols. Where do Helmut Newton's hyper-erotic photography and his ruminations on power fit into our new world?

Underpromise and Overdeliver: The Best Way to Grow Your Photography Business

Creating imagery that’s “brandable” is part of many working photographer's bag of skills but still takes some know how with lighting, posing, and while creating a human connection to excel at a high level with consistent results. Let’s dive into how we can make our commercial and branding imagery simply while also growing our network and earning new clients in the process.

4 Photoshop Back Ups All Serious Photographers Need to Do

Hard drives fail, computer programs get corrupted, and companies have data losses from time to time. If you rely on Adobe to keep all your files and settings safe, then you may be in for a shock if things go majorly wrong. Make sure you have the following four items manually backed up while you still can.

7 Portrait Composition Tips in Just Two Minutes

When you are shooting portraits, you are probably focusing the majority of your attention on posing, and it can be easy to fall into somewhat plain compositions. This great video will give you seven quick tips along with lots of examples that will improve your compositions and reinvigorate your portraits.

Building a Useful Relationship With Instagram

I'm tired of Instagram, and I'm guessing you walk a similar path. The platform that was built on photography and promoting good imagery is exhausting for photographers. While I'm not certain what the end-game of Instagram is, it seems user experience for the creators is not at the top of the list. That's why I created a method that heightens my own user experience, and I'm sharing it with you.

What Skills Does a Photographer Need to Make Money?

Being good with a camera is just one of many skills you need to successfully earn money as a photographer. This excellent video explores the skill every financially successful photographer has and why it is such a crucial thing.

How to Create Sharper Photos Using Focus Stacking

Landscape photographers commonly prefer to get as much of the frame in focus as possible for maximum sharpness. Focus stacking is a common and useful technique for accomplishing this, and this excellent video will show you how to do it using Photoshop.

Are You Making Full Use of the View Modes in Lightroom?

With Lightroom's new update being the main recent talking point among Adobe photography users, it still might be worth checking out some of the fundamentals of the powerful application. Here's a video detailing the four main view modes besides the Grid view in the Library module — with a bonus explanation of metadata filters at the end.

Photography Documentaries to Watch Now

With the wide theatrical release of "The Picture Of His Life" just a few days away, I thought it might be interesting to create a list of some of the best documentaries about photography and photographers ever made. What are your favorites?

$20 DIY Paper Seamless Roll Storage System

Storing seamless paper rolls in your home or studio is always a bit of a task, especially once the collection has grown over the years. Although there are off-the-shelf options, I found that this simple $20 build does a great job.

How I Found my Photography Style

You'll often hear people talking about your photography style, but what does that mean? Does it matter in how you book jobs or how much you can charge? How does one even find their photography style, and why is it important?

How I Fix Underexposed Images

We have all done it. It doesn't matter how long you have been a photographer; at some point, you will take the perfect shot, but the flash will not fire, you will have slipped and moved the shutter speed, or any manner of blunders. Here is how I fix them.

Up Your Portrait Game With These Posing Tips

When it comes to portrait and fashion photography, posing a someone who isn't a model can be one of the hardest things to learn. How do you succinctly tell someone to move how you want them to in order to get the shot?

Pro Photographer Demonstrates How He Uses Filters to Produce Vivid and Striking Portraits

If you're a landscape or architectural photographer, you're probably quite used to using filters to control the look of your images. A good polarizing filter, for instance, can have a dramatic impact on your image. Portrait photographers, for the most part, tend not to use a lot of filters, and this could an area where they could experiment more.