Education

Cinema5D founder Sebastian Wöber's latest three-part tutorial on drone shooting starts off with quite the introduction in Part I. Wöber could honestly be saying anything to accompany his to-die-for footage, but what makes it so fantastic is how great the information in this video is. From safety to beginner tips on getting started and how to get that cinematic shot you have in your head (don't worry, Wöber has plenty examples if you don't), Part I has you covered. And there's more to come...very soon.

A few months ago I wrote a two part article on branding for photographers. In this article I will continue with branding for photographers, and why you should keep your brands separated. The most common thing I see are wedding photographers combining their wedding work with their family, baby, senior, and even commercial work. While I completely understand the tendency to not only simplify your marketing, but also the concept that by showing your multiple talents you will increase your value to clients, combining genre's is one of the biggest things hurting the growth of your business.

Story & Hart's Academy of Storytellers just put out this wickedly informative video that not only highlights five great drone shot techniques but also breaks down their uses and how to actually achieve them.

Many people that want to get into filmmaking believe you need to attend film school to have a successful career. Many also believe that by purchasing a Red Epic Camera you will instantly become a filmmaker. Neither are true. After watching Casey Neistat's Guide to Filmmaking video, you learn that gear doesn't matter. Neistat does own expensive gear, such as the Canon 70D and the Canon 5D Mark III, however, he became a successful filmmaker and youtuber with dirt cheap equipment.

Black Diamond Equipment is known for making top-of-the-line outdoors equipment for skiers, snowboarders, and climbers. Recently, they launched their video series BDTV Season 1, which is going to be compromised of short videos about people who they believe embody their core values. These videos are a great examples of storytelling using short video format and deserve further examination. That way you can apply the same learnings to your own video work.

When I started out my photography business, I was always told how important it was to have a strong and personal style. At the time, I did not understand what that meant. I knew all my pictures were too different to make for an impactful portfolio. I also knew that my retouching was inconsistent. But no one told me how to create that sought-after "photographic style." Even the word "create" was probably wrong. Rather, it appears that a style is developed and refined shoot after shoot, job after job. It is a neverending process. However, there are some points to help develop an impactful style.

As someone who prefers to shoot using natural light, I have realized that sometimes, a photo begs for artificial lighting. For years, I struggled with how many strobes to use and where to place them. I lost patience and focused instead on natural light. By spending the time to learn how lighting actually works, I eventually gained a better understanding of how to use strobes. In this article, I hope to share with you how to use just one strobe to create jaw-dropping results.

It seems that a lot of photographers tend to avoid direct sunlight and for a long time, I did too. Occasionally, I would backlight subjects, but I would never dare light them directly with the sun. I decided one day that it was time to embrace the sun. In this article, I break down my methods for achieving a good photograph in direct sunlight, discussing what has helped me and what you should avoid.

In this video we see Antwerp, Belgium-based commercial photographer Andy Van den Eynde tackling color correction on location. Andy starts by dropping his base temperature down to a cool 2800K and then recreates the warm glowing effect of torch light using gels from his Rosco Color Correction Filter Kit. What I found interesting was how he actually builds torches out of strobes and gels, which provide the rim light and the glow that would be thrown off from actual torches.

This is one of the best lighting tutorials I've ever seen, being both educational and entertaining. The German-based production company, Dugly Habits, has created this lighting tutorial for the Dedolight International Competition 2015. Using the Dedolight SPS5E Lighting Kit and a handful of other lights they construct three entirely different atmospheres in one room along with a wide variety of lighting tricks to create the illusions of car headlights, candle flicker, lightening and more. What's even cooler is how they deliver this educationally rich tutorial.

The process of culling is used in every type of photography and is used by professionals and amateurs alike. Culling is simply the process of selecting the best images from a shoot to be edited and delivered to a client. When photographers first start out in the editing world, this process can seem like a waste of time or hard to figure out a best practice. So I’m going to explain why we cull and some of the best ways to do it.

As New Horizons has shown us, the geniuses at NASA are not only solving the mysteries of the universe, they're also capturing its beauty. Just like you and I, though, they don't just publish those images straight out of camera. Read how Photoshop helps NASA to fully represent the universe in all its awe-inspiring beauty.

