Education

Silhouette portraits are always fun to experiment with, and it’s easy to assume that we are limited to sunrise and sunset for capturing this type of image. With knowledge of camera exposure settings and a single off-camera flash, this style of portrait can be produced at any time of day or night.

Is your Instagram really working for you? We all know how important a tool such a social media is to help create a brand and attract clients who may want to hire you. If you're finding that your account is struggling to grow then you might be making some of these many mistakes.

With a little work, it's possibly to create fairly convincing lens blur using Photoshop. This tutorial will show you just how to do just that.

When you rely on creativity for work, a battle with the absence of these abilities can be detrimental, especially when you’re freelance. No matter what type of creative work you do, there will come a time when you feel like your powers have dried up and you are no longer capable. It will seem like the ability to do anything is gone forever, everything you make is crap, and no good ideas seem to be coming to you. To understand this problem as universal and cyclical is a step towards understanding what it is that drives your creative abilities. There are ways to elevate past these woes and continue creating your best work. Here are five easy practices that can help you in your woes next time you are met with a creative block.

There are often things that are helpful to workflow, no matter how minor they are. One of my favorite customizations to a new install of Photoshop is the cursor customization. When watching a tutorial and I see the instructor clicking through a menu instead of using a shortcut key for something as simple as duplicating a layer, I can understand the reason why. When demonstrating to people, it's valuable to slow things down and make sure they understand. It may seem subjective to flat out say that changing the cursors is the best thing to do, however I believe that once you try it you will agree.

Super recognizers are people with extraordinarily good face recognition ability. It is estimated that less than 2 percent of the population are super-recognizers. Are photographers any more likely to possess this superpower?

In August 2015, I quit all working commitments and took the leap in to full-time photographer. In March 2016, I wrote an article of advice about being a photographer I wish I'd known earlier after I began to scrutinize my performance under the new, professional microscope. Well, time has elapsed, shutters have shut over 100,000 times, and more things have been learned. My photography business has grown in this interim and I found myself thinking about this aforementioned article again. Here are seven of the most important things I have learnt about being a professional photographer that I wish I'd known earlier.

If you're looking to try out film for the first time, the veritable myriad of choices can be a smidgen overwhelming. This remarkably comprehensive guide will tell you everything you need to know about all the 35mm ISO 400 options on the market right now.

David DuChemin has become very well known for his so called “sermons” on vision. He has written books about it, including the beautifully crafted "VisionMongers." He is a champion of exploring art over exploring gear, and even his YouTube show uses his motto in its title, “Vision is Better.” In Episode 61, he goes into a common misconception about vision and style. Then he offers us a few tips on how we can get over our difficulties and find our own work.

One of my biggest pet peeves is working with wedding videographers that treat their craft like it’s photography. In doing that, a lot of talented people sell their art form, and the art form of their peers, short. So what can you do to focus your videography and cinematography skills and make your wedding videos more refined? Think like a filmmaker.

Giving your portraits a cold, dramatic finish is a neat way to give them an alternate look that makes them stand out a bit. This helpful tutorial will show you how to take a standard portrait and transform it, and it does it using only Lightroom.

A good portfolio is never finished. Portfolios, books, albums, or websites, however a photographer's body of work is contained, it should be ever-evolving and developing even after a photographer has started working on professional projects. Any perception that a photographer can leave a portfolio static once work starts flowing in is a dangerous one. For a number of reasons, developing and improving is an on-going process.

When I first decided to try converting some of my photos to black and white, it seemed very hard to get good results. I would often rely on using the desaturate adjustment in Adobe Photoshop that I learned in high school 20 years ago. This makes for some very flat and gray looking images. From there I found better results by using tools like Photoshop actions and Nik Silver Efex. This method still lacks control a bit, and in my opinion anytime you have to leave Adobe Lightroom, your workflow speed is taking a hit. Once I learned to emulate the monochrome photos I was attracted to and impressed by, my work started getting better.

You’ve got a solid website, your photography skills are on point, you’ve been around for awhile, but you still aren’t getting any clients. Peers’ businesses are booming, you know there are plenty of clients to go around, and yet, you’re still struggling to get by with your photography business. There are a ton of factors that go into why a business fails, but here are a few reasons why your photography business may be failing.

When you're working in Photoshop, it can be easy to run astray of staying organized. This helpful video talks about why a consistent workflow is key to top-notch images.

If you're just getting started with artificial light, one of the most challenging scenarios you'll probably undertake is mixing natural light and your strobes convincingly. This helpful video will give you some quick tips, as well as a neat trick for eking out a bit more shooting time during golden hour.

A color calibrator was perhaps the best non-photographic photographic purchase I've ever made. If you're not calibrating your displays, this helpful video will show you exactly why you should reconsider that.

Photography requires repetitive tasks that can often become habit forming. When we find a way of doing something that works, we repeat those steps to get the desired result. We get locked into certain styles and certain ways of thinking. This can be valuable because it makes us dependable, but these habits can also have an undesired effect: they can make us predictable, bland, and stifle our creativity. What can a photographer do when their creativity starts to atrophy? The answer is play.

