If you decide to watermark your images, making sure it's something that's both classy and not overly distracting is the best way to go. This video shows you not only how to create a watermark, but how to customize it to conveniently stamp on any image with ease.
Oscar Wilde used to say that experience is “the name men give to their mistakes.” Photography is both a science and an art. As such, the artistic side of photography must be acquired via experimentation, and failure is a natural part of the learning process.
Most lighting modifiers come with diffusion panels that soften and even out the light emitted. Some even come with two panels. These panels can have a strong effect on your light, and it's well worth understanding exactly what to expect when you use them or leave them off. This helpful video gives you a comparison of all three situations.
Quite possibly one of the most overlooked aspects of lighting a subject is the rim light. Not only is it a great method to make your subject pop off the background, it's a quick way to give your portraits a very professional look. This helpful video will show you everything you need to know about creating proper rim lights.
If you like to shoot waterfalls, you've likely noticed that they often have a distinct blueness to them, whereas you likely desire them to be white, as they normally look to the naked eye. This quick tutorial will show you exactly how to remove the blue from waterfalls and restore them to their original shade.
Adding drama to images without humans to express it is its own art, and taking advantage of the play between light and dark is one of the best ways to do it. This great video follows a landscape photographer as he uses shifting light to accentuate his subjects and create excitement in his images.
Akira Kurosawa's films are some of the most lauded works in history. His fluid and multilayered use of movement not only generated visual interest, but also helped to tell the story and telegraph emotion. This great video essay examines just what made his use of movement so genius.
As I am constantly saying, I am a huge fan of workflow optimization. I work alone and automating even the simplest of tasks is crucial to staying organized and being able to keep up doing what I do. This tip is the first in a series regarding automation I will share, and this is such a key to thinking differently: creating your clients folders.
One of the most commonly heard pieces of advice within creative circles certainly seems to be the need to find your “style” and market that. What is your style? How to find it? These questions we’ve been told should plague us and drive us get inside our heads if we let them and begin to dictate what we do and how we do it.
If you do much work in Photoshop, you've no doubt used a Hue/Saturation/Lightness (HSL) layer before, but within that adjustment is a powerful tool for refining how the effect is applied. Check out this helpful tutorial that will show you how to get the most out of HSL adjustments.
Traditionally, more involved edits such as dodging and burning are done in Photoshop, but it's often desirable to stay in Lightroom if you can. This helpful tutorial shows you how to dodge and burn a portrait all in Lightroom.
In a world saturated with photography, you have to find ways to stand out. If you are able to put in the extra skill and effort to make something that is unique, it can quickly gain attention. Backlighting is one technique I use to accomplish this. Initially, backlighting seemed like a difficult task.
If you're like me and love spending time both shooting and editing your images, why not get creative and refresh those deep-etching Photoshop skills when you've got a few hours in between projects? Composites look really neat, but there's a lot of work and patience that goes into it behind the scenes and if done correctly, it would look amazing and really take your conceptual photography t
Contrary to delusional beliefs, not everyone is hooked up to a high-speed connection capable of streaming 8k video at magnificent buttery smoothness. Extremely fast connectivity is an amazing thing that is still out of reach for the vast majority of users. You can't assume that the viewers of your website are going to be piloting a computer hard-lined into the latest fiber optic goodness.
Ok, it's not the most exciting subject, but a good tripod is worth its weight in gold, and a bad one will leave you continually shaking your fist at the sky and cursing. Here are five things you should look for when deciding to purchase a tripod.
In November of last year, Jonny Von Wallström sold his feature-length documentary film "The Pearl of Africa" to Netflix. He had been attempting to chase down the video streaming service for several years. This included hunting down contact information for commissioning editors and attempting to woo Netflix employees at every pass.
Flying a drone often enables the possibility of getting some really unique and arresting shots, but it also takes a fair amount of skill or even a second operator on a dedicated camera controller to pull them off. These five simple shots will give you similarly excellent results with minimal effort.
In this video, Photographer Andrea Belluso uses strip softboxes to create dramatic portraits of his friend and pilot along with a gliding airplane. Strip softboxes create soft light with a long highlight on the aircraft body.
We talk about gear and how to take better shots or process your images all the time, but less often do we discuss the non-camera related side of photography, engaging with the subject, though it's obviously of the utmost importance. This helpful video gives you five tips to produce better engagement with your talent.
It does. It doesn't. Sometimes it does. There might be no question more polarizing in the photography community than "does gear matter?" Here's what five successful pros have to say on the subject.
Nikon turns 100 years old today! To mark the occasion, here’s a timeline of some of the milestones in the company's history.
Cranes are quickly becoming a staple in the bags of many videographers and for good reason. It has a smaller footprint, lower cost of entry, and has a relatively low learning curve than most gimbals on the market. Even though most users can pick up and go without ever opening the manual.
Understanding light is at the heart of photography. The topic of light is a vast one but there are some fundamental concepts which should be mastered before all others. One of those is the difference between hard and soft light.
Perhaps one of the biggest rites of passage for a photographer is gaining proficiency with artificial light. It can seem a bit daunting at first, but once you get some basic principles down, it's really not that hard, and you'll greatly expand your photographic capabilities in the process. Dive into this great video to get started.
The challenges of creating portraits of dogs are compounded when more than one animal comes along for your session. Whether you’re photographing two dogs or two dozen, this simple compositing method will make sure you will be able to create the perfect group portrait where each dog is looking their best.
