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As a wedding photographer, outdoor couple shoots are undoubtedly my favorites. On the big day, it gets overwhelming with little scope to get planned shots. We tend to go with the flow. For this reason, outdoor couple shoots are a treat to any photographer as it offers a lot of time and space. Here are my two cents on how to make your outdoor couple shoot an enjoyable and a memorable one.

As wedding photographers, we always find ourselves walking the high wire between art and popular demand. But then, is the balance hard to achieve? In my opinion, I’d say it is wise to just put the thought, sincere effort, and presence of mind into your photos. What you capture will be loved equally by the artist in you as well as the couple you shoot - who seek nothing less than spectacular. The picture we are going to dissect is a product of this belief.

Art is about storytelling. It’s about using all the tools at one’s disposal to convey and idea or an emotion. To connect an audience to a brand, or a personality, or a moment in a way the no other medium can. Along with my own technique, the ingenuity of the on-camera talent and the creative team behind it, plus the tools necessary to complete the job, the location you select for your shoot is one of the many raw materials that will have an effect on the eventual alchemy you bring forth to produce a great image.

Michael Shainblum, Fstoppers' Photographer of the Month for August, has been creating epic time-lapses for years now and he’s just released a new YouTube video tutorial. In this new video, Shainblum goes through his editing process detailing an Adobe-centric workflow for time-lapses.

Whether you’re about to head out for a day of shooting some corporate videos, producing a multiday lifestyle photoshoot, or even traveling abroad for a project, as a filmmaker or photographer you’ll likely have to do a fair amount of prep, called preproduction. This article will summarize a number of things that you should think about and probably not forget to do before leaving for your next job.

This may be appalling to some, or realistic to others, but I think if we don't discuss the state of the profession of photography we will eventually regret it. When it is more than a hobby, how has the industry changed? Is it a good change? Has technology helped or hurt the professional?

There are tonnes of tips and hacks you can use to get new and creative shots for your portfolio. How many tips are you aware of where you are using simple objects most people probably have just lying around? If you are like me and shop online, you probably have a few cardboard boxes lying around right now which could be perfect for some photo hacks for creative work.

Photography, as with any creative pursuit, requires the creator to have their hand in the process for the results to shine. Countless Facebook ads, online workshops, and even our camera companies would have you believe that they if you just buy that next magic bullet, everything will change for you. If they are to be believed, swiping your credit card just one more time is the key to making great images. Rubbish. It’s time to break away from that thought.

You might have noticed a common theme in my articles: "the gear doesn’t matter". A lot of people have called me out on this, especially as in my profile picture I’m shooting on a Phase One with Broncolor lights. And yes, you are right, the kit does matter in my line of work, just not always. Sitting on the fence? Maybe. Here’s my explanation:

Lighting: it's the beginning and end of photography. The way we think about light shapes our style, our techniques, and the way we feel about our art. Unfortunately, lighting, whether by natural or artificial means, can be intimidating. When we're learning about lighting, all too often we get so wrapped up in technique that we don't think about what we are doing before we execute. However, sometimes the best tips we can get have more to do with mentality than technique.

What do you do if that one location you want to photograph on your trip just happens to be one that hundreds if not thousands of other people also want to photograph? It can be a tricky situation to navigate. Sometimes it can be straight up frustrating. After too many instances where I found myself just being irritated, I found a few different ways to approach my shots of popular destinations that allowed me to capture what I wanted without having to feel like I was fighting crowds just for my shot.

Love them or hate them, Lightroom presets have become a staple in the world of editing. A lot of users use them to emulate their favorite photographers or in an effort to recreate certain film looks. The problem with these presets is that everyone that uses them ends up releasing work that looks the same as everyone else who has the same preset. This was apparent with the very popular VSCO presets. What DVLOP aims to do is give you the ability to not only emulate your favorite photographers, but also the tools to create your own style.

Capture One has recently published an article on The Image Quality Professor's Blog on how to create your own Styles and Presets written by Alexander Flemming. Styles are a great timesaver and can help accelerate your postproduction workflow with beautiful color corrections.

Photographers and digital artists alike have been using image editing software like Photoshop to enhance their work for years. There are several ways to add creative enhancements and filters to your work within Photoshop, but there are ways to add them without using the program or even in conjunction via other software and plugins. Auto FX Software has been around for more than 20 years with their customized creative photo software solutions which work as a stand-alone program or as a plugin for Photoshop or Lightroom. Right now you can get two of their modules for FREE along with support from Auto FX Software.

In a lot of genres, particularly landscape photography, luminosity masks are some of the most useful tools you can employ to make selective edits. This helpful video will show you a quick and effective shortcut for creating your own customized luminosity masks.

Normally, you get what you pay for. If you try to buy something that is less than half the price of its competitors, it's going to be bad. This is certainly what we expected when we compared four of the most popular carbon fiber tripods, but I'm shocked and excited to tell you we actually liked the most affordable model we tried the best.

The current trend for color grading videos is the orange and teal look. It’s not rocket science to understand why it works so well and why everyone uses it. Complementary colors are an easy choice when it comes to color grading and using orange for brighter tones allows keeping the skin tones look quite natural. In this nine-minute-long tutorial, Theo from MiesnerMedia shows us how we can achieve that trendy look using DaVinci Resolve 14.

An image can have a global color cast for a wide variety of reasons, and there are a multitude of techniques for correcting such issues. This clever technique can resolve a color cast with one click and also provides a way to do so for more difficult images.

Color has always been an Achilles' heel for me. When I first started in this industry, I was always looking for the magic answer: a specific Photoshop action, or a Lightroom preset, or a plug-in that did some kind of magic that created the color that I had wanted. Boy was I barking up the wrong tree.

There is a good reason that Ansel Adams' name has stood the test of time through the years. As one of the photographers in history who gets studied the most, Adams' work continues to be used as an example to photography classes and studies around the world. One of the reasons why he is still revered around the world is because of how carefully his images were crafted and how difficult they are to recreate. Digital and printed recreations of his images just don't quite have quite the depth and quality that his original prints do.

What's the first rule of any working professional photographer? Backups. What's the second rule of any working professional photographer? Backups for the backups.

How many of you have old memory cards, USB sticks, or even hard drives lay around doing nothing? Of those that answered yes, how many of you still haven't worked out a decent backup strategy for your images? Here's a quick and free solution to securely encrypt that unused storage so when a disaster strikes your most important work isn't lost forever.

Photographers who are active on social media often get a lot of questions about the technicalities of photography. Especially about nightscape photography – the subgenre of landscape imaging where you basically have a dark landscape set to some celestial backdrop featuring twinkly stars. Either through commenting on a shared image, a direct message, or an email, people ask about the type of gear that was used to capture a specific shot or any of the numerous variables that make up a given photo. Variables that range from the time of day to how many degrees of rotation on the polarizing filter. But this time I got an email that announced the inevitable demise of the subgenre of nightscape photography. But there’s a strong, intrinsic motivation for nightscape photography that I want to share with you here.

The Clone Stamp is the bread and butter tool for a lot of photographers, and rightfully so: it's a tremendously flexible and powerful feature that's strikingly simple in its operation, particularly compared to many other tools. This helpful video shows you a couple of quick shortcuts to get even more versatility out of the Clone Stamp.

If you are interested in the commercial side of the photography industry, working with models and agencies is a must. Approaching a modeling agency and asking to work with models can be intimidating, particularly when you aren't sure how to get started. Fortunately, Dublin based fashion photographer Anita Sadowska recently shared a video on her Youtube channel that provides helpful hints any photographer can use to get their foot in the door.