As a self-taught photographer, I’m an advocate of learning through doing. I didn’t study it, but I can imagine that reading all the Photography 101 books that are available still wouldn't prepare you for actually being on a set, with a model standing in front of you, and a team awaiting your creative direction. In my journey, experience has meant everything. Here are some of the things I’ve learned over the years that may help when shooting your own portraits.

Ryan and Josh Connolly of Film Riot always brings us the coolest do-it-yourself filmmaking and special effects tutorials. In this "rewind" episode (read: old) they show us how to create the killer effect of throwing someone clear across the room. What's doubly cool is how easily this can be done with just a still camera and software that most of us already have (Photoshop and After Effects).

Are you as stealthy as a fog horn? Do you have all the grace of a dirigible in a sudden windstorm? Certain genres of photography — wedding and wildlife photography in particular — require a certain physical tact, an ability to be unseen. Check out our tips on how to capture the focus of an event without becoming the focus of the event.

Have you ever found yourself questioning which file format to use, when it comes to displaying, storing or printing your images? Are you curious about what JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF and BMP actually stands for? Do you want to know how each format deals with compression and data loss? If so then this crazy informative infographic is just what you've been looking for.

Retouching can vary from photographer to photographer. But it can also vary depending on the genre you are shooting. I know it does for me. My wedding retouching is far from being as refined and time-consuming as my portrait retouching. When dealing with hundreds of pictures, you have to find techniques that get you close to a perfect result, but as quickly as possible. One thing I had trouble getting my head around was maximizing my dynamic range in my wedding pictures without stacking multiple raw developments. That was until I made a lucky mistake when sharpening an image using a high pass filter.

Every day, millions of people use filters to stylize an Instagram post, or Gaussian blur to edit a photo. Have you ever wondered what's really going on when you do this? It all comes back to one fundamental process.

What do iconic movies like Dr. Stranglove, Alien, Psycho and Star Wars all have in common? They all knew how to create that, "Oh f**k" moment. You know the one I'm talking about. Every thing is fine. All good here. Wait a minute. What's that? BAM! Well Director Joey Scoma of RocketJump Film School shows us how to recreate those nail biting, butt clenching, knee jerking moments using tried and true video editing techniques.

Brooke Shaden is an undeniable force of photographic nature. Not only is she well regarded as a pioneer of modern fine art photography with her dream-like compositions and self portraits, she is often as focused with helping us develop our own work as she is with her own. This week, Brooke throws open the doors to her “Promoting Passion Convention”, which aims to more than your ‘typical’ photo workshop. If you’ve been looking to spread your creative wings and be inspired to create by learning from some of the best in the industry, this could be exactly what you’ve been waiting for.

Five years ago I filmed the iPhone Fashion Shoot, a 10-minute video in which I take professional looking images with the iPhone 3GS. That video was supposed to inspire photographers who assumed that their work was suffering because their gear wasn't ultra expensive. The video became extremely popular and became very polarizing. The majority of people thought my images looked good because I used fancy lights.

As we all know, the human experience is unique. Your life and your opinions will never be the same as any other persons. This is why there is a subjectivity to art. When viewing and creating art, there will not be two artists who imagine the same piece. Since photography and retouching are both art forms, it would be plausible that the same applies.

John Free, for those that don't know, is considered one of the great street photographers of our time. His ability to capture the human spirit in a split second is uncanny. Here is a 10 minute video of a private lesson that was given to Ted Forbes of The Art Of Photography. It is full of helpful advice and inspirational lines for photographers of any genre.

Wedding photographers often tell me how annoying it can be to get a consistent white balance across the images of the day. Shooting weddings almost every weekend during the summer myself, I used to have that problem as well. With a white dress for the bride and a white shirt for the groom, it should be easy though. The problem is I like my images to make my couple look good. Meaning I like having the same skin color and tone on every picture. During the day, their skin might change color a bit because of the sun, the emotions, and the alcohol. Switching to Capture One this year I found the perfect solution to avoid this issue: setting my white balance based on skin tones and not on a gray card anymore.

