Opinion

Many of you know about my headshot work, but one of the other major areas of my business is photography for hotels, also known as hospitality photography. Hospitality photography often requires a jack-of-all-trades. I frequently shoot food, cocktails, headshots, mock weddings, and work with models for lifestyle shots. Then add to all that the architectural elements and details of the interior and exterior of the property and you have a shoot that requires quite a bit of different types of gear. When you add it all up, sometimes I’m flying a few hundred pounds worth of gear with me. As I was traveling recently, I thought it was a good time to write up an article about flying and traveling with your gear, and the best way you can minimize the cost of moving it all.

The calendar just turned its pages to 2015. We have tiny and versatile cameras like the GoPro Hero 4 filming 4K video, camera companies making 50-megapixels DSLRs, and artists making mind-blowing stop-motion/hyper-lapse/time-lapse films. So why is it still so hard for artists and big brands to easily connect to collaborate on photo and video projects?

We have all seen the comparison from one iPhone to the next as the newest tech is announced and the previous model is shot off as outdated and useless. This time we look at the evolution of mobile shooting and the tech that brings us into a new era of photography. Looking all the way back to the first iPhone and the quality of image versus the newest flagship from Apple, the iPhone 6, it's remarkable how far we have come and it excites me to see where we can go from here.

It's already been a couple weeks since Serif announced the release of the Affinity Photo beta. I, along with literally thousands of others, have downloaded the program and started putting it through its paces, trying to fit it into my own personal workflow. In this little first impressions review I'll focus on Affinity Photo as a raw converter, a basic retouching platform, and put it up against the big dogs: Affinity versus Lightroom, and Affinity versus Photoshop.

I am hardly the first person in the industry to prattle on and on about why you should print your photos, but I think it is worth mentioning, here today, some things you may not have considered about your digital files. After all, either by intent or just circumstance, we've all been led to believe that our digital files are "safe forever", especially if we've gone to great lengths to back them up on secure drives or on cloud servers and such. But, are they really all that safe?

How are you getting people to look at and engage with your work? This is something we all have to think about constantly in today’s visually saturated market place. It’s why it’s all the more important to look at – and learn from – those producing stunning and engaging work. Let me introduce you to Leonardo Dalessandri, and his latest project “Watchtower Of Turkey”, a video that he worked on over the course of a year and quite possibly some of the best visual media you’ll see in 2015.

Even wonder what goes on in the boardrooms of our favorite camera manufacturers? For many users over the last few years, there’s been regular questioning over decisions that the Big Two (Canon and Nikon) have made. Long term fans have been almost universal in their derision of both companies, citing lack of innovation, lack of meeting true user need, and 'interesting' pricing strategy as some of the reasons. True or not, this video showing “behind the scenes” of the DSLR video revolution and a parody of Canon exec thinking is absolutely hilarious.

Photography, for many of us, is a very personal ambition. As with any art form we pour our blood, sweat, tears, and heart into every project be it a paid or unpaid venture. Many of us put so much emphasis on the success of our creations that we are afraid to share them with the world. Many great pieces of work go unseen because of this irrational fear we hold.