Rex Jones's picture
Average rating:
4.2 out of 5 4.2
Rex Jones
Saint George, UT
Menu

Articles written by Rex Jones

Know Your Rights: Basics of Photographic Copyrights
29
by

At this point I have lost track how many times I have been given inaccurate counsel from other well-meaning people, such as, "Make sure you copyright that so nobody can steal it," or "If you put it online then you give up your rights and it becomes public property." Such advice will only ever come from people who don't actually understand copyright laws. When it comes to copyright issues and navigating them, the only advice worth following is advice that can be backed up by law. If you receive advice that can't be backed up by legitimate copyright law then the advice is simply someone's opinion.

Sharpening in Lightroom: Make the Most Out of the Detail Panel
21
by

Adobe Lightroom was a pretty slick piece of software to begin with, but over the past several updates it has become an incredibly powerful tool for photographers. Of all the different controls and tools available within the software, the Detail panel has become one of my favorites. If you use Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Photoshop, you can find the same set of controls that we're talking about today which of course is within Lightroom. Adobe has been streamlining their systems for a long enough time now that handling raw files, although from a cataloging perspective is quite different, is almost identical between Lightroom, Camera Raw, and Photoshop.

Working With Kids: The Challenges and Rewards
4
by

As a photographer, working with children can be incredibly challenging at times, but it can also be just as much fun. I have found that there is no real secret behind taking great shots of kids, but rather it comes down to how you navigate interacting with each child while on the shoot. The range of personalities that kids will display is incredibly diverse, this means that it is unlikely that you will be able to interact with any given child the same way that you did with another. This also means that it will be really easy to capture very unique shots on every single shoot.

Why You Should Consider Giving Film a Chance
22
by

I still try to learn, as much as I can, as often as I can, especially in the world of photography. No matter how much more experience I manage to gain or how many people I get lucky enough to work with, I think I will always still feel like a beginner who is just learning the craft. I was fortunate enough to begin my adventures into photography with a great darkroom class. My experience behind the camera quite literally started with black and white film and using enlargers to bring my images to life.

Tips for Shooting Landscapes in Tourist-Heavy Locations
19
by

What do you do if that one location you want to photograph on your trip just happens to be one that hundreds if not thousands of other people also want to photograph? It can be a tricky situation to navigate. Sometimes it can be straight up frustrating. After too many instances where I found myself just being irritated, I found a few different ways to approach my shots of popular destinations that allowed me to capture what I wanted without having to feel like I was fighting crowds just for my shot.

Yes, You Should Still Be Studying the Work of Ansel Adams
26
by

There is a good reason that Ansel Adams' name has stood the test of time through the years. As one of the photographers in history who gets studied the most, Adams' work continues to be used as an example to photography classes and studies around the world. One of the reasons why he is still revered around the world is because of how carefully his images were crafted and how difficult they are to recreate. Digital and printed recreations of his images just don't quite have quite the depth and quality that his original prints do.

Instagram Hits 800 Million, Launches New Controls for Safety and Filtering
3
by

Instagram just recently announced that they have grown past 800 million users with 500 million people using the popular social media app every day. This week the company updated the app's ability to take more control of the commenting on your posts. In the June update, Instagram created a filter to block offensive comments in English, and that filter has just been expanded to include the languages of Arabic, French, German, and Portuguese. Instagram is in the process of improving the filter over time to allow the general experience of sharing to improve simultaneously.

Make the Most of Autumn Colors This Fall
7
by

That's right, it's just about every photographer's favorite time of year. The last thing that anyone wants is to have the season come and go without having had the chance to capture as much of it as we can. Whether you shoot landscapes, or portraits, or even if you don't take pictures at all but still want to have the chance to make the most of the autumn colors then here are some tips that might help.

Use Color Contrast in Photoshop for More Depth and Richness in Portraits
2
by

There are so many different ways to process your photographs. Some people will spend hours on a single image, others will spend a few seconds, and the rest of us fall somewhere in between those ranges. For the most part I think we all strive to get as much as we can in-camera through the time we spend metering subjects, dialing in exposure settings, and controlling our lighting whenever possible. Post-processing is just another part of that creative process where we harness the capabilities of the image created in the negative and use our own preferential techniques to create the final image.

Setting Out to Shoot Boudoir as a Male Photographer
12
by

There are countless photographers out in the world who are producing truly exceptional work in the field of boudoir. Local to me in Utah, