Recent Education Articles

Five Helpful Tips for Better Wide Angle Landscape Photos

Every focal length has its own challenges, and when it comes to wide angle lenses, creating effective compositions can be particularly difficult. This helpful video will give you five tips for creating more compelling wide angle shots.

Learn the Exposure Triangle and Histograms for Better Landscape Photography

There are three basic elements that control the exposure or overall brightness in your images: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. But aside from controlling exposure, these camera settings also have a couple of side effects. To help understand all this, Dave Morrow comes to our rescue by teaching the exposure triangle.

How to Create Captivating Self Portraits

Have you ever had an incredible idea, but couldn't find a model to help you? Learn how to bring your vision to life through the art of self portraits.

How to Replace a Sky With a Better One Using Photoshop

One of the most useful Photoshop skills you can have is the ability to convincingly replace the sky in an image. This great tutorial will show how to do just that, from placing and masking the sky in to blending it effectively.

How to Shoot Neon-Themed Portraits at Home

If you're ever seen portraits shot somewhere like an arcade or next to a neon sign, you know they offer a neat look full of washes of color that envelop the model. If you don't have access to such lighting, this great video will show you how to recreate the effect at home.

Making Black and White Prints in the Darkroom

Just a couple of weeks ago, Ilford Photo released a video on how to develop your own black and white film. Now, they've followed it up by giving you everything you need to know in order to turn those negatives into beautiful, tangible prints.

How to Develop Your Personal Style as a Creative Professional

In this world filled with talent rising everyday, personal style is very important to any creative professional. It not only gives you the edge to stand out from the crowd but also serves as the unique selling proposition to market yourself. How does one get to develop one's own personal style?

The Most Important Thing to Do Before Sharpening Your Images

The Internet is full of articles and videos telling you what technique will revolutionize the way you add sharpness to your images, but almost none of them tell you the most crucial step to take before sharpening, no matter the technique. In this article, I’ll show you this simple yet essential action to make your sharpening genuinely efficient.

Have a Point of Departure

With the latest video from COOPH Ralph Gibson reveals that to be a good photographer, you need a point of departure. There are some great overall tips too, but what this means is what kept coming back to me.

How to Successfully Re-establish Yourself as a Photographer After Relocating

Relocating is never easy but it can be an incredible step in a photographers' career and craft. A new city, state, or even country is a blank canvas with endless possibilities. These possibilities and work to be done in order to transition can be overwhelming, where do you even begin?

Tips To Maximize Your SmugMug Account

My workflow has relied on SmugMug starting back in March of 2008, and after a decade of use, my organization was a disaster. In that ten-year span, the focus of my business has evolved, and SmugMug's features grew with it, and my account was well past due for cleaning house a remodel. Part how-to and part review, check out what I did to revamp my account so you can easily configure your site like a pro.

How to Shoot Long Exposures in a Stream with No Tripod

You're trekking across Scotland and you come up to a waterfall that's screaming to be photographed. In your mind, you already know you want that beautiful, streaky, long-exposure water. As luck would have it, you're hungry, shaky, and your tripod is enjoying a day off in your Airbnb. What's next?

Five Hacks for Video With a Smartphone

The video quality a smartphone is able to produce these days is so good that you can use it for a lot more than just vacation memories. If you want to take it to the next level, here are five tricks to make your iPhone videos stand out without spending more than a couple of bucks.

How Introverts Can Become Great at Promoting Their Work

In the competitive world, marketing one's work is very crucial to the success of every photographer and professional. And if you are an introvert, it might look like one uphill task, but not when you understand the knacks to build confidence.

Why The Gear You Have Does Not Matter

G.A.S (Gear Accumulation Syndrome), is something all photographers feel it at some point in their careers. That feeling the gear they have is never good enough. Learn how to overcome that, and start taking the photos you've always dreamed of today.

Tips for Shooting Abroad

Whether you are a landscape, street, or portrait photographer, there are ways we navigate differently abroad as opposed to within our own hometown. Here are some tips to ensure not only that you come home with photos you are happy with, but also that you get to take home a bit of the culture with you as well.

Apple Shares Some Tips for the iPhonographers Out There

The iPhone has become the world's most popular camera. Apple has done a lot of marketing specifically surrounding the camera features and now shares a few iPhone shooting tips it recommends in a new series of fun videos.

Introducing Kids to Photography With a Kids Photo Walk

It felt good to watch what was possibly the largest group of kids with cameras ever in my little community diving head first into photography. Are you ready to inspire the next generation of photographers where you live?

Common Blunders Photographers Make

On the surface, it would appear to most that photography is a straightforward endeavor. Point the dedicated camera or smartphone at your desired subject, press or tap the shutter, and hey presto the magic happens. Funny thing is, simple as one can make it sound, still there is so much room for even professional photographers to botch things up.

Going Back to the Basics and Learning to Recognize Good Light

These days there are a million things that you need to juggle simultaneously as a working photographer. You need to be managing your website, social media, and constantly be replying to emails. We tend to forget the actual craft of photography and most importantly telling your story with light.

Simple Tips and Tricks to Make Footage of Yourself Look Professional

Filming yourself is tricky business, as you can't be behind the camera to make sure everything is going as it should. This helpful video will walk you through all sorts of things you should consider to make footage of yourself look professional.

