Instagram Stories have become more and more attractive with the latest features such as the tag- and location-based stories. People seem to enjoy these features, and they can drive more potential followers to your account. However, quality content, even in Stories, remains king; and posting a video or a photo that stands out can really make a difference in bringing more followers to your page. As photographers or videographers, we truly have a massive advantage in producing great content that people want to see. So in this article, I’ll show you how to post your amazing work to your Story even if said content is older than 24 hours.

Getting film developed is expensive, and depending on where you send it, it can take more than a few days. If you find yourself with some old negative film strips and you're wondering how they would look today, check out this fun tutorial for developing them in Photoshop.

Nine-time Emmy award-winning TV producer and writer John Marshall found himself on Maine's Frye Island with too much time, talent and imagination. The result photo series, which he calls Sunset Selfies, is creative, whimsical and inspiring. I'd be ridiculously surprised if this doesn't spawn a whole slew of creative projects within our community, as enthusiastic shooters start cutting out their own cardboard silhouette to use during magic hour.

With just a few simple ingredients and a couple of camera hacks, you can make these otherworldly photos at home on a budget. From the comfort of your own living room, you'll be able to capture images reminiscent of those famous iPhone wallpapers.

Use two threaded circular filters at once and you run a terrible risk: they might get stuck together. It happened to me when I was using a neutral density filter and a circular polarizer. Here’s how I got them unstuck.

So you bit the bullet and invested in Lightroom 6. Then Adobe announced their new Creative Cloud program and you decided you would stick with Lightroom 6 until there were new features added that could justify the jump to that monthly payment plan. Well now there is this fancy new tool called the dehaze tool. It looks to be pretty great, but it doesn’t really justify the jump from something you own outright, to a monthly payment. Lucky for you there is now a free way to add the dehaze tool to Lightroom 6.

Knowing how to communicate with models and set up your lighting are crucial to shooting portraits, but what are some more practical tips for creating a striking body of work? This video lists 10 great ideas to get you inspired.

Gear Acquisition Syndrome isn't just about camera bodies and lenses; it definitely extends to lighting as well. But sometimes, it's great to see someone go back to the bare basics of manipulating light. That's exactly what Daveed Benito does in this great video in which he uses only flashlights, and watching his process is a valuable lesson in lighting.

Google’s Pixel has been hailed as one of the best on the market, some even calling it the best. I’m not saying the iPhone’s camera is lackluster, but is there something missing?

With the wedding season right around the corner, it is time to find a solution to improve last year’s workflow. Most event photographers complain about the same thing: culling. It can quickly become a very time-consuming task, and it is far from being the most interesting part of the job. Although, there are a few ways to help speed up the process while retaining a solid quality control.

Edward Weston began his career making soft, almost out-of-focus images that emphasized patterns and light. After a trip to Mexico in the 1920s, he decided that photography was really about details and realistic depictions of the world. He made a complete turnaround in his work and began making work that was simple and focused on tones and textures. He got so into "straight" photography that he didn’t even believe in cropping his images.

With Cam Link USB dongles proving both expensive and sometimes a little tricky to track down, you might be pleased to learn that more free workarounds are emerging. This video shows you how to set up your Fujfilm camera to work on your Mac computer as a webcam for use in applications such as Zoom and Facebook Live.

Google Photos is in the process of testing an enhanced search feature that allows users to perform complex queries, making it simpler and more efficient to find and manage photos within the platform. By catering to detailed and specific queries, users can locate their desired images with greater ease, thereby improving their overall experience.

If you're on a tight budget or don't have much room, this video will show you how to take advantage of literally every square inch you have.

What are your go-to troubleshooting tools when shooting landscapes?

If you are fan of DIY projects or are on a budget, this tutorial shows you all the steps for creating a simple yet effective globe light modifier for Paul C. Buff (RIP) strobes like AlienBees and Einsteins. Unlike many other DIY modifiers, this globe actually attaches the exact same way the retail modifiers do. Best of all, you can buy everything you need for under $25!

Creating your own photography studio doesn't have to be as expensive as you might think. For around five dollars, you could make your own studio setup to take some amazing portraits in the comfort of your home.

