There is a veritable plethora of ways to retouch a portrait, and a lot of the time, it is a game of balancing the ultimate quality with the time spent retouching. If you really want to get into one of the most respected techniques out there, it's well worth taking the time to learn how to dodge and burn.
Midday sun can be very difficult to work with, but that does not mean you can't get great images during the middle of the day. This helpful video will show you how to take better landscape photos when dealing with midday sun.
Long telephoto lenses are excellent at capturing the rich, intimate details of animals, but there’s a learning curve to using them. Before you miss another shot by not finding your subjects in the viewfinder in time, check out this video.
In photography, we are always looking for the best lighting for our subject, but when we don’t have the ability to choose the location or need to create interesting and dramatic lighting on the go, we need to be able to use the light we bring with us. This involves starting at the fundamentals and learning how to balance your flash and the ambient outdoor lighting.
Professional photographers who have been in the field for years can be an invaluable resource for helpful tips and bits of wisdom whether you are first starting out or you are just as seasoned as they are. This great video features 29 professionals giving out their tips on how to become a better photographer.
Even though you are cold, wet, and tired, it might be a great idea just to check what is around the corner. That was what I did, and I was rewarded with several photos.
Creating fantasy composites is always fun: you get to invent your very own worlds and characters. Technically, in a composite sense, you can also get away with more unrealistic elements.
Perhaps one of the key things that an aspiring photographer needs to learn is that the quality of light is one of the most important elements in making a great photo. Often, it's the light that makes or breaks the photo.
When analyzing a photo, do you care more about how a photo was taken, or why the elements in the photo are there? If you’re trying to grow as a photographer, you might need to stop asking how things are done, and why they are done.
Sometimes it’s fun to set yourself a challenge, maybe shooting with limited gear or with a very quick turnaround. On this occasion, I had no choice. The shoot was conceived and captured in under fifteen minutes, and the images were edited and submitted less than half an hour later. Here’s how it came about.
We are now four parts into the art of composite series, and this week we touch upon style and influence.
Creative blocks can be a great cause of anxiety and/or frustration for many of us. And, while a creative rut might seem inescapable when you're on the inside, looking out; actually freeing yourself from this oppressive, suffocating feeling may be a lot easier then you think.
The most ridiculous claim I have ever heard about not going to Iceland was “it is over-photographed and it is not possible to get an original photo”. Challenge accepted. I got four in one day.
In my latest video, I set out to disprove the idea that Iceland is over-photographed and it is not possible to get an original photo.
Photoshop is an extremely intricate program for which there is a multitude of ways to accomplish any one task. Nonetheless, one of the most fundamental techniques almost every photographer should know is how to create and use luminosity masks. This great video tutorial will show you how to use them.
In an industry dominated by budgets in the millions, or even hundreds of millions, how can an independent filmmaker get their vision to market? YouTube, VIMEO, luck? The festival circuit? Making a movie is expensive, so how does a rising artist find enough financial support to break into the business of film?
When I purchased my first large zoom lens it came equipped with a tripod foot. I quickly learned that a standard ball-head wasn't the best way to use one of these beasts on a tripod. This started my venture into the gimbal games and actually helped in ways that I didn't anticipate.
At the start of the new year, Netflix released the cultural hit show, "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo". No show has made me change my lifestyle around more than this one was able to. But I didn’t just use it to clean my room, I used her methods to clean my portfolio. Lately I’ve been scrolling through my website wondering if everything on it is still worth it.
If eyes are the windows to the soul, eyeglasses can be the dust on the on the screen, with their reflective surfaces obscuring arguably the most important part of a portrait — the eyes.
So let me start with a bold statement. Adrian Sommeling is probably the most famous composite artist in the world. If you have not seen one of his images before, you are either short-sighted or you live in Scunthorpe. I do not think modern technology has blossomed there yet.
Our usual way of looking at scenes and people and all the things in the world is at 120-200° depending upon the different things that we see. We were use to seeing our horizontally. That is until we got into smartphones and further into Instagram stories.
Drones are great tools for photography and video, but with technology changing at such a rapid pace, racing drones (FPV) are becoming much more popular and in demand for commercial work. It can be a little overwhelming to learn this technology all at once, so I am here to help you with your first setup.
Photographers love their advanced and expensive gear; it makes our jobs much easier and can produce some absolutely stunning results in the right hands. But what can you accomplish with a $79 camera that's over a decade old? The results might surprise you.
Wedding videography is a grueling, difficult job full of all sorts of challenges of both the creative and technical variety, and watching a skilled videography team can be tremendously instructive whether you are new to the field and looking to learn or a seasoned master looking for new tricks and ideas.