When people first get into wedding photography, one of the main pieces of advice they will hear over and over is, “You can’t reshoot a wedding." This instantly leads to photographers asking, “How do I protect my images?" Image backup and cataloging is sort of like baking a cake. Every photographer is going to have a different recipe to how they do things. Over the years my process has evolved into what it is today. This process came about in part from learning by fire, and another part came from learning from others. If you don't want to use my entire process, I at least hope part of it can become a helpful addition to your workflow.

Understanding your fundamentals is, well, fundamental to photography just like it is in anything else. In a previous article, I discussed the basics of aperture and exposure. Now, moving forward I want to address one of the key elements of aperture which is depth of field. All variables in photography have a give and take, and with your aperture as we gain light we also lose depth of field. But aperture is not the only variable the affects depth of field, and in this article we will take a look at those other variables.

Dodging and burning for cleaning skin is very common amongst high-end retouchers and for a reason: when mastered, it gives you natural, yet almost perfect results. The downside of the technique is that it can eat up a lot of time. When I say a lot of time, I mean up to a couple of hours for a single image, depending on the problems that need corrections. While spending this much time on big projects or perhaps on personal projects is conceivable, for someone that shoots portraits every day and has to retouch quickly, this is simply not viable. A couple of tricks exist to help you go faster, while retaining a high quality and natural-looking image. I have listed four of them here with the hope that they will save you as much time as they do for me.

It's always impressive to see a subject that's shot so often used in a new and creative way. This conceptual shoot of the Milky Way by George Malamidis was beautifully conceived and executed. George picked two possible names for the image, both of which perfectly describe the outcome, "The Iris of God" or "The Peacock Milkyway." Want to know how he got the shot?

This week we get to look at yet another style of retouch, a sports styled image. Each genre, weather it be fashion, beauty, landscape, or sports is going to have different parameters to follow and slightly different goals to achieve. With a female athlete it can be particularly tricky, because it can be challenging to find the line between doing to much or not enough especially as it come to skin retouching. In this post we will look at some of the steps and tricks used in this particular image that can be applied to your own sport retouch. We will also take a look at what else can be done to this image.

When getting started on a conceptual image, it can be hard to figure out where to even begin. For conceptual photographer Thomas Brown’s new image entitled “Tunnel Vision,” it all began with an idea from his imagination and a rough sketch on notebook paper. Check out this cool behind-the-scenes video showing how his concept was creatively shot and developed into the final image.

I often see instructional videos and one-on-one tutorials with amazing photographers on various websites and while many of them are amazing and full of valuable information, they usually cost several hundred dollars. There are a lot of photographers that I would love to have a one-on-one tutorial with, but often it is just not in my budget. While I like to stay as busy as possible with my own photography business, in my free time I'll sometimes come across good opportunities. When I started assisting in my spare time, I quickly found that I could learn as much, if not more, than if I was watching a tutorial or having a one-on-one conversation with an experienced photographer — and I get paid to do it.

Night photography is something that every budding photographer will play around with at some point in their learning process. It’s a great way to get star-filled nighttime landscapes or to capture the light-painting shots in which you write in the air with sparklers. Most people don’t associate night photography with wedding photography, though, which is a shame, because it can be a good way to capture some non-traditional wedding images. These nonyraditional wedding images can help you stand out in the sea of wedding photographers and can help you book more weddings.

Through September 13th, you have a chance to submit any un-posed wedding photos to be critiqued by the Fstoppers team in a new episode of "Critique the Community." What do I mean by un-posed? Your submissions need to be candid moments of people that you captured, detail shots, locations, or any other picture where you did not position or pose your subjects. This episode we promise to critique EVERY submission, even if it takes a few videos to do so. However, to qualify you must follow the submission rules below.

Creator and editor of Lonely Speck, pro night sky photographer Ian Norman is back with another great tutorial. Being nothing short of passionate when it comes to astrophotography Ian always seems eager to share what he has learned over the years. In his latest video Ian gives us the rundown on how he post processes Milky Way photos in Lightroom.

I woke this morning to find that director Matt Rycroft, over at the Cooperative of Photography, had dropped this little gem in my mail box. In their latest video the COOPH team up with first class celebrity portrait photographer Greg Gorman, as he demonstrates how to approach a nude photography shoot.