Working with a second shooter has a ton of advantages: you can cover more moments, you get different angles and perspective on the same moments, and they even allow you to try new things during the day that you normally couldn't afford to do. One of the more frustrating things about working with a second shooter though, is when you get back home to later find out that your cameras were not synced to the correct time. What you're left with is images from the reception all intermixed with images from getting ready.

Let's face it, we all use our phones a little too often. The average person checks their device over 100 times a day. For this reason, I decided to use a fairly unknown hidden function on most smartphones to help curb my habits. Not only did it help tremendously, but it also brought some unexpected benefits to me as a photographer.

The internet is awash with camera hacks, and most of them end up being pretty disappointing, often involving a glass ball, some fairy lights, or a cracked mirror. By contrast, this is a collection of five ingenious methods that not only offer shortcuts to getting some cinematic footage, but will hopefully trigger some inspiration.

We just can't seem to get enough of New York City-based Photographer David Bergman. Whether he's touring with Bon Jovi, shooting for Sports Illustrated, creating a 20,000-megapixel image, or just popping in with a quick tip from his "Two Minute Tips With David Bergman" series, David never fails to show us something worth our while. For his latest two-minute tip, he teaches us a quick and easy method for dealing with grey, overcast skies.

In this video from nature photographer Simon d'Entremont, he details many solid techniques to help you improve your photography.

The YouTube channel Rideable Entertainment may just have created the most impressive DIY camera slider I have ever seen. It's made partially of wood but not in a cheap way. It has more of a Steam Punk look to it with some effort put into the finishing. The most impressive part is that they even managed to make it motorized, something that a lot of affordable sliders in the early days couldn't even do.

If you look back to the beginning of photography, color didn’t exist. In fact, it didn’t exist for a long, long time. Even as 35mm film pioneered the way that photography was used and purchased, black and white was king. Slowly, as time progressed, color film began to take a foothold in the industry. Once legendary color films like Kodachrome and Kodacolor became widely available, black and white became far less popular for commercial use. Now, in the digital era, almost every digital camera records information in color. Why then, would I bother viewing my images in monochrome during my shoots, even if I know I’ll deliver them in color?

Many readers may already be aware of the big changes that came with Adobe's latest release, Photoshop CC 2019, but in this video, Colin Smith shows us some small features that can save you serious time if you work a lot with Photoshop.

If you're into that film noir look à la "Double Indemnity" (and who isn't?), this is the tutorial for you. Using only an off-camera flash, a food box, and some tape, you can create this moody and cool lighting effect.

This low-tech alternative to digital photography can produce stunning art. Last year, I've recovered five out of ten “cameras." Some are found by others and stolen, others are simply blown off by a passing storm. Yet others are removed by bomb squads... I'm sharing these pictures with you, which are scanned negatives of black and white photographic paper. The brightest parts are the sun's streaks, burnt and etched in the paper - along with bubbles, rips and sand that texturize the images in bizarre ways.

You probably use Lightroom because of the efficiency in processing batches of images, which in turn frees up more of your valuable time. But why use the software without the convenience of its many shortcuts, which save you time and make your work easier?

It’s always important to stop and smell the photos – but what happens when your stop is at night, in complete darkness without any lights to help you out? You improvise. There are a few things you can do to help you compensate for lack of proper lighting equipment.

I'm no painter. In fact, if we ever play Pictionary together, do your best to get on the other team. So, when I wanted to make my own custom backdrops, I knew I was way out of my depth. Like many photographers, I've drooled over Sarah Oliphant's hand painted backdrops for years. When I saw Jeremy Cowart draw his own backdrop on an iPad Pro, I thought I may have something within reach. While I continued trying to decide exactly what Oliphant backdrop I want to start with, I thought maybe I could experiment with some digital painting of my own.

At some point every photographer uses a backdrop of some sort. The problem is that they are usually large, heavy, and cumbersome. Hanging them can be a bit of a pain and mounting hardware can get pricey especially if you are dealing with multiple backdrops. Jay P. Morgan of the Slanted Lens offers up 3 simple DIY solutions for mounting backdrops that will save you time, money, and headaches.

Matt over at DIY Perks, a Youtube channel dedicated to electronic based DIY projects, made a tutorial on how to build a 1000w equivalent liquid cooled LED light. The best part is it's daylight balanced at 5600k so perfect for simulating a sunny day or Window light when the sun just won't cooperate.

