Photography Education

Doing photography professionally will change the way you shoot and operate. If you are planning to go professional or have recently done so, these might be of help.  

Fstoppers is celebrating July 4th with our biggest sale this year. Buy any tutorial and you'll automatically save 20%. Bundle them together and you'll get up to 50% off everything in our store. This sale will expire next week, so be sure to act fast.

The easiest way to decide on which digital camera is right for you is to consider budget, size, features, and a few more things. Follow this guide on what to look out for and help make a decision for your first digital camera purchase. 

Portraiture is a challenging genre that requires sharp skills with the camera, in lighting, post-processing, and your ability to work with and pose a subject. If you have been feeling a little unsure of your work lately and need something to get you back on track, check out this great video tutorial that will give you five helpful tips to improve your portraits.  

Today, a short story about how forcing yourself to look at art from a different perspective can sometimes help you see the whole picture. 

Photo gear tends to be quite expensive, and when you are outfitting your camera bag, the costs can add up rather quickly. However, the used market is always bustling, and you can save significant amounts of money by buying what you need there.

Have you ever wondered what photography is? Often, we are all busy with figuring out the practicalities of it, and we never stop to ask ourselves what the heck it even is. In this article, I will define photography in the simplest way possible. 

When you think of retouching skin, you likely think of using Photoshop over Lightroom, and for deep or intricate work, that is definitely where you should be working. However, Lightroom offers some built-in tools for this, and they can often be all you need to produce a finished photo.

Most of us simply take our photographs, pop the memory card out of the camera, put it in our computer, and download the photos. But many professional studio photographers tether their cameras to their computers, and it can do a lot to improve both your workflow and the quality of your images.

Photography is quite full of rules on pretty much every topic, and they can be a bit of a double-edged sword in that they can guide you and help you to realize technically apt images, but they can also be creatively restrictive. So, what should your relationship with photography rules be?

Landscape photography is a challenging genre that demands a combination of a wide variety of skills to bring a finished photo to fruition. There are a lot of places where a mistake can derail things, and this excellent video tutorial discusses seven such mistakes and what you can do to fix them or avoid them altogether. 

Starting out in photography can offer some harsh lessons, but here are six useful insights and hints that will give you a sense of perspective and potentially improve your images. 

Landscape photographer James Popsys has put together a useful series of nuggets that will be of value to anyone who is relatively new to photography.

There are many bad photographers who think they are good. The topic of why has been discussed on countless occasions. But, is it a bad thing? Is it really wrong to be bad and think you’re good? Let’s find out. 

For some, having a wide variety of poses can be challenging. The model is limited by what they are wearing, what they have to hold or interact with, or even the vision or mood of the shoot. Beauty headshots provide their own limitations, here are some posing tips for your next beauty shoot.  

When starting out as a photographer, understanding how colors work together can be confusing, with color theory feeling daunting and sometimes a bit pointless. This short video gives you a fantastic introduction that will give you an insight into how to harmonize the colors in your photographs. 

In this article, you will discover the best video settings for editing on your iMac or Macbook Pro when you are color grading your footage in Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 17. 

Photography is tech-reliant. With cameras coming out so often, it’s easy to get lost in constantly upgrading your camera, lens, light, and so on. However, there is one thing that I am always upgrading as a professional photographer.  

Composition is one of the trickiest parts of landscape photography, particularly since unlike most other genres, you do not get control over the elements in the frame. If you are having a bit of trouble with your compositions, check out this great video tutorial that will show you some ways to improve them and show you some helpful examples as well. 

A good medium telephoto macro lens is one of the most versatile a photographer can have, useful not just for macro shots, but for sharp portraits, wedding ring shots, and much more.

Fashion photography is a team effort. You just can’t be the photographer, makeup artist, stylist, retoucher, assistant, and a whole crew by yourself. But how much should you outsource? Most photographers are happy to leave makeup to a dedicated specialist, but when it comes to retouching opinions differ.

Travel photography can be a tremendously fun and rewarding genre, but it comes with its own unique challenges, particularly with regards to time pressure and the need to be able to familiarize yourself with an environment and produce good images efficiently.

I listen to podcasts every day on all sorts of topics, including photography. Thus, I began thinking about how you start a podcast from scratch and whether, ultimately, you can turn them into money. I asked a veteran podcaster these questions and more.

Handmade selling is on the rise and with it comes an increasing number of new product photographers. Quality product photography is essential for marketing your goods, but it doesn't need to be expensive or overly technical. In fact, there are some easy things that you can adjust that will help elevate your product photographs to the next level!

Creating successful portrait photos takes the confluence of a wide range of skills and as such, it can be quite challenging. If you are looking to improve your portrait photos, check out this great video tutorial that offers a range of tips in just five minutes.  

With the rise in photographers choosing film over digital, large format film cameras are becoming more sought after. But can this look be recreated with a digital camera? Here’s how one photographer did it.  

The majority of landscape photos are shot with a maximum or almost maximum depth of field. Everything is sharp, from front to infinity and beyond. But have you ever considered shooting a landscape with a shallow depth of field?

If you shoot a genre in which you have to deliver a lot of similar images, you can save significant amounts of time and ensure greater consistency in your images by using Lightroom's batch-editing functions. This helpful video tutorial will show you a batch-editing workflow that will help you quickly get through large sets of photos. 

