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A Look at a Commercial Photographer's Marketing Emails

Marketing is tough. It is hard, a bit of a dark art, and also very much something that you can't learn overnight. Chances are your photography is good enough, but you are still struggling to get work.

The Truth About the Exposure Triangle, and Should You Use It?

Making the relation between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO visible is the idea behind the exposure triangle. I have seen many beautiful drawings of the exposure triangle, but what does this diagram really show? Let’s find out.

Don't Forget Why You Should Be Taking Photos

It can be easy to get caught up in the annoyances of professional obligations or to simply grow bored or tired of photography from time to time, which is when it is important to remember why you should be taking photos in the first place. This thought-provoking video discusses why.

A Start-to-Finish Landscape Photography Tutorial for Beginners

Landscape photography can be tricky to learn, as it takes the confluence of several techniques and creative ideas to make a complete photo. If you are new to landscape photography, this fantastic video tutorial will show you how to take a shot from start to finish.

A Complete Guide to Editing a Portrait in Capture One and Photoshop

Capture One and Photoshop make for a powerful combination for editing portraits to produce professional results. This fantastic video tutorial gives a complete guide to editing a portrait from start to finish using both applications and a wide variety of creative tricks and techniques.

Does EXIF Data Prove Trump Is Lying to America?

I'm not one to write political articles, and I promise you this one isn't meant to be pro-Trump or anti-Trump. However, as photographers, we've been told that a photo is worth a thousand words. What if the words these photos replace tell a very different story?

These Mistakes Held My Career Back for Years

We all make mistakes in our journey to be professional photographers. In this video, I have put together the biggest mistakes that I made that have slowed down my career in the hope that you can avoid them

10 Great Tips and Tricks for Better Editing in Photoshop and Lightroom

Both Lightroom and Photoshop are complicated and nuanced applications with wide ranges of capabilities and features. This excellent video tutorial details 10 helpful tips and tricks for using them that will help you edit more quickly, find new capabilities and ways of doing things, and create better overall images.

Using Shallow Depth of Field in Landscape Photography

When you think of aperture choice and depth of field in landscape photography, you likely trend toward using narrow apertures for a wide depth of field. And while that is certainly a great way to approach images, you can create unique photos by using a narrow depth of field, which is what this excellent video explores.

Adobe Demonstrates Powerful New Sky Replacement Feature Coming to Photoshop

One of the most well-known features of the new AI-processing technologies in various post-processing programs is automated sky replacement, which takes a lot of the time and effort out of what is traditionally a rather tedious task. Adobe is the latest to offer their own version of the technology, as demonstrated in this new video.

A Spot Metering Crash Course

Spot metering is just a camera feature that measures the exposure from a single point. However, it is often misunderstood, and utilizing spot metering correctly may widen your technical capabilities when shooting in manual mode.

A Beginner's Guide to Layers in Photoshop

Photoshop is a very complex tool full of a wide variety of powerful features, but perhaps no feature is more crucial to editing images than layers. If you are new to Photoshop, this great video tutorial will show you how layers work in just a few minutes.

Common Post-Processing Mistakes Made by Beginners

Working in Lightroom and Photoshop (or your post-processing programs of choice) takes the confluence of a wide range of knowledge and technique along with a good creative eye, and it can be a bit tricky to bring them together all at once, even for seasoned photographers. This excellent video discusses three common mistakes beginners make when they are learning about post-processing their photos and how to fix them.

Common Financial Mistakes That Hurt Creatives

You can have all the technical proficiency and creative vision in the world, but if you are not good with your finances, you will have a lot of trouble building a successful photography or videography business. This excellent video discusses some common financial mistakes that creatives make and how to remedy them.

5 Ways to Retouch Skin Using Lightroom and Photoshop

Skin retouching is a skill and there are various ways to go about it, with some requiring more time and effort to give more refined results. Here are five techniques broken down, using both Lightroom and Photoshop.

8 Essential Composition Tips to Improve Your Photography

Landscape photography is the art of seizing the beauty of the outdoors through images. Landscape photographers aim to make their viewers feel as if they’re walking into a scene without having to get out of a sheltered building. But what is composition, and how is it helpful in landscape photography?

How to Swap Faces and Expressions in Photoshop

Changing a subject's face or expression from one image to the next isn't as difficult as beginners think it will be. Here's a quick tutorial on exactly how you do it.

A Seven-Step Process to Sharper Landscape Photographs

Excellent sharpness is one of the top requirements for a successful landscape image, and there are steps you can take all throughout the process of shooting to help ensure that your image is pin-sharp. This excellent video gives a great seven-stop process to help you get those sharp photos.

A Deep Dive Into Photoshop's Adjustment Layers

Photoshop's core adjustment layers are diverse and powerful, but are you using them to their full potential? I'm going to bet that you're not; check out this video to find out why.

The Most Common Food Photography Mistakes

Food and product photography is an ever-growing niche, and with this comes trends in the pitfalls and mistakes that we all make when photographing food. In this video, I cover the most common things that trip us up.

How to Increase Your Chances of Winning a Photography Competition

There's a huge variety of photography competitions, from your local camera club, to huge global awards and some big prizes if you win. So, how do you win a photography competition, and is there a special formula you can use to reap the rewards?

Building a Magical Empire: Fstoppers Interviews Bella Kotak

Bella Kotak is an international fine art, fashion, and portrait photographer whose magical aesthetic has gained her fans all across the globe and garnered her features in industry magazines like Rangefinder and PhotoPlus, but her photography career didn’t start in the happiest place.

Will Off Camera Flash Make The iPhone a Professional Camera?

The day has finally come when photographers can sync their powerful off-camera flashes with their Apple iPhone using Profoto's new AirX syncing system. Being the skeptic I am, I had to see for myself if using 500 Ws of powerful strobe light with your cell phone was simply a gimmick or potentially an industry game-changer. Today, I'm left swallowing my pride.

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.