The music business is a brutal, cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world and I lived it for nearly 10 years. Since the age of 16, I struggled as a touring musician, surviving off nothing but cold Spaghettios and sleeping in a decade-old 8-passenger van. I was fortunate enough to explore the nation and see things that most will never see, but by the time I left the business I was completely burnt out.

Filmmaking and photography are often about being as resourceful as one can and using creative problem-solving to get whatever shot you're interested in. The Gorillapod is a popular product built around that philosophy, and this helpful video shows you five different ways to extend its usefulness.

"I'm really starting to get tired of how blurry and pixellated my 4k image looks," said no one ever. But in the never ending quest to squeeze the most resolute, highest quality image possible out of our (relatively) inexpensive cameras, Art Sanchez was able to get 8k video from a $2,000 Nikon D800.

As you learned in my articles about editing mistakes, too strong image transformations can harm the quality of your photos. But if you use them selectively, they can be of great help. In this article, I show how to use selective image transformation in Photoshop to fix compositions.

After endless hours wasted, I found the solution for an issue I've had using the Intous tablet with my Macbook Pro. The brush would get stuck and I couldn't hit Photoshop shortcuts between brush strokes. I went through the hassle of reinstalling all drivers, buying a new tablet and setting all my Photoshop settings back to default before finding the following simple 30-second fix. This issue pertains to people using Apple computers with Photoshop CS6 or CC and a Wacom Intous tablet. The fix is for the following issues:

Maybe it’s nostalgia or maybe it’s a design classic. Whichever way you look at it, the Nintendo Game Boy and its camera accessory have achieved cult status among photographers and gamers alike thanks to the distinctive lo-fi digital images it creates.

Retouching is a great tool, one that can save pictures in some situations. However, there are a couple of things that can be really time-consuming and annoying to correct in post, two of them being flyaway strands and chapped lips. I am sure those two have happened to any of you who shoot portraits, beauty, or fashion. However, no need to fear these anymore! Jordan Liberty gives us his tricks to avoid them.

It all started with a conversation between filmmaker Justin Gustavision and I this past Friday. Justin works for Nadus Films who just released a brilliant award-winning documentary “BBoy For Life” which shows how break dancing has provided teenagers a way out of Guatemalan gang life. The film has been picked up by Starz and Discovery Channel, yet their social media presence could be considered dry, when it should be arousing a well-deserved tornado of hype.

I’ve always been enthralled with first person movie scenes, games and music videos. Clocking countless hours with Duke Nukem 3D in my parent’s basement on an old Packard Bell PC planted a seed that forever changed me. To this day I think The Prodigy's breakbeat electronic hit “Smack My Bitch Up” is one of the greatest first person videos of all time.

One may be the loneliest number, but it may also be all you need. Gear is necessary for photography. Gear is a huge part of the fun of photography for many photographers. And having a variety of lenses at our disposal allows us to get shots in all kinds of circumstances. But when you're not out shooting for money, and instead are trying out a slowed-down approach to photography for a personal project, one prime lens may do nicely.

I like beer. I like film. I like beer and film together, especially when you can process film with beer!

Inspiration can be hard to source at the moment, I'm sure I'm not alone on that. Fortunately, one photographer is printing creativity en masse and giving it away for free.

Lately, it seems as if I am seeing a lot of photos where the model or subject is seen through a window, for example, the shot where the model sitting inside a coffee shop enjoying a cup of coffee while the photographer snaps a photo from outside. If you are having trouble finding a location to do that, here's a hack for you to recreate a similar look.

Now that things are opening up again around the world, we can start doing outdoor photo sessions again, and this one trick will help you stand out in your community.

I didn't study photography in any official capacity — not unless you count a quick Google whenever there’s a term I don’t understand. So naturally, I'm biased in the argument about whether studying photography is worth it. But in my opinion, the most valuable asset to a photographer is something that cannot be searched on the internet, nor can it be taught.

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.

Light is a key factor in photography. It helps shape and create your photo. As the sun changes throughout the day, depending on where you are you may see some thin beams of light fall across the environment. Creating these thin light beams and adding them to your portraits can add some interesting looks. Controlling the light into small beams is one way to create drama and mood in your work. How would you create a thin beam of light on set?