Our photos are important to us, and as such, it can be difficult to be honest with ourselves and objectively evaluate their quality. However, if we want to improve as photographers, it is crucial that we be willing to do so, and this great video discusses why.
In this great video, Brandon Woelfel takes us through photographing with natural light at golden hour and dusk. Explaining his ISO, shutter speed and aperture options at every stage makes it nice and easy to grasp the secrets he's sharing.
Taking images of your family every day for 50 days is a challenge all on its own. Pair that with being stuck at home in quarantine for all 50 of those days, and things get downright interesting. This is how I approached it and what I learned.
Noise is something we pretty much all try to minimize in our photos, and we know that one of the best ways to avoid it is to shoot at as low an ISO as possible. But even at low ISO values, you can still see noise, particularly as you shoot longer exposures. This great video will show you what long exposure noise is, why it happens, and how you can fix it.
A lot of photographers think that using automatic modes on a camera is a sign of a lack of technique or ability, but it is not such a black and white issue. Here is why you should consider using automatic modes in certain situations.
Double exposures have been around since the days of film, but thankfully, you can create them digitally now (with a lot more control over the final result too). Now is a great time to grab a couple of photos from your library and to try it out yourself, and this great video tutorial will show you how to do it in Photoshop.
Capture One is already quite a powerful tool for working with portraits (and is used by a lot of top professionals), and the latest version brings a variety of useful new features. This great video will show you how to retouch portraits using Capture One 20.
For the normal person, blue skies make for a lovely day, but for the landscape photographer, they can be pretty drab and boring. That does not mean you can't take great shots, though; it just means you need to try for different images than you would otherwise. This great video discusses how you can turn monotonous blue skies into fantastic images.
A dark background is a fantastic way to keep the focus on your subject, and all it takes is a little lighting know-how to make it happen. This great video will show you how it is done and how you can use it to create dramatic, vibrant images.
Finding free photography education is about as easy as it is to find a cup of decent coffee. But finding world-class education for free is another story. But until June 6th, you can get free education from 30-plus educators on the top of their game through Photographers Unite.
While dedicated studio lights are much more powerful, speedlights are far more portable and can be a perfectly viable substitute in a lot of situations, especially location work where full monolights would be cumbersome and tedious to use. This great video will show you how you can use simple speedlights and portable modifiers to shoot professional headshots anywhere you go.
Adobe After Effects is something of a companion to Premiere Pro, offering a range of visual effects, motion graphics, and more for video work. And like other Adobe production apps, it is a fairly intricate and often complex application. This great video demonstrates every effect in the program so you can see what they can do and where they might be appropriate for your own work.
Some days are beautiful and full of vibrant color and interesting skies, while others are, well, just plain boring. However, those boring days can be the most important of all. This is why you should still be heading out with your camera, even on the least interesting days.
You will often hear proponents of prime lenses tell fans of zoom lenses to simply "zoom with their feet." However, zooming with your feet will not produce the same image as zooming with your lens, and understanding the difference will give you lots of creative capabilities for taking more powerful images. This helpful video will show you the difference and the impact it will have on your photos.
A lot of beginner photographers hear the advice that professionals only shoot in manual mode and that it is a necessary method for becoming truly adept with a camera. And while there is certainly some truth to the benefits of using manual mode, you might be surprised just how often professionals use various semi-automatic modes, and this great video discusses why and how they can benefit your own work.
360 and action cameras are experiencing increasing popularity, especially as video quality improves more and more. This great video will show you nine creative tricks for better 360 and action camera footage.
An octabox is a highly versatile and relatively affordable modifier that many photographers use in a wide variety of genres and scenarios. This fantastic video will show you five different ways to use a single octabox.
Reflections are a fantastic way to create more visual interest in a photo or to add a pleasing symmetry that helps to balance the composition. They take a bit of technique and consideration, however, and this fantastic video will give you five helpful tips to make your reflection images more powerful.
Long exposure photography is a highly popular technique, one that is a ton of fun and an excellent way to create stunning images. If you want to improve your long exposure work, this fantastic video will give you lots of great tips for better images.
I firmly believe that anyone starting out with artificial lighting should master working with a single light first, but that does not mean one-light setups can't produce versatile and professional results. This great video will show you a critique of several one-light images and provide you with a ton of helpful advice on lighting, posing, and more.
Whether you're looking to create your first portfolio or you're a print veteran thinking about some updates, this webinar may help to move you in the right direction.
Fire will always be something that evokes feelings of excitement, dread, and more, making it a fantastic dramatic tool in short films, wedding videos, and more. But of course, you can't just go around lighting fires wherever and whenever you want, so this great video will show you how you can convincingly fake it with your lighting.
Fundamentally speaking, diffusion panels and softboxes serve the same purpose: creating a larger source and thus, softer overall light. However, in practice, they can have different effects on your subject and can also be easier or harder to work with depending on your needs and setup. This great video will show you their advantages and disadvantages to help you decide which is right for your work.
A lot of us are stuck at home right now and probably itching for something to shoot to keep our technical skills sharp and the creative juices flowing. If you are looking for something that is a ton of fun to shoot, now is a great time to learn more about splash photography, and this great video will get you up and running in no time.
