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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
I shoot concerts. Like, a lot of concerts. Since I shot my very first local show back in 2008, I have had the immense privilege and pleasure of photographing over 1,000 bands in the limelight on a lighted stage. And it's not easy. I've argued for a long time that live music photography is an animal; a beautiful, untamed, unpredictable — and sometimes vicious — animal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes, it's not about practicing harder, but practicing smarter. Over the past few years, I've gathered a few tricks that seem to consistently help me refine my skills. Consider incorporating them into your routine.
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.
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 t
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.
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 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.
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.
Erik Almas, one of the best commercial composite photographers, has recently teamed up with the team at PRO EDU to create a fully comprehensive tutorial on his complete shooting and retouching process. In this video Almas takes us through an hour-long tutorial, retouching and completing the backplate for one of his tutorial images.
Talking about how to be creative is difficult. There are many intangibles and few absolutes. Luckily, two phenomenal teachers put together a great list of rules in 1967.
Welcome to the this week's installment of Fstoppers’ Gear Tuesday! Below, you will find the answers to last week’s questions, including great topics such as film scanners and the Nikon D750.
As part of CreativeLive's Portrait Bootcamp the mad talent and knowledge of New York City-based portrait/fashion photographer Lindsay Adler are put to use as she breaks down the practical definitions of light.
We love photography. We love gear. And we love this guy: New York City-based headshot photographer Peter "Shabang" Hurley. So when B&H put out this episode of, "What's in Your Bag?", featuring Peter and his kit, of course we were going to watch and post it with all the same excitement and exuberance that Peter himself puts into everything.
What is it about photographers? It's no secret that a lot of us like to play with fire, fire and more fire.
Natural-looking images are making a comeback. If you look at recent issues of big magazines, you will see that makeup is often a nude with some shine to it, retouching is less "doll like," and even simple 1-light setups seem to be the standard. Some people will argue that it has been like this for quite some time. It is true, but I find that retouching is more flagrant than before.