Most car guys would be happy just to see a McLaren Mp4-12c in the flesh. Getting to hang out with one for a day, while also being paid to take photos of it, would be "dream job" material. Clearly Dallas based photographer Brian Braun is living the dream!

Good action scenes are not always achieved through complex VFX, expensive practical effects such as explosions, or carefully choreographed fight sequences. In this video, you will see a few simple tricks that can help you tell an action story better using your existing tools.

A long-time friend of Fstoppers Felix Hernandez shoots an out of this world cover for Top Gear Magazine. This project is a perfect example of how brands, publications, and artists can collaborate authentically.

While most of us here have been through the experience of your first paid photoshoot, there are definitely a lot of users here using the content of this site to further themselves to a professional level.

Last week I shared the story of Andy and Jess Wickstrom and the DesignEgg. Continuing with the theme of creatives who travel full-time for their work, brings me to the husband and wife photography team of HagePhoto.

Lens choice affects everything about a scene in a movie. In this video for Vanity Fair, Newton Thomas Sigel explains some of the reasons why cinematographers choose wide angle, normal, and telephoto lenses.

I am going to walk you through how these dramatic food shots were created using only one flash and simple light shapers to imitate light coming through a window frame.

We're back with more deals and announcements from B&H and this time we've got some newly announced Macbooks, a 25% discount on 16GB Sony SD Cards, nearly half off Manfrotto 190 tripod's after mail in rebate and big savings on Olympus lenses! If you're interested in any of these deals, check out the links below!

Mercedes-Benz – yes, the automobile manufacturer -- has shared a nice video featuring The Impossible Project and their quest to bring instant film back to the marketplace.

As the video explains, six years ago IMPOSSIBLE started with a factory and little else. The company was able to redevelop the necessary processes and materials to produce instant film. They now offer 600-type film, SX-70-type film, and even 8x10 black and white instant sheets.

I shoot for a clothing boutique and we shoot outside at the same area weekly. To say I have overused the available locations is an understatement. Sometimes I find myself on the side of the road, next to a rundown building I’ve shot at 20 times already, and think to myself, how in the world can I make this different? I’ll bet most of us have been there at some point.

One of the hardest parts of filming on moving sets such as moving cars or trains is to maintain perfect lighting in a way that makes sense to the viewer. There are many obstacles the filmmakers have to deal with when shooting on a moving set, like how to move the lights while keeping it on the same angle while the vehicle is moving and how to keep the camera shot steady and focused on the subject. Check out this great BTS video showing how filmmakers in China solved these problems.

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.

Photographers Kristina Sherk and Chris Crumley have been a dynamic pair for years with their underwater photography. Crumley's shots of Sherk's mermaid modeling have gone viral around the world. However, Sherk decided to take on a new endeavor and create her own underwater art.

I'll start with a rather obvious warning: this video and article may contain spoilers for anything that happens up to and including episode 2 of season 7 of "Game of Thrones." With that out of the way, we can look at how the incredible fight scene of that second episode was created.

Who doesn’t love watching the X Games? Those athletes are crazy. Just as captivating, though, is this behind-the-scenes two-part video on The Northface and X Games Baldface commercial. Director Todd Jones pulls out all the stops in this two part BTS documentary, breaking out a Phantom HD Gold, a helicopter, and building one really enormous jump.

What have you done to get the shot today? Parked your car, walked into a studio? Plunked down a tripod on a sandy, tropical beach? Fiddled with some macro rails? South African aviation photographer Justin de Reuck unstrapped a good deal of his harness, slid open the canopy, and took photos at what I'm guessing is 100 knots, mere feet from the ground. I'm not sure how that plane actually took off with Justin's balls of steel on board, because man, they must be huge.

Here's a brief behind the scenes video featuring Andrew Geraci and Drew Breese in a Q&A regarding their haunting video, "Asylum". This HDR time-lapse was created from 35,000 photos over 7 months. If you missed this last week on Fstoppers, it's here in the full post. As the BTSV reveals, Drew and Andrew made this for no other reason than the love of shooting. That alone is worth your attention.

Vincent Laforet's famed "Air" series takes yet another turn from New York and Las Vegas, finally arriving in San Francisco. Fstoppers caught up with Laforet to discuss ever-shifting challenges throughout the project, G-Technology's recent support of the project which will bring it to Europe this summer, and the future of the project as a whole.

With the recent addition of albums to Instagram, photographers have a fantastic opportunity to add videos such as behind the scenes, short vlogs, or even short clips along with their images. However, if you are like me, cinematography is kind of a new world. While setting up the camera to film isn’t incredibly complicated, editing the content afterward is like learning Photoshop all over again: a nightmare! Thanks to YouTube and amazing people like Ben Brown, getting a grasp of Adobe Premiere’s basics isn’t too difficult.

Summer is in full swing and that means there's plenty of blockbuster films to see over the next few months. One that my son and I are looking forward to is the next chapter in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise starring Jack Sparrow, aka Johnny Depp, along with returning original cast Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. This is the fifth installment of the franchise and it hopes to breathe a fresh take on the story that brings back key characters from the first couple films. In this video, you get a fantastic glimpse into what makes these movies what they are and it gives you a hint at how they do it.

For the yet unreleased October 'survival' issue of Backpacker magazine, adventure photographer, Bud Force, decided instead of having a model dangling perilously off of a cliff that he would do a creative composite. He shot the background at 'El Capitan' peak in Guadalupe Moutains National Park and the subject at Mineral Wells State Park.

Hollywood's latest A.I. thriller, "Ex Machina," promised to take viewers on a fascinating and thrilling philosophical, ethical, and human journey. The Turing test, man's domination over machine, artifically intelligent machines' potential and perhaps inevitable self-awareness and domination over man, and an eccentric Silicon Valley-like billionaire-type leading the helm... how could this not be a great film? More on that later, but to make all of this happen, director Alex Garland and VFX supervisor Andrew Whitehurst had to create a robot that would connect so well with audiences that we would treat it as any other human character.

Hiring a professional makeup artist for your studio can be a daunting task, but one that can be rewarding when it comes to client satisfaction. In the second half of this two-part interview, we will delve a little more into what we, as photographers, should be looking for when we set out to hire a makeup artist for our own studios.