The tone curve is by far one of the most versatile, efficient, and powerful adjustment tools in Lightroom, and mastering it can take you a long way to better image edits and more creative control. If you are unfamiliar with the tool, this fantastic video will show you not only you can use it to adjust things like shadows and highlights, but how it can also be used to color grade an image.
Photographing cars is no small task — literally. Their size makes them trickier to photograph than a lot of other subjects, requiring more lights, more space, and a range of other adjustments and considerations to create a successful shot. This interesting video shows you what it takes to photograph a car in a studio.
A lot of photography is learning how to control different parameters: lighting, composition, posing, etc., but one thing we will never have control over is the sky. Bad skies are something we all have to deal with at one time or another, and this great video will show you three different ways you can fix them.
If you want to create a consistent body of work, it is crucial that you unify the elements of style that go into each image. One of the most overlooked of these is proper cropping, and this excellent video will show you why that is such a crucial thing to master.
Long exposure photography is a fascinating discipline. It can be used in many ways and to great effect if you want to bring some mood and mystery into your photography.
Often, times of adversity — war, social crises, pandemics, etc. — lead to some of the most creative, introspective, and deep works of art across many genres. What sort of art can we expect to be made during and after the coronavirus pandemic? This fascinating video discusses art made in times of adversity.
The more time you spend as a photographer, the bigger your image collection will become, and if you do not put good effort into keeping things organized, it can become difficult to navigate through all your photos. This great video will show you how to use star ratings and keywords to keep everything organized and easy to find.
Along with aperture and ISO, shutter speed is one of the three fundamental parameters that determine the exposure of a photo and that give you creative control over the look of an image. If you are new to photography, this helpful video will show you the ins and outs of how shutter speed works and how it affects the style of your photos.
It happens to all of us at one point or another: our camera breaks, the weather does not cooperate, etc. We have all had a failed photoshoot before. This great video features a photographer discussing four different failed photoshoots of his own.
Of course, having technical skills and the ability to craft a well-exposed and edited photo are important, but if your images are not telling a story, viewers will not find them compelling. This fantastic video will show you how to improve the storytelling in your photos.
Without proper focus, an image simply will not work, which is why it is so important to completely master the skill and know all the different ways you can focus your camera and which method is right for a given situation. This fantastic video will show you seven different ways to focus a photo.
Focal length is one of the most crucial choices in making a landscape photo and can drastically alter the look of the final image. How do you choose the right focal length for a given scene? This excellent video the importance of foreground elements and how to create a balanced composition through the correct choice of focal length.
When you are new to Photoshop, some of the first things you should learn about are layers and masking. Now is an excellent time to work on your editing skills, and this fantastic video will get you up and running on how layers and masking work and what they are useful for.
For many years now, I have religiously bracketed all my landscape images and macro images of flowers. This is why you should give serious consideration to always doing the same.
Photoshop is a tremendously complex program with all sorts of hidden features and techniques. This excellent video features five tips for enhancing images using some techniques you might not have seen before.
A gimbal is one of the best ways to quickly take your video footage to the next level, but if you are shooting with manual focus, it can be tricky to work with. This excellent video will show you three helpful tips to make it easier to use manual focus when you are also using a gimbal.
Being a successful photographer or videographer takes the combination of a wide variety of skills, techniques, creativity, business savvy, and more, and taking all of that into consideration, it is no surprise how truly difficult it is to find success. This excellent video discusses one of the most important skills any creative needs to have to be successful, no matter the genre.
Using live view can sometimes be a way better choice than using the viewfinder or shooting blindly. This great video discusses when and why you should consider switching to live view to help you get the shots you want.
Given the current situation, it is quite possible that it will be a very long time before we see normal weddings with large audiences again, which means workarounds, such as live streaming, need to be found. There is an opportunity for wedding videographers in this, however, as live streaming can be a great service to add to your offerings, and this great video will show you various setups to get you up and running.
Becoming a professional landscape photographer may sound easy to some. There are no clients to work with, no schedule, no lights or backdrops, just nature, you, and your camera. Or is it?
Do you ever ask yourself whether your method of retouching is correct or the best or if there is something new to learn, like how to use frequency separation and a tool in Photoshop that you’ve never tried?
A black background is a popular and timeless look for a wide variety of applications, but depending on where you are shooting, you might not actually have access to a literal black background. This excellent video will show you how to create one no matter where you are.
Product photography is a fantastic genre in which to practice precise and careful lighting and post-processing, and even if it is not what you specialize in, the skills you learn can carry over to whatever you do shoot. This great video will show you how you can use a single light to composite a great glassware product image.
Video editing takes a lot of time and resources, and as such, it is important to establish a proper workflow that promotes efficiency. If you are new to video, check out this comprehensive look at a professional's video editing workflow.
Posing is something a lot of photographers struggle with even after mastering other aspects of the craft. If that is something you tend to have trouble with, this great video will give you lots of helpful tips for improving your portrait posing.
While Lightroom is generally used for cataloging, global edits, and basic local edits and Photoshop is used for more advanced post-processing, there is a definite overlap between the features and capabilities of the two applications. This great video details when you should use Photoshop versus when you can afford to stay in Lightroom.
