Urban lifestyle photography has seen a surge in popularity in the last 10 years, particularly with the rise of Instagram. Here, COOPH give eight tips for improving your urban lifestyle shots.

All photographers can agree that you won't stay in business long if you do not charge for your work. But what if I told you that the best way to gain exposure to high-paying commercial clients was to give away your images for free? Today, we sit down with commercial and composite photographer Josh Rossi and explore the concept of free.

The ability to create images with powerful composition is one skill that separates great photographers from good ones. If you photograph weddings or anything involving outdoor portraiture, keeping these three tips in mind will help you to create strong compositions wherever you go.

There are two fundamental types of lenses: zoom and prime. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages, and it is important to understand them before you make your next purchase. This helpful video will teach you the differences between prime and zoom lenses and help you decide which is right for your work.

Retouching a portrait in Photoshop often takes the use of a wide variety of techniques, all of which you must have a good grasp of to create a professional image. This fantastic video will show you how to use frequency separation, dodging and burning, color grading, and more to retouch a portrait in Photoshop.

It can be easy to get caught up in things like talking about gear or finding dramatic locations for creating stunning images, but there is a lot more to becoming a successful and fulfilled photographer than just those things. If you want to both improve your images and enjoy the experience more, check out this awesome video tutorial that offers some excellent advice sure to put you on your way.

Editing software from Skylum has gone through a lot of changes over the past few years, and with its new software Luminar Neo, there's still lots of room for evolution in what the software can do for its users. HDR Merge was recently added as an expansion for the software, and this is one feature that had been asked for by its users for some time. Another feature that has been requested in forums quite frequently is the ability to stitch panoramas.

We have all heard photographers claiming photography is art, but what is art really? Moreover, who has the right to define it in the first place?

As a Creative Cloud subscriber, you gain access to the beta version of Photoshop, where you can test cutting-edge tools before they’re added to the main release. One of these tools is a powerful update to people masking, offering more flexibility directly in Photoshop.

When it comes to DIY hacks, there are some absolute beauties out there that demonstrate the wonderfully creative imaginations that people have. It’s no different when it comes to photography, and these hacks I’m going to share with you today might be some of the most outrageous you’ve ever heard.

Staying focused is a premium in the 21st century, and nothing makes you feel more lost in the sauce than not knowing which way your lens is pointed. This method will help you stay focused and help create a system to save all the information you come across in a searchable database for future reference.

Wide angle lenses are the standard choice for landscape photography, but they challenge the photographer to compose images in which a huge part of the scene is in the frame. This great video tutorial follows a photographer as he shoots with a super-wide angle lens and shows you how to compose with such a challenging focal length.

Portraits are such a special and intimate thing: they offer both a representation of the subject and a window into who they are, which is why it's so important as the photographer to give the utmost consideration to how we portray those two things. This wonderful video examines just that topic, connecting it to practical advice as well.

Shooting time-lapse video can be a slow start for many videographers. There’s a lot of time put into capturing every scene, and so when you’re just learning the ropes, mistakes in scene selection or camera setup can mean hours of shooting time thrown away. In this video, Moritz Janisch of Fenchel & Janisch gives newcomers some helpful tips on shooting better quality time-lapses in the city at night.

As photographers, it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that the latest and greatest gear will instantly improve our skills and creativity. However, this mindset can often hold us back from truly growing as artists and honing our craft.

Light stands are not known for being inconspicuous, and as such, if they are in your shot, they can be a real pain to deal with. However, with some careful planning, you can make it super easy to quickly composite the light stand out in Photoshop, and this helpful video will show you exactly how to do that.

Shooting portraits using natural light means paying careful attention to how that light is behaving and how it falls upon your subject. This insightful video gives you a series of tips on how to make the most of a wide variety of shooting conditions.

Replacing the sky in a photograph is traditionally a fairly tedious process, particularly if you are dealing with a complex structure consisting of things like tree branches and the like. However, Luminar 4 brought with it a new AI sky replacement tool that promised to drastically reduce the amount of time and effort that goes into the process. Can it hold its own with Photoshop? This great video pits them head to head to find out.

Camera sensors have become remarkably capable in recent years, able to capture scenes with wide dynamic range that would have been impossible for older models to handle. Nonetheless, there are still scenarios that exceed the abilities of even the best sensors. So, what do you do in those situations? Exposure bracketing is a powerful technique, and this helpful video tutorial will show you how to use it to improve your images.

Editing skies in landscape photos can be challenging, especially when you want to create a vibrant, natural look. Using Lightroom’s tone curve is an effective way to add depth and color without overcomplicating your workflow.

There are a bunch of different ways to make your photos stand out: great light, gorgeous model, amazing locations, idealized retouching, but one that is often overlooked in favor of these less subtle approaches is color. We photographers tend to schedule a shoot, show up, capture what's there, and pat ourselves on the back for our genius, but what goes into the shoot before we schedule it can be just as important to the end result as what we do with our lights or our camera. Let's look at an example from my work for Lifetime. No lights. No reflectors. Just color.

When you're new to artificial lighting, one of the trickiest parts can be understanding the vast array of different modifiers and which one is appropriate for whatever you're shooting at the moment. This helpful video will show you a variety of common modifiers and how they change the look of your images.

One of the most challenging parts of landscape photography is that you constantly have to balance ever-evolving conditions, seeking out new compositions, and managing camera settings and equipment. What if you could remove one of those from the equation, though? This excellent video tutorial features an experienced landscape photographer discussing how you can make finding new compositions far easier.

Eyes are often the focal point of a portrait, and enhancing them can take your images to a new level. With a few creative Photoshop techniques, you can add captivating detail and depth to the eyes, making them stand out without looking overdone.

Photographing The World Behind The Scenes Episode 5 is here. In last weeks episode (episode 4) we spent our last day in Iceland, and our photography guide went on a rant about photographers that is so hilarious, his rant has more views than the entire episode. In episode 5 we leave Siggy behind and fly to the opposite side of the world, New Zealand.

If you spend enough time on the internet, you might begin to get the impression that you have to be at epic locations to get portfolio-worthy images. But travel is expensive and time-consuming, and all those locations have been shot to the point of nearly being cliché. Instead of dropping a bunch of money to travel to a faraway location, give the "boring" hometown photography challenge a try instead.

If you’re making a film, obviously the focus needs to be on the story. It seems that’s become the popular counter to a lot of debates about the fine-tuning of an image. While Roger Deakin’s mentality of “the type of camera doesn’t matter” can hold true on most levels, if we’re going to take ourselves seriously as creatives we need to be actively making decisions about how and why we create. Why do you choose this over that? And how does it affect story? One of the most important decisions you make as a director of photography or cinematographer is about lenses.

A lot of beginner photographers hear the advice that professionals only shoot in manual mode and that it is a necessary method for becoming truly adept with a camera. And while there is certainly some truth to the benefits of using manual mode, you might be surprised just how often professionals use various semi-automatic modes, and this great video discusses why and how they can benefit your own work.

What do you think of when you hear the term "composite"? Lots of hours with the Pen tool cutting out elements or fiddling around with the Refine Edge tool?

Flash can be an excellent tool to freeze motion, especially when you are working in the studio or do not have extreme amounts of available light for using ultra-fast shutter speeds. But you can get even more creative results by mixing the freezing power of a flash with a long exposure that captures motion, and this fantastic video tutorial will show you how it is done.