Modern wedding clients expect a lot out of the videographers they hire. No more can you simply be a person with a camera. As professional equipment gets more affordable, the quality standards that people expect have increased as well. This is especially true when you’re editing. To help you capitalize on this new reality, the folks over at Rocketstock have put together Unity Lite, a free pack of five wedding titles and sixteen bonus light leaks.

One of the challenges wedding photographers encounter is how to structure pricing for their services. One common mistake is to include a free engagement session in all wedding packages. There are a few reasons why you should offer engagement sessions only as an add-on to wedding packages.

Infrared photography can be an absolute blast, but it normally takes some specialized equipment and post-processing to pull off. This video shows you how to try it out relatively cheaply and easily to see if it's right for you.

Color casts are one of the most common issues you'll have to tackle when editing photos. Unfortunately, the fix isn't always as simple as adjusting the white balance and/or tint, as casts may appear at varying intensities in different areas and luminosity ranges of your image. This helpful video shows you a more advanced way to tackle them.

Popular landscape photography locations can be a bit of conundrum in some sense: they're likely popular because they offer great images, but that reputation means it can be difficult to produce original work from them. This vlog follows one photographer as he seeks out those compositions in one of the most popular locations in the world.

My passion for photography stemmed from a series of trips I had taken overseas and a desire to capture the beauty of those places with more finesse. Landscapes were a natural draw for me and it didn’t take long to come across the concept of exposure blending.

In his latest photography tutorial, noted French photographer (and prolific video tutorial maker) Serge Ramelli demonstrates how to quickly and effectively replace a sky in Photoshop.

Perhaps one of the most fundamental skills a filmmaker needs to have down pat is the ability to focus well. This gets all the trickier when you or the subject are moving. This helpful video will show you four ways to keep your subject in focus and walk you through various scenarios to show you which method works best in each situation.

There's something we love about the ambiguous; after all, a quick Google search shows people still hotly debating the ending of "The Sopranos." When done well, ambiguity can be the greatest ending of all, as this thoughtful analysis of one film demonstrates.

A few weeks ago, Adrian Sommeling showed how he Photoshopped his son and himself driving an Aston Martin in Iceland. He’s back with yet another video, and this time it’s a shattered iPhone 8 composite. This one is particularly interesting as it includes glass and thus reflections which are both amongst the most difficult things to keep natural looking when working on composites.

While photography and videography are different, they share many common aspects. Starting with one, and then also learning the other is an excellent idea to improve your craft and potentially open doors for more jobs by becoming more versatile. In a recent video Matti Haapoja released on TravelFeels, he explains to us why he believes shooting stills is crucial for videographers.

Sean Tucker started his career as a food photographer and had the chance to work alongside with some of the best food stylists in the industry. Thanks to this experience, he’s learned quite a few secrets one needs to know in order to capture the most stunning food pictures possible. Through this 15-minute long tutorial, Tucker shares some of the fundamental knowledge every photographer and foodies should acquire. So if you’d like to improve or get started with this genre, be sure to check the full video and take notes.

"Which camera should I buy?" This is one of the most common questions I hear. Whether the question comes from an aspiring indie filmmaker, a television production student, or a parent wanting to capture some memories of their children, the answer is never that simple. It’s the equivalent of someone asking what kind of car they should buy. Do you want to carry your kids to soccer practice? Drift around tight corners in a parking garage? Save on fuel costs? The point is that this question leads to more questions. Here are a few things to ask when you’re deciding on a new camera.

Lightroom is a nuanced application full of controls, sections, subcontrols, subsections, sub-sub- well, you get my point. One of the least often examined tabs is buried at the bottom of the Develop Module: the Camera Calibration tab. This video gives a helpful explanation of exactly what that tab controls.

The Liquify Tool is one of the most powerful features of Photoshop, with abilities that can subtly or vastly alter the structure of features in your image (and not just those on humans). Just like any powerful tool, though, it takes a bit of finesse and know-how to get the best results, and this helpful video will give you that knowledge.

Darkness is one of the most difficult situations to work with. Cameras have come a long way towards improved performance in low light but no light is an entirely different can of worms. Unless your goal is to create more ISO snow than Christmas in Alaska you need to introduce light. Flash is great at pouring some much-needed illumination into the frame but it isn't so great at making sure that your camera is in focus when you do so. Even the best autofocus system in the world continue to struggle in the darkness so, as photographers, it is our job to stack the deck in our favor by leveraging strategy to give our focusing systems a leg up.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail," but then again Franklin wasn't a photographer. Photoshoots with humans, animals, or even some objects are dynamic and even active situations that are at the same time part inspiration and part performance. Finding the right balance between planning and improvisation can help take your photography to the next level.