This week's winning image comes from Photographer Daniel Nordholm. It's a stunning landscape image that he captured in Lofoten, a beautiful archipelago in Norway. I was very excited to break from my norm of beauty and fashion retouching to tackle and share a landscape retouch. Many of the techniques and the workflow of a landscape can be very different from portrait retouching, while the philosophy can be quite the same. In this article, you will see the full retouch of the image in the short two-minute video. In all, the retouch took about an hour. I will also share some specific techniques for landscape editing that you can use in your images as well.

All of us, from time to time, get to a point where we wonder what we can do to improve our work. We take class after class on technique, and study our gear until we know it inside out. We hone our skills, practicing lighting and post processing until we have developed our work to a point we can be proud of. Yet, when all that is said and done, our work still lacks something. Where do we go next?

Listen up! It's time to put away the Wacom and pick up a camera! Let's talk about exercises you can do every day to make you a better photographer.

Whether it’s high noon, sunset or the magic hour it’s hard to beat photographs taken under the natural light of the sun. But how do you contend with the myriad of conditions it produces? Easy. You watch this video by RocketJump Film School as director of photography Jon Salmon walks you through most of the lighting scenarios you might encounter outside. There are even some helpful DIY tips on modifiers thrown in.

In B&H's latest episode of "Wedding Photography Tips" wedding photographer Susan Stripling offers up some solid nuggets of advice for you to chew over before taking on your first wedding gig. Susan addresses some really important issues, that a lot of shooters wouldn't even consider, prior to embarking on a career in wedding photography.

If you ask any well-known and successful photographer what the most important thing you can do to grow your business is, they will almost all point towards shooting personal projects. Before the end of every day, I try to visualize at least one creative and interesting idea that might be worth photographing. Nine times out of ten, those ideas are complete garbage. Every now and then, I come up with a really great idea, but unfortunately, 90% of the time, I completely forget these great ideas and they never become a reality. Here is how I have solved this problem.

Many beginning photographers find it very difficult to translate their vision verbally. In order to save yourself time, effort, and frustration the day of your shoot, use a mood board. Mood boards are visual collages of inspiration designed to provide your team or client with a visual reference guide that everyone can agree on before your photo shoot.

It's Monday so it's time for another speed retouch and episode of Retouching Mondays. This week image comes courtesy of last weeks winner, Ben Scott. If you would like me to retouch your image and send you back the full-high res final image, all you have to do is post your image in the comments and wait to hear back. I will email the winner on Thursday morning, so post your newest favorite image that you want retouched. It can be any genre, beauty, fashion, landscape, wedding! I'll record the retouching and send you the final image to use as you wish! Take a look at the speed retouch of Ben's image and let me know in the comments if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Now lets take a look at the before and after and the challenges for this week's Monday Retouch.

An influx of talent naturally creates more competition and offers your client more choice. That choice ultimately leads to lower odds of you landing any given job. It would be very easy to look at the current state of photography and blame it on a numbers game, but then, you wouldn’t be entirely correct.

Photographers love to critique. Or is it criticize? Or comment? Complain? Postulate? Pontificate? We seem to witness quite the gamut of behavior in response to one simple request: "CC, please."

In my recent Natural Light Tutorial with RGGEDU, I went through every aspect of natural light photography and retouching... Or so I thought. During a shoot this week, I realized I missed one thing: enhancing freckles with Photoshop. In this article I will show a simple method to making those freckles pop.

In this tutorial I will show you how to setup your studio strobes for full length portraits as we shoot an editorial style lighting setup. First we will look at the entire gear list we used and you can use for a similar setup, from the backdrop to the studio heads. I will breakdown our lighting. with lighting diagrams and explanation of WHY we are placing our lights where we are. Also, in this video tutorial we share some Behind The Scenes from our shoot day.

Getting human subjects to feel comfortable and to emote in front of the camera is always a challenge. We deal with a variety of personalties which can prove hard to manage when you have all the other things such as lighting, camera settings, and composition to think about. Lindsay Adler has put together a list of 5 crucial steps to help get your subject relaxed from her years of experience.