Education

A few quick things to consider when making the shift from still photography to cinematography.

One of the most challenging situations for any photographer, whether they're a beginner or a seasoned veteran, in shooting in low light. This quick, helpful video will give you eight tips to get better shots when shooting in low light.

Photography can be a frustrating pursuit, particularly when you don't come home with the image you wanted. That's when a bit of persistence can really be your best friend in helping you get the shots you want.

When you're new to lighting, the veritable plethora of principles, terms, and techniques can be a bit overwhelming, but there are a few fundamental principles that you should absolutely learn to ensure your understanding is secure. This great video talks about one of those principles.

You do the shoot, you get to the end of the edits, you send the client the exports, and they ask for revisions. Then they ask for more. And more. What do you do when your client keeps asking you to change things over and over?

Every photographer needs a good website; that's a given. What isn't so obvious is should you have a contact page? What about a photo on your bio? Is it best to have multiple galleries or everything on one landing page? Today Lee and I review a few websites to show you what does and doesn't work when displaying your work.

We spend a lot of time learning about lighting scenes — where to add it, how much to use, how to modify it, etc. And as important as it is to learn how to add light to a scene, it's equally important to know how to remove it, and this quick, helpful video will show you why and how.

Skin retouching has always been one of those things that require a bunch of work in Photoshop or an expensive add-on program. But the new ON1 Photo RAW 2019 has streamlined the entire process.

How many bags do you pack for a landscape photography trip? While your camera gear is probably the heaviest part of your luggage, your clothing may be the bulkiest. But as any mountaineer or thru-hiker will tell you, it doesn’t need to be that way!

What would it be like to take a year long travel sabbatical to photograph the world? When I started in November, I expected it to look like my last five years of landscape photography trips — just back to back. After just two months of being location independent, it’s fair to say I was pretty far off the mark. Here are seven lessons I’ve learned.

Sam Abell is one of the most famous American photographers of the 20th century, particularly known for his frequent work for National Geographic. This awesome full-length documentary will teach you vast amounts about what it means to take a photograph.

Hamish Gill, who runs a fantastic film-centric blog, 35mmc, has a great article up that addresses an often-asked question he receives: "Which film camera should I buy?" The spoiler is he doesn't have an answer.

There are many ways easily to cut out an object from an image using Photoshop, but inevitably, the very edge of your object is imperfect. In this video, Colin Smith at PhotoshopCafe shows us how clean up those edges not just quickly, but perfectly.

In the vast majority of my photos, I aim for one specific thing during editing.

Even though we're firmly in the age of Photoshop and advanced digital manipulation, the issue of honesty of representation and what constitutes cheating in photography has a lot more history and nuance than just the clone stamp. This thoughtful video examines the topic and what it means to cheat in photography.

Wedding photography has changed vastly over the years. And as much as there is a growing potential for newcomers, there is also an amassing amount of challenges that one has to encounter. It is wise to have a clear understanding of the industry before taking the plunge.

Most of us go to great lengths to keep our gear nice and clean. The last thing you want is for your lens to affect your images simply because of how downright filthy it is, unless that's exactly what you want. This video shows you how occasionally letting your gear get dirty can be a good thing.

Your camera has several different methods of calculating the correct exposure for a given image, and understanding how each of them works is crucial to getting properly exposed photos. This helpful video will help you understand metering modes.

When you're new to artificial lighting, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to put together successful images using strobes. This helpful video will teach you how to break down light so you can successfully create the images you'd like when you're using flash.

The Canon 60D was a great camera when it was announced back in 2010, but of course, like any other camera that's almost a decade old, it's been far outpaced by the technology that has come out since its release. And yet, this filmmaker has stuck with it despite all that.

Have you ever been confused about which color space you should use and wondered what the differences are? This video will help you understand, and most importantly, choose the correct one.

Fact is we are nothing but brains absorbing the necessary information around, which is needed to survive. Did you know that something as fundamental as colors are as much a cultural phenomenon as everything else?

Landscape photographers make use of filters quite a bit to help control and enhance their imagery and to enable certain artistic choices. This helpful video will introduce you to the different types of filters and how they affect your photos.

Last year, Fstoppers produced a tutorial with Monte Isom, which has helped numerous photographers including Gregg Shipman. In this video, Shipman details how he earned an extra $31,000 in just one photoshoot using the knowledge gained in the tutorial.

With the holidays coming up, you might be thinking of offering family portrait sessions or simply putting together a shoot for your own family. This quick video will give you some great tips for getting the best portraits you can in as little time as possible.