If you’re making a film, obviously the focus needs to be on the story. It seems that’s become the popular counter to a lot of debates about the fine-tuning of an image. While Roger Deakin’s mentality of “the type of camera doesn’t matter” can hold true on most levels, if we’re going to take ourselves seriously as creatives we need to be actively making decisions about how and why we create. Why do you choose this over that? And how does it affect story? One of the most important decisions you make as a director of photography or cinematographer is about lenses.

Amongst the drones available on the market in 2017, the DJI Spark is surely not amongst the top ones in terms of files quality. The sequences it creates are quite difficult to color grade in postproduction and thus it makes it hard for videographers to mix the clips with footage from another camera. However, there are ways to improve what you can get out of Spark’s videos. Casey Faris gives us one of the tricks he uses to maximize the dynamic range of the images.

If you're new to Photoshop, one of the tools you'll want to become familiar with as soon as possible is the Healing Brush. This quick and helpful tutorial will show you just why it's so useful and how you can take advantage of it in a wide range of situations, from retouching portraits to removing items in landscape shots.

There are many paths in professional photography. I have gone down the route of commercial photography, and whilst I am nowhere near where I want to be in professionally, I thought I’d share a few points that can go a long way to making it as a professional commercial photographer.

Smartphone video is seemingly getting better by the minute. While they may still have a little way to go to match a $50,000 RED Weapon (though it's closer than you think), smartphones can be utilized to create videos of astonishing quality given the obvious limitations (small sensor, fixed focal length lens, noise issues created by limited ISO capability). In his latest video, popular YouTube photography personality Kai Wong discusses various tips to get the most out of your smartphone videography.

The ability to create images with powerful composition is one skill that separates great photographers from good ones. If you photograph weddings or anything involving outdoor portraiture, keeping these three tips in mind will help you to create strong compositions wherever you go.

We often aim to capture great expressions when cueing and posing subjects, but we sometimes overlook basic elements that may distract our viewers. In particular, natural pointers like our arms, hands, fingers, legs, and feet command a strong presence within images, but we don’t always recognize the power of their presence in the moment. While we surrender some control during truly candid moments, we should make every part of an image purposeful and keep natural pointers in check when posing.

It's important to remember that we are here to analyze and understand, but not be overly critical. While these tips/techniques are great in understanding the visual weight and posing elements within an image, they are not reasons to throw out what would otherwise be a great photograph.

Sharing your content is probably one of the best and fastest way to grow a community and a base of potential customers. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media platforms are some of the most common places to start pushing out pictures to the largest amount of people possible. However, when you get into video, you soon realize that sometimes things get a bit trickier. One of the issues I recently encountered was when sharing a YouTube video on Facebook, the thumbnail simply wouldn’t appear. In this article, I’ll show you how to solve this problem and what to do to avoid it in the future.

ACDSee Video Studio 2 is a software specially designed for those looking either for a simple video editing tool or a way to record their screen and create content out of it. In my recent review, I mentioned a couple of times how effortless the process is. However, I thought it only be wise to show you through an example how it works and how simple the app truly is. People just getting started in the video world or those of you looking for a way to record and edit educational content, be sure to read the full article.

When it comes to processing your digital images, there are so many tools available to you and sometimes the process can seem a bit convoluted. Personally, I like to use a mix of both Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop to make the most out of my images. Perhaps I'll throw Capture One in the mix one of these days, but for now all of my postproduction work is done using Adobe software. This brief tutorial goes over one of the lesser-known tools that exists both in Lightroom and Photoshop, the Dehaze tool.

Commercial Conceptual Photographer and Digital Artist Adrian Sommeling is one of the names that every retoucher and creative photographer should know. He has one of the most incredible portfolios out there with work that you simply can only wonder how the heck it was done. Well, to learn more about how he creates his stunning digital art, he’s started to push out short videos with explanations on every step. In this article, discover how he shot his son, himself, and an Aston Martin before compositing them onto an Iceland landscape.

When working with a ton of footage, culling them down and selecting just the part of them that you need can take quite a while. There a few methods to make it faster and easier, and one of them is called Pancake timelines. In this video, Justin Odisho explains to us how it works. If you are video editor with working tight deadlines or one looking for a way to speed things up, this tutorial is definitely made for you.

As photographers, we often pour endless hours into every possible method of learning to become better through the study of our craft, practice, and an ever increasing collection of supposedly quality redefining gear. In this dogged pursuit of photographic excellence, we often forget about the far more simple aspects of our lives that can have a tremendously profound impact on the quality of our work. By forcing ourselves to take a step back and focus on the foundational aspects of our selves that allow us to maximize our performance, regardless of the task, we are able to expand the potential of our work to new levels.

We were all beginners at some point, and we all made beginner mistakes too. And while it's important to experience certain errors to grow as a photographer, being aware of some others can help you grow more quickly and advance your skills. Here are five mistakes to avoid when you're first starting out.

If we find somebody to be a genius, we tend to put them on a pedestal. We worship them in their own little Pantheon and are always trying to find out what makes them special. Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel, James Nachtwey, and countless others are adored and followed by many. But what makes a genius?