It is easy to overlook just how important having a really strong focal point is to making a photograph truly successful. This insightful video discusses the multitude of ways a focal point helps a photo and how you can improve your own.
Everyone who is photographing landscapes knows how important light is. With the right light situations, a boring landscape can transform into something magical. It is not only choosing the golden hour, but also waiting for the right moment. You need to be patient.
The neat thing about photography is how different photographers can have vastly different creative ideas and interpretations of the same subject. This awesome video follows four photographers as they shoot the same model; see what they came up with!
It is pretty amazing just how much you can accomplish in post-processing software nowadays, but there is something particularly satisfying about creating an image that looks like it took lots of Photoshop work entirely in camera. This excellent video tutorial will show you how to recreate this fascinating day and night image all in camera.
It is a strange thing when you think about it: films have long had fight and stunt coordinators to make the simulation of violence and dangerous situations both look realistic on screen and to protect the actors involved in the scenes. Yet, simulating intimate scenes is often done without expertise and often in very inappropriate ways that can and have seriously affected those involved.
We all love to drool over those beautiful, fast (and oh so expensive) f/1.2 and f/1.4 lenses. But do you really need that top shelf glass, or would you be better served by saving your money and investing in a cheaper version? This great video talks about some of the more intangible facets of lenses and why it's about more than just the widest apertures.
Weddings are a nonstop whirlwind of technical and creative challenges, and the more knowledge and tricks you can have for both categories, the better.
What do oversize truck tailpipes, paleolithic sculpture, and the vibrancy slider have in common? And what might they have to do with helping us create more engaging photographs? Why do some abstract paintings move you and others don't? Why should we react to an abstract work of art at all?
Humans are the greatest adaption machines in the world. We are, by nature, made to adapt.
Missing a shot is something that happens to every photographer, but there are ways to make it happen less to you. Here’s how to almost never miss a photo.
Anya Anti is an internationally published photo artist from the Ukraine who now lives in the Big Apple. If you have never seen her work, you are missing out on a whole series of quirky, interesting, and fantastical images that stir up emotion and imagination.
Confidence is one of those important attributes that are really useful for a photographer. While too much can definitely be a bad thing, not enough can dramatically reduce the opportunities you'll have to make great work.
Digital cameras have come along way in the last 20 years, but just how far? Blair Bunting recently took an almost-as-new Nikon D1 out for a spin to see how it stacked up to modern cameras.
Welcome back to The Art of Composite Photography. In the previous parts, we have covered pre-visualization, planning, and unbreakable rules.
Landscape photography can be a tricky genre, full of subtle aesthetic and technical choices that can really make or break a photo. This excellent video details seven tips that can help you to improve your landscape photos.
Have you wondered how it looks when a landscape photographer gets up early in the morning and hikes to the top of a mountain to photograph a sunrise?
Sony cameras have some incredibly powerful and advanced autofocus systems with intricate settings and numerous customization options. At times, however, all those capabilities can almost be a bit overwhelming. This helpful video will show you the ideal autofocus settings for portrait shoots.
If you've been involved with photography for very long at all, you may have noticed that photographers have a variety of opinions — about everything. Unfortunately, many photographers appear as though they live in a box, where they can only see the things that they are personally involved in.
Many of us have either done this ourselves or have a friend that has done it. I'm talking about getting out to a location only to learn that you don't have a usable memory card or battery.
In case you've never taken the time to just sit outside at night and look (or howl) at the moon, it's actually freaking awesome. The logical next step is to setup your gear and trying to photograph our lunar friend.
Besides making cool miniature city scapes and stopping converging lines, there are a host of reasons why you should consider buying a tilt-shift lens.
As still photography cameras and motion cameras continue to merge with technology, so have, to an extent, the expectations of our profession. No better way to prepare yourself for the future than to learn from the masters.
When you are new to photography, there can be a tendency to point your camera indiscriminately. And while there is nothing wrong with feeling out how the entire process works, eventually, you have to move from taking snapshots to making photographs. This great video discusses that process and offers some helpful tips for getting there.
We would all love to have large, sprawling studios in which we can have the freedom to experiment and tackle any sort of job with ease, but the reality is that that simply is not the case for most of us. This helpful video will show you how to set up a working, versatile studio in a small space without spending a lot of money in the process.
Cameras these days are smarter than ever, so why go full manual for bird photography?
What's up? Glad you could make it for part 2 of my Art of Composite Photography series. Last week we spoke about pre-vis and planning. I hope you found it helpful and most importantly I got my point across that it is not the tools you have that count, it's the vision. This week I will be discussing the three unbreakable rules of composite and why background comes first.
The inner journey of our photography careers are often more interesting than the outer. I experienced that first hand this summer, when I got one of my favorite photos of 2019 from my “backyard”.