Learn How to Do Long Exposure Photography

When each frame takes a half a minute or more to capture, the road to learning long exposure photography can be a long one. Here’s a much-needed shortcut to get started with this classic photo technique.

Eight Tips to Increase Your Instagram Likes

Like it or not, Instagram is a viable tool for a lot of photographers to showcase their work and find potential clients. This great video will give you eight tips for increasing your likes on the app.

Tips and Tricks for Cold Weather Photography

Winter is coming. Scratch that — winter is here. Are you prepared to brave the cold to keep shooting? Check out these cold weather photography tips.

How to Rock Your First In-Person Sales Portrait Session

Clients these days prefer to stare at your work on their phones rather than a framed work of art to pass on for generations. This is where the art of selling prints comes in to play. In just five simple steps learn how to take your print sales to the next level and see why once you start selling prints, you'll never look back.

Seven Tips to Help You Become a Better Photographer

Photography is a process in which you never stop learning and there's always something you can improve. This great video will give you seven tips to become a better photographer.

Three Ways to Get Bokeh in Camera

In the realm of photography, bokeh (shallow depth of field) is extremely popular amongst many. Creating a creamy out-of-focus background behind your subject helps forces the viewer to focus their attention on a particular area. So how do you get that creamy bokeh in camera?

Start Using Smart Previews to Speed Up Your Workflow

Being connected to your devices may not always be practical for editing, especially when traveling. Smart previews can help you edit on the go but also free up your storage as well. With the WPPI conference fast approaching this is the best time to create your previews and let your external hard drives stay put at the house.

Tips on Capturing Mesmerizing Images of Children

It can be difficult enough to photograph adult models, but using children as models is a new level of challenging. There are a few tips to remember to make your shooting process a bit easier.

Three Common Misconceptions About Camera Raw Smart Objects in Photoshop

Smart Objects in Photoshop are a fantastic tool to avoid working in a destructive fashion when filters, such as Camera Raw, need to be used in the retouching process. In this video, Greg Benz clarifies three common misconceptions to save you useless worries or precious time.

Creating an Angelic Lens Flare in the Studio

Shooting portraits might become monotonous if you are only capturing what is obvious in front of you. A little imagination and technique can help you spruce things up. How about creating an intentional angelic lens flare?

Everything You Need to Know for Your First Paid Photoshoot

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.

Lens Hood Basics: What You Need to Know

If you’re new to photography, you may be wondering what’s the big deal with lens hoods. Here’s a quick two-minute breakdown of why exactly you’ll find them attached to lenses everywhere.

Working With a Limited Color Palette in Studio

During the conceptual stages of a portrait shoot, when deciding which color palette to incorporate, could less possibly be more? This brief video from Adorama TV features small home studio savant Gavin Hoey showcasing for us how to create effective portraits in studio within a limited color range.

Planning and Executing Your First Photo Editorial

The in-between stages of fashion photography can be knowing which ideas for stories serve best as test shoots and which are worth pushing forward as a full editorial. Do the benefits of a cohesive editorial outweigh the efforts required to make it? This article breaks down the steps required from idea to execution.

Blend-if: One of the Most Useful Features in Photoshop

The Blend-if feature is easy to miss if you're not looking for it in Photoshop, but it's one of the most useful tools you can have in your post-processing kit. This great video will show you what Blend-if is and how it works as well as some useful examples.

How to Add Depth and Drama to a Landscape Image in Lightroom

Half of creating a landscape image is in the editing process. This is where you shape the photo to match your personal style and to make whatever statement or evoke whatever feeling you'd like it to. This helpful video will show you how to add depth and drama to a landscape shot using Lightroom.

The Importance of Patience in Landscape Photography

Landscape photography can be a fickle thing, particularly since you're very much at the mercy of the light and elements. That's when patience becomes an important virtue from which you'll reap the rewards, as this great video talks about.

The Importance of Work-Life Balance as a Freelance Photographer or Videographer

A lot of us love freelance life simply because it's not the corporate grind. And while that's a great perk, one benefit of the corporate life is a (normally) clear delineation of where work ends and life begins. This great video examines finding that same delineation as a freelance photographer or videographer.

A Guide to Processing Your Own Black and White Film

If you're just starting with film photography or are interested in it, processing your own film can seem a bit daunting, but it's really not that hard, especially with black and white film. Furthermore, it can be immensely satisfying. This great video will show you everything you need to get up and running as well as the entire procedure.

Learn How to Balance Strobes and Ambient Light for Great Sunset Portraits

One of the most fundamental skills you can have when it comes to artificial lighting is learning to balance the ambient and strobe. This great video goes behind the scenes of a sunset portrait shoot to show how to do just that to get both a properly exposed subject and background.

Why Practicing Minimalist Landscape Photography Can Make You a Better Photographer

Minimalism in any art form is a deceptively difficult thing to pull off successfully, as the increased importance of every element shrinks the line between profound and mundane to a razor's edge. Nonetheless, the practice of minimalism — even if only ars gratia artis — can be a sort artistic sieve through which a clarity of your own expression emerges.