So many tips and tricks for photography are either ineffective, highly niche, or flat-out untrue. Nevertheless, there are still some brilliant tricks that can improve your workflow, and here are eight of them.
There are a few words I've grown to dislike over the years, "hacks" being one of them. Despite my personal vendetta, the word is synonymous with lesser-known tricks that can be helpful when performing a task. With photography — a craft with a lot of moving parts — there are a great many. I find that most are rarely applicable to my work, some are middling, and a handful become a staple in how I work.
In this video, Mark Denney goes through eight tricks he teaches on his workshops, and one — probably the least like a traditional "hack" — is my favorite and a go-to technique. That is, whenever you find yourself wanting to capture a wide field of view, but you want to retain the compression (and perhaps shallow depth of field) of a longer focal length, simply use a longer lens, switch to portrait orientation, and create a panorama.
I have used this method many times in many different genres, often bordering on the Brenizer Method. While it works well for landscape photography, it is criminally underrated for portraits and many other genres too. I love a shallow depth of field in a number of scenarios, but then I will regularly want to retain some of my location in the shots, not just a gooey mix of colors behind the subject. Panoramas are not reserved purely for capturing extra-wide vistas.
Excellent video and commentary as always, Mark! As a landscape and product photographer, I'm always seeking ways of maximizing the sharpness and detail in my images. I love several of your "hacks", such as the small bungee cord on the backpack to enable it to sit on the ground! That makes perfect sense, especially under windy conditions, to keep the backpack from swinging/moving. I also like your idea of "testing" every image with the polarizer...something I've neglected doing since I'm usually somewhat filter-averse, since I like shooting with as little as possible between my lens and subject, to maximize sharpness. That said, I do realize that a polarizer under the right conditions, can indeed improve image detail. Thanks again!
As a general rule, I'd say 15 minutes is a good length. However, more important than length is organized content (the video has a purpose, that purpose is clearly stated, and the content sticks to the subject. (no stream of conscientiousness).
I really like videos that get to the point quickly: no yelling, no hand waving. To me, length is irrelevant if the content is poignant.
Video length of 10 min. seems optimal depending on complexity of the subject, but what drives me nuts is all of the unnecessary patter before getting to the subject. In this video it was 3 1/2 min before the fist tip.