When you're creating a composite image, it's a game of balancing and matching a ton of parameters to make the different elements convincingly look as if they all originated in the same frame. This helpful tutorial will show you some of the most important aspects you need to have mastered to create your best composite work.

Industry icons like Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz often look to us plebs like they’ve been blessed by the photography gods with talent the rest of us can only dream about, yet their success stories often include incessant practice, unwavering determination, apprenticeships, and lucky breaks. What separates those of us at the bottom from the select few at the top? And, if you want to be front and center stage, how do you get there?

One of the coolest parts about being a photographer or videographer is that you often get to rub elbows or work with people you might not ever meet otherwise. Here's how to increase your chances of getting a response (and a positive one at that) from those celebrities when you reach out to them.

Do you know what keywords are and the best way to add them to your photos? What about what options to select when you are exporting your images? Have you ever heard of the painter tool? In this final part of my three-part series on Lightroom for beginners, I will cover the final steps to take after applying your final edits to your images.

For years, I've been the biggest supporter of everyone using a Mac, except gamers. Especially if you are a photographer or graphic designer, it just makes sense and it always has. But as current events unfold it's becoming harder and harder to stick with the platform, no matter how great it actually is.

Time-lapse photography isn’t anything new, but it is a process that takes a lot of time to produce a cinematography effect showing subtle motion speed up to make it pronounced. Many motion films and television shows use it to show when a storm is forming, day shifts into night and vice versa, or even showing a busy street or freeway over time. Not only is it used there, many photographers produce their own clips for various projects. So how do you shoot and process a day to night time-lapse?

You don’t need me to tell you the importance of social media. Many of you under a certain age likely can’t picture your life without it. Judging by the number of selfie sticks and Facebook screens annoyingly lighting up dark movie theaters, social media had apparently become as important as breathing. Even those who came of age before the dawn of the smartphone are not immune to its charms. And in an increasingly connected world, our devices are not only a social diversion, but can also become a business necessity. This week, I had an experience that drove home just how necessary it can be.

Half the fun of having a professional wide-aperture telephoto lens married to a DSLR or mirrorless camera is all you can do with bokeh. However, if you don't have such a lens or want to have some fun with a past shot, this tutorial shows you how to easily add a bokeh effect using Photoshop.

A few months back, I was getting the feeling that I needed to start traveling to see more of the beautiful world we live in. At the time it was just a thought until my buddy Tom Harmon called me up and asked if I'd want to go out to Oregon with him. Of course I had to take him up on the offer and I was excited to leave New Jersey for once. I knew that if we were going to be in Oregon for just three days, we'd better plan a hell of a trip to fit in all the spots we wanted to go see. Finally, it was the night before the trip and we had finalized the locations we were going to go. With everything planned out, we were ready to get out to Oregon for some droning.

Looking for an easier way to light up your subject in a variety of different ways? The creative duo from Bitbanger Labs that launched the pixelstick is back with a new invention, colorspike. It’s an animation-driven light that with photographers and video shooters alike.

Google is a beast. There’s no other good way to put it, Google is a beast of a platform with an incredible amount of free valuable content available at our fingertips. But as with any beast, there is always a dark side, and for Google a big con is that the monster search engine never forgets. In the realm of Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) there is a plethora of both good and bad information available to the masses. Because of this, business owners have formed bad habits with SEO that are outdated and harming their ranking within Google and its algorithm. Here are a few habits you may have that could be harming your photography website’s rankings, and how you can fix them.

There's probably no other genre in which long exposures are so heavily used than landscape photography. The convenience of mostly static subjects combined with the necessity of low ISOs means landscape shooters are often pushing their exposures well past the one-minute mark. This interesting video examines three variations on long exposures of similar subjects and how they produce different results.

You’ve just finished shooting a beautiful wedding video and your edits are being finalized. But wait — you still need to find the music to go behind each scene. Use these five insightful tips to find the perfect music that will enhance your next wedding video.

This past week, Minnesota-based Photographer Rich Hoeg had the opportunity to photograph the aurora over Stewart Lake in Two Harbors, Minnesota. Hoeg describes himself as an enthusiast photographer with a love of photographing birds.

Multi-light setups can be tricky to master, but they also offer a remarkable amount of control and creative possibilities. This helpful tutorial will walk you through one such setup with its take on a classic lighting setup, showing how each light contributes to the final image and how you can replicate it yourself.

I have been struggling with my bad filing hierarchy for years. An inefficient, inconsistent, or straight up bad folder structure not only robs you of of your hard-earned time but it can also sabotage entire projects, hiding your files in the deepest, darkest corners of your hard drive, nowhere to be found ever again. I recently came up with a system that enables me to easily and efficiently store files as well as retrieve them. Follow along to hopefully also put an end to your digital storage struggles.

We all have them, those cloudy days when you just can't create no matter how much you want to. As normal as this is, it's very frustrating. I'll spend hours doing random things before getting to work in hopes of stumbling upon any crumbs of inspiration left behind. I've found a few things that always work like going for a walk, sitting outside or talking with other artists. However. I've found value in working on old images.

Instagram continues to grow as a legitimate tool for photographers to feature their work, build connections, and find clients. As such, developing an efficient workflow on the app is something most photographers should consider. This helpful video will show iPhone users a neat trick to save time.

Outdoor on-the-go DIY style editorials are really picking up in the fashion world. It is a good skill to have in your toolkit as a budding photographer. In this article, I want to break down how a small team of talented artists and myself went about producing and shooting two full on-location, outdoor editorials for Bullett Magazine in less than two weeks in NYC.

Many photographers I know have started making videos as well. It's a skill many clients and brands are looking for. Social networks have been developing the easiest way to watch a video on their platforms and if you look at the amount of time you spend browsing online, video takes a large percentage of that media you consume. If you want to start with video and don't want to make mistakes that can waste time or have you look like someone starting out, here is a video that lists the mistakes and how to prevent them so you are off to a good start.

It’s been quite trendy in the past few months to see handwritten text composited onto images on Instagram. Perhaps you’ve been wondering how it’s done or maybe you’ve just been looking for a way to make your writing even more personalized. No matter the reason why you’re reading this article, if you want to give a more personal dimension to your images with handwritten text, be sure to watch this tutorial.

After a four-hour trip to London and only being able to catch whatever sleep I could during the uncomfortable journey down, I met with Peter Hurley and immediately felt welcome. For those of you who don't know, Peter Hurley is a headshot photographer based in New York City. Hurley once had a career as a model and was also part of the U.S. Olympic sailing team. He is known for his clean, white background headshots and for coining the phrase "squinch," which has now become relatively mainstream thanks to news channels and shows like Orange is the New Black. To many, Peter is known as the best in the business and this may be true, but, what is Peter actually like to work with?

For anyone beginning to delve into the art of using off camera lighting, it can be a bit daunting to decide where to start in acquiring new lighting equipment. Here is a great guide to the pros and cons of LED and strobe lighting so that you’ll be able to make the right choice for your next acquisition.

I don't make time-lapses, but as a viewer I frequently happen to find time-lapse videos that I can't or don't watch at all. Here are my tips for all of you out there to make your sequence of images more appealing to any audience.