A portrait with a dramatic golden sky behind the subject is a highly popular and timeless look, and it is also a fantastic way to learn how to balance artificial and ambient light. If you are new to the technique, this helpful video tutorial will show you how to set up and shoot such a portrait, including a lesson in using high-speed sync. 

If you’ve viewed deep-sky astrophotos (not landscape astrophotos), you may have noticed that extremely long exposures (not counting mosaics) are used. In extreme cases, exposures may run over 12 hours. Unless you have a space telescope, it should be obvious that multiple exposures have been used. 

It is highly tempting to pull out your credit card and grab some expensive new piece of gear when you are feeling creatively stuck or like your technique just is not good enough. And while new gear can certainly be a lot of fun, if you spend money every time you feel stuck, you are going to quickly end up hurting.

Of all the genres, landscape photography often places some of the greatest emphasis on creating a fully realized image in the editing process. As such, there are a lot of places where things can go wrong. If you are new to editing landscape photos, this excellent video tutorial will show you six common mistakes and how you can fix or avoid them entirely.  

Some of the best advice you can get from a photographer when you are starting out is when a more experienced photographer answers the question, "what would you tell a younger you about photography?" Well, here is one photographer's five answers to that question. 

When you think of focal lengths for landscape photography, your mind likely turns to wide angle lenses, and no doubt, those are commonly used for a good reason. However, using telephoto lenses can really open up your creativity. Nonetheless, they come with their own pitfalls, and this great video tutorial discusses them and what you can do to avoid them.  

Low-light shooting brings its own problems with underexposure, high-ISO noise, and difficulty focusing. But with a few tweaks in Lightroom, you can save those otherwise lost photos and bring them back to life. 

A nighttime landscape shot with the Milky Way over the earth below can be dramatic and eye-catching, but they almost always require two separate exposures for the foreground and the sky to get the best image quality. Once you have your two images, you will need to blend them to create a single final frame, and this great video tutorial will show you how to do it using Photoshop.  

Lighting equipment can get really expensive quite quickly, but one of the most useful pieces of lighting equipment is actually extremely affordable. The 5-in-1 reflector is something that should be in every photographer or videographer's bag, and this excellent video tutorial will show you how to make use of it to dramatically improve the look of your video and images. 

Being a beginner at anything is daunting at first and photography is far from an exception. With such depth and technical knowledge, it can be overwhelming, so here are 20 essential tips that can help those photographers just starting out. 

You'll make countless mistakes as a professional photographer. This is how we grow as artists and entrepreneurs, and I encourage experimenting with your marketing and photography. I'm certain someone will object, but show the person without mistakes, and I'll show you a person who has accomplished very little.  

ND filters are some of the most commonly used photography accessories out there, and they are great for both creative and technical applications. If you have not used them before, this great video will show you how they work and what they are useful for.  

Have you ever wondered how to create a stronger portfolio and artistic voice? In this article, I will share my methodology for creating better photographs. 

Most of us do not particularly enjoy standing in inclement weather, particularly with expensive and often fragile photo equipment. However, if you are willing to weather the elements, you can often get dramatic and compelling landscape images that capture the viewer's eye. This excellent video tutorial will give you some great ideas for taking awesome images in the rain. 

It doesn't matter how proficient you are with your camera and how expert your post-processing skills might be, without a full and strong understanding of composition, you will likely fall short of great images, most of the time. 

Tripods are one of the most common and useful accessories a photographer or videographer can have, and just as important as the tripod itself is the head you put on top of it. There quite a few different kinds of heads, and this awesome video tutorial will show you how each of them works and which one is most appropriate for the work you do. 

You have probably seen jaw-dropping photos in which the moon aligns with some sort of natural or man-made landmark. They take a fair deal of careful and precise planning, however, and this excellent video tutorial will show you exactly how to do it to get your own shots.  

How often do you go back and look through old photos, even ones that did not make it into your portfolio? And how often do you really spend time with those photos, not just scanning them? It can be more valuable than you think, not just for your photography, but for your happiness and for finding deeper meaning.  

New cameras and lenses can be very expensive, but you can save a fair amount of money by buying used gear. However, there are, of course, certain considerations you should make before you buy that previously owned body or lens to ensure you are actually getting a good deal and are buying from a reputable and honest person.

Most people get into photography because it is fun and exciting. But when you do photography as a job or even if you are in school studying photography, it can at times lose its luster. Finding ways to bring joy and fun back to photography can be a challenge, but is a worthwhile pursuit. 

If you are shooting a genre that requires large telephoto lenses, then you know that they can be quite unwieldy to deal with. And while things like a monopod or gimbal head can help alleviate that issue, sometimes, you will find yourself shooting handheld with that behemoth lens.

Long exposures are by far one of the most popular creative uses of photography out there, and there are a ton of different ways to approach them. If you are new to them, this excellent video will teach you both how to choose the right ND filter for a long exposure and how to choose the correct shutter speed for the effect you want.  

If you’ve been shooting (landscape) astrophotos for a while but are relatively new to astronomy, you may be contemplating stepping up to a telescope for your astrophotography. But taking the next step isn’t as simple as getting a longer lens for more magnified views. You should understand the changes in your shooting and equipment that this implies.