If you do a lot of layers-intensive work in Photoshop, you know that sometimes, navigating using just that little panel on the right can get a bit cumbersome. However, Photoshop has a built-in feature to help you search and filter layers, and this helpful tutorial shows you just how to use it.
Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve is widely known for its color grading tools. It’s what many would call an industry standard thanks to its powerful features. With the Beta 4 of Resolve 14 that was released a little while ago, the software saw its editing and audio capabilities improving quite a bit as well.
It’s not rocket science, but there’s certainly a whole bunch of trial and error involved with shooting something as bright and spectacular as a launch. I spoke with John Kraus, a young photographer doing just that, to guide us through the process and obstacles that are involved.
Getting colors that are vibrant and pop without being gaudy is a challenge in which many landscape photographers are constantly engaged. This helpful tutorial shows you how to use selective color adjustment layers to subtly give your images that desired look.
Both Mozart and Debussy said that music is the space between notes, alluding to the fact that sound is meaningless without silence to contextualize it. There is of course a visual analog, and considering and incorporating it carefully into your images can vastly improve the impact of your compositions.
"Keep your head down and always know where the ball is. It hurts when you get hit." And with that, I was off and running. Here's what it was like stepping out of portraits and events and into the world of professional sports photography.
If you've got some old family photos lying around that you've scanned and cataloged in Lightroom, you might be interested in colorizing them. Here's how to do that without ever even touching Photoshop.
There are plenty of reasons you may want to blend natural light with flash. I know I rarely shoot with more than one strobe on location so the ambient light often acts as a fill light or rim light. Regardless of your reason to do so, knowing how to easily achieve this is extremely important.
Have you ever considered how significantly confidence can affect your photography? Creative people are often a largely unconfident group.
If you're not familiar with Crash Course (and judging by the number of subscribers and viewers they have on YouTube, most of you are), it is an educational YouTube channel started by Hank and John Green.
Many of us have been there. You upload your work to a social media platform only to find out months later that your photos have gained the attention of the masses. Immediately you start getting bombarded with emails, phone calls, and publications start reaching out.
If you're new to Premiere Pro then you're probably new to the world of keyframing. Use keyframes to animate properties like scale, position, rotation, opacity, audio levels, as well as a handful of other attributes. Keyframes are especially useful when working with photographs in Premiere.
The closest art to photography is painting, and thus the two primary visual art forms share basic precepts regarding light and composition. In the same way photographers use different lenses, filters, and lights to achieve their vision, so too might they learn to use various time-honored, classical techniques in composition.
Composition may be one of the most widely discussed artistic aspects in photography. In theory, the idea is simple. Putting it to work, particularly in motion arts, is easier said than done. Composition is one of the most important creative aspects of any filmmaking. Simply put, it is the act of defining the position, arrangement, and view of objects within the frame.
The ability to produce a simple animation is a useful but often ignored feature in Photoshop. In this tutorial, Aaron Nace of Phlearn takes you through the process of producing a basic video in Photoshop by having text fade in on an image.
Lindsay Adler is best known for creative fashion and beauty work, but aside from her stunning and unique photography, she’s a great speaker and educator. She recently gave a two-hour master class at B&H on how to create a portrait that is a work of art.
A huge part of shooting video is audio. No one wants to look at footage with poor sound with distracting background noise. But thanks to Steven Oakley from MiesnerMedia, if you are reading this article, poor audio will be a story of the past in your videos. Oakley gives us a handy trick to eliminate almost any background noise using only Adobe Audition and Premiere Pro.
The Puppet Warp tool is one of the most powerful methods to manipulate people, objects, or whatever you please in Photoshop. If you want to learn how to stretch, bend, or contort your subjects, give this helpful video a quick viewing!
This incredibly well thought out and carefully executed shot is an awesome lesson in not only designing an intriguing product photography shot that tells the right story, but also in bringing it to fruition. Check out this step-by-step video that walks you through the entire process.
Adobe Lightroom can be a powerful tool in your photography workflow. There are a lot of features that are included, but as a new user or even someone who has been using it for a while, there might be some useful tricks within Lightroom of which you are still unaware. How many of these are new to you?
Just over a year ago today, I took the leap and made my first MagMod purchase. That first endeavor included: The Basic Kit, a set of Creative Gels, a set of Artistic Gels, an extra MagGrid, an extra MagGrip, a MagBounce, and a MagSphere.
Just when I was beginning to think I was the only person out there who owns a drone primarily for still shots instead of video work, this helpful video came along to show 11 ways to take better drone photos. If you just bought your first drone or are simply looking to improve, I recommend giving it a quick watch!
If you're like many stills shooters who are just getting into video, you're probably finding out it's its own world. If you're wondering how to give your footage a more cinematic and polished, professional look, this great video will give you 10 quick tips to get you up and running.
If you haven't been paying attention to the topic of Net Neutrality, now is the time to jump on the bandwagon. To save the long explanation, take a quick visit to Battle for the Net for more info on what exactly is going on and how to add your name to the growing list of independents everywhere in support of Net Neutrality.
Getting videos exported from Premiere Pro and uploaded to Instagram is not the most straight forward process. To help with this, I’ve created three export presets for you to use. These include Landscape, Square, and Vertical aspect ratios. To install and use the presets, follow the steps below.