Articles written by Jason Vinson

A while back I shared an amazing clip that showed what it would be like for mountain bikers if dirt could fall from the sky like snow. In the winter months, snowboarders and skiers get to experience those rare days where the weather conditions are perfect, leaving the mountain covered in a fresh blanket of snow. Because these conditions don’t happen every day, there is always a sense of urgency to get onto the mountain to be one of the first to hit a fresh run. The idea of the video was to show that same sense of urgency in the world of mountain biking. What would it be like if a dirt blizzard covered the runs with a blanket of dirt? Now we get a behind-the-scenes look into what it took to create this unreal scene as well as the tools they used to capture it.

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. Over the years my process has evolved into what it is today. This process came about in part from learning by fire, and another part came from learning from others. If you don't want to use my entire process, I at least hope part of it can become a helpful addition to your workflow.

If you Google the solar system, you will be shown images of all the planets in our solar system laid out in the order they rotate around the sun. The problem with these images is that each planet's respective distance to the sun is not shown to true scale. This leaves the viewer without a true understanding of just how far away each planet is from another. That’s why Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet set out to make a true-to-scale representation of the solar system.

Photography as an art form is all about creating something unique and original. Photographers will travel around the world and trek mile after mile to capture that secluded hidden waterfall or that secret cliff that overlooks a valley. Then they post their amazing image to the internet and now every other photographer wants to shoot that location. One by one, photographers seek out these locations in an effort to put their own artistic spin on the area. Eventually thousands of images are captured of a single location, some of them good and some of them bad, but at what point is the location no longer worth shooting?

The day has finally come in which we are no longer bound to the square crop within Instagram. The ability to post horizontal and vertical images has been requested by users since the beginning of the app. In the past, you would have to open your image in another app, add borders, and then export the new image to Instagram. Since this is the process I follow, I know it’s a huge pain. But even with this new cropping ability, I’m sticking with my old ways.

I know. It’s another one of those dang camera bag reviews. It’s a bag and it holds a camera, why does there need to be a full on review? Well in this case, because Wotancraft is not a well-known name in the industry and there is not a ton of information out there about their products in comparison to other brands. Their Ranger bag is also really good looking. It’s fashioned after World War II military bags and is completely handmade. Plus, I’m a sucker for a good bag review.

Posing is one of those things that people constantly struggle with when getting into photography. Poses that feel comfortable in real life don’t always look good on camera. Check out these four videos from Lexia Frank to help give you a solid base on how to pose your clients in the most flattering way.

Building a business is a tedious thing as most of us know. Everyone uses a different approach and some of us fail and some of us succeed, it's the nature of the beast. In my free time I do some Olympic lifting and I found myself searching for new and better techniques online. What I ended up with is not only finding some great videos for my Olympic lifting, but also a different way of building a business.

I’m always looking for new and interesting ways to add visual interest to my images. I’m a big fan of the effects you can get with prisms and the like, but it’s always nice to find something a little less used. Last year I went to a Katy Perry concert and they were handing out pairs of 3D glasses, which cause rainbow light streaks to appear all around you. I later found out that the glasses were made from diffraction paper.