No doubt, photography is not a cheap hobby, and the camera gear hype machine is designed to make you continually reach for your credit card to buy the latest and greatest gadget, camera, or lens. Whether you are a new photographer or a seasoned veteran, though, it is important to remember that a compelling image is not made by a great camera, it is made by a great photographer, as this insightful video essay demonstrates.

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.

Every genre has different optimal gear setups, which is why it is important to sit down with your camera and take the time to adjust its settings to fit your subject matter and workflow. This helpful video tutorial features an experienced landscape photographer discussing seven camera settings you should turn off to make your workflow more efficient and to improve that quality of your images.

Are you not into abstract photography? It’s one of those things you’ll either love or hate. But it's important, and there is much more to it than you might know.

Lightroom is one of the most common applications in the photo industry, used by millions of photographers for cataloging their images and performing basic to intermediate edits on them. As the foundation of many photographers' workflows, it is important to ensure that you are using Lightroom correctly. This excellent video tutorial discusses three common mistakes photographers make when using the application and how to correct or avoid them in the first place.

It's always nice to nail that exposure for a beautiful portrait using a balance of different lights. Check out this short video by The Slanted Lens about the basics of shooting photos with Christmas lights. With the combination of proper exposure, time of day, a dramatic sky and some other pretty simple techniques, you can take some great holiday photos this season.

Making money from photography is becoming increasingly more difficult. Quite by chance, I have stumbled upon a system of selling my images that has proven far more effective than anything else I've done. This is how I do it.

What do you think it takes to become a pro landscape photographer? You might come up with a whole range of possible options, but according to this pro, you might be thinking about it all wrong. See what he says it takes.

Our ability to perceive the environment around us in the visual spectrum, or visual perception, is a combination of molecular biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology. These various vision mechanisms often change how we perceive what we see and can even vary depending on the environment in which we see them.

As photographers, we're acutely aware of resolving power; it's one of the fundamental measurements of a camera. Have you ever wondered what the resolution of the human eye is, though? It turns out that the answer to this question isn't as simple as quoting a figure. Check out this great video that explains how we should think about it.

Is your camera’s histogram still a mystery to you? Here is everything you need to know to read a histogram and how it will benefit you as a photographer.

Sure it's easy to put off watching a video that isn't under five minutes long. Sometimes you just have to make an exception, and the weekend is the perfect time to do it. In this video, David Brommer talks about not only the rules of composition, but the theory behind the rules we all know and how they relate to our way of seeing. He takes us through the history of painting (which is the best possible thing to study for composition) and how it relates to every single image we take.

It used to be that you generally used Lightroom for organization and light adjustments and Photoshop for heavier editing. However, in recent years, Lightroom has taken some remarkable steps forward, and you can now perform major edits without having to leave the program. This great video tutorial will show you how to use some of Lightroom's tools to add atmosphere to an image.

When you are new to photography, the veritable plethora of controls on a modern camera can be a bit overwhelming. This helpful video tutorial will show you which controls and settings you should focus on the most to master your camera and take more ownership of your creative process.

No doubt, the dark and moody look is highly popular nowadays, and it actually is not particularly difficult or time-consuming to achieve in Photoshop. This excellent video tutorial will show you what kind of photos work well for such a style and how to create it.

The overall layout and the placement of subjects within the frame can make or break your photographs. You may know the rule of thirds and the golden section, but composition goes way beyond that, and most of it is about simple geometry.

Getting skin tones just right is a subtle but very important aspect of creating professional portraits and setting your work above that of others. Photoshop has lots of tools for working on skin tones, but if you want to keep everything in one application, this helpful tutorial will show you how to get great skin tones working solely in Lightroom.

Shooting on a clean white backdrop can be one of the more complex in-studio lighting setups around. Properly exposing for full lengths while giving your models room to work can require four or more extra lights and considerable amount of setup time. While taking the time to take care of the details is important for getting the perfect image and saving yourself hours of retouching on the back end, sometimes you just want to get a nice clean background without the hours of prep.

When speaking of retouching, most people think of cleaning skin and altering the body shape. However, retouching goes further than that. Colors play such a significant role in an image, that forgetting about them would be a great mistake. Just like a good makeup artist shouldn't limit their job to the model's face, a good retoucher shouldn't stop the job with cleaning skin.

We spend quite a bit of time studying how to perform more extreme edits, and while those techniques certainly come in handy quite a lot of the time, knowing how to create a simple, clean, natural-looking image is an important skill. Whether you're a beginner or more experienced, this great video will show you how to easily get that look in Lightroom.

We all love a great landscape under an amazing sky. Clouds, sunlight, sunrays, and colors are often preferred over a simple and dull sky. But sometimes, nature doesn’t show us the things we like to see, something that can be frustrating if we can’t go back a second time. Is there a solution?

Today, I’d like to talk about three key elements that I feel make up each and every photograph we take. Of course they are not the only elements, but I feel that they are the most important. Specific shoots, like fashion or automotive commercials, require all sorts of preparation and specific skills. However, at the photographic level, three key elements still apply. If you consider your composition, light, and moment, you will be well on your way to making a successful photograph.

Jen Brook, a model, recently wrote an article to future brides to be about what to expect and how to prepare for being photographed on their wedding day. Her tips on posing, preparing, and practicing are a great read to share with your future brides.

Modern cameras can handle low light quite impressively, but high ISOs will still introduce some noise into your images. So, what can you do when that happens? This excellent video tutorial will show you how to process high-ISO images in Lightroom to reduce the appearance of noise while still maintaining sharp results with plenty of detail.

Photographers often get stuck in traps that drain time and energy without adding value to their craft. These mistakes can be discouraging, leading some to abandon photography altogether. However, identifying these pitfalls early on can save you a lot of frustration, helping you grow without unnecessary setbacks.

When it comes to processing your digital images, there are so many tools available to you and sometimes the process can seem a bit convoluted. Personally, I like to use a mix of both Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop to make the most out of my images. Perhaps I'll throw Capture One in the mix one of these days, but for now all of my postproduction work is done using Adobe software. This brief tutorial goes over one of the lesser-known tools that exists both in Lightroom and Photoshop, the Dehaze tool.

Shooting in harsh sunlight is always a challenge. Recently I shot a test while out on a trip in Los Angeles. Due to scheduling we had to start shooting around 4 p.m., so we were dealing with hard sunlight. In this post we will look at five different setups you can use to shoot in and manipulate these less than ideal lighting conditions. In a previous post, I showed how to quickly scrim hard lighting. In this quick tutorial we will look five different ways to light while in the same environment and conditions in order to alter the look of our image.

Most of us love images with vibrant, intense colors that pop off the screen and entrance our viewers. Getting that look in a tasteful manner takes a lot more than simply pumping the saturation slider to garish levels, however. This excellent video tutorial will show you some helpful techniques for making colors pop in a tasteful way using Photoshop.

I’m a big fan of getting images right in camera, and it's something that strive to do. I think there is something to be said for the skill that it takes, especially when shooting an event like a wedding. Getting the perfect light, the perfect composition, and the perfect moment while dealing with all the different variables of the day is quite a feat. The main image I’m going to be talking about today, though, does not fit into this category, but it still manages to be one of my favorite and most "liked” images.