Being a photographer isn't the sort of job in which you can walk out the door at 5 p.m. and leave your work behind until the next day, which is why time is the most precious gift a photographer can receive.

You've probably heard before that you should not shoot portraits with a wide angle lens because it distorts the features in an unflattering manner, but there's more to that concept than just that advice. This great video will quickly clear up what is really happening when you change focal lengths.

Hiking is a natural part of landscape photography. A few friends have spent months “thru-hiking” the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail. In preparation for this life-changing endeavor, they did frequent repacking called “pack shakedowns.”

Photoshop is a complex program that takes years to master. And even after you've spent countless hours learning the ins and outs, surprising new shortcuts are a pleasure to discover.

For years, I considered myself purely a stills photographer. I resisted video like the plague. Little did I know that creating a YouTube channel to document an unrelated project would promote my creativity in ways I couldn't predict.

Lightroom can sometimes seem deceptively simple in comparison to its more nuanced cousin, Photoshop, but there are a lot of powerful capabilities lurking beneath the surface of the application. This great video will show you six different ways to color tone an image using Lightroom.

The aspect ratio of a video is a subtle parameter that can have a large effect on the final product. This excellent video examines the different things you should consider when choosing an aspect ratio for your work and how they'll affect how your viewer perceives the final product.

Most photographers have started with a crop camera when digital photography was introduced. Only after a few years, the full frame cameras became affordable and that is the moment when all the discussions about the effect of depth of field and crop sensors started, often with the mentioning of physics laws and mathematical calculations. Let’s try to find out with some real world examples.

If you own a cheap older lens, go back to the first set of images you captured with it, then compare those to images shot recently with that same lens. You might be surprised by how much better those old images look.

What can you do to make your outdoor shots stand out from the crowd? With a great location and a great model, you are set to get a successful series of shots, but how creative can you get? The one ingredient of a creative outdoor shoot is a simple yet strong theme.

Does the thought of SEO produce in you a mixture of fear and confusion? It's time to stop putting it on the back burner and get your photography website noticed on the front page of Google with these SEO tips.

One of the most popular genres of photography and perhaps one of the best for beginners to try is portraiture. This great video will give you a quick guide to planning a successful portrait photoshoot.

V-flats are traditionally not portable by any means. For those that have a little DIY in them, I made my own portable v-flats that I can take with me anywhere I need. Here’s how to make them.

I do not adhere to a certain style and that gives me a lot of freedom.

The HSL sliders are a powerful way to change the mood and tone of your images quite quickly in Lightroom. This awesome video tutorial will introduce you both to the theory behind them and how to use them to create images that better match your creative vision.

One of the greatest challenges that we have as photographers is to try to show a three-dimensional world in only two dimensions. That missing dimension, depth, can only be implied. There are many ways to create a feeling of depth. Lighting and composition are two, but my favorite is using what I call dimensional framing.

It's the time of year when you might be stringing holiday lights all around your house. Put them to use with this fun DIY project that only takes a few minutes to complete.

During a recent night out, I was asked the question: "What do you do for a living?" It was the perfect opportunity to practice being excited about my work, so I launched into my story. This was followed up with a question that often comes up in these conversations: “Why would someone hire you to fly around the world when they could save time and money hiring a local photographer?”

Photography is something where there are lots of little details, any one of which can make or break a shot. This great video talks about the many benefits of keeping something as simple as a notebook on you.

How do you level up your photography skills? The obvious places might be to peruse work by other photographers or watch some YouTube tutorials, but these are actually the least effective ways to learn: your best learning resource is your own library of bad photos!

It's often that us photographers can find ourselves stuck in a rut, looking up at other creatives and wondering where they get their ideas from and just thinking that some people have it, and some people don't. That little voice in our heads can really be detrimental to our self-confidence and reflect in our work.

Everyone wants to be a better photographer. Whether you're just starting out or are an established veteran, we're always wanting to be better at our craft. Today's video has some accessible tips for improvement that anyone can put into practice right away.

Any burger advertisement makes it seem like, for just a couple of bucks, you’ll get a juicy stack of meat piled high with vegetables on a crisp bun. Reality never meets expectations, of course, and so, if you’re wondering why your limp burger with wilted vegetables never looks like that advertisement, this video will show you why.

Returning to the same location repeatedly can yield some very different outcomes. Here I go through three years of photos from the same perspective.

A lot of photographers look for ways to give their portraits a three-dimensional "pop," whether that's through the lens used or some sort of post-processing technique. This great video will show you a quick and effective method for getting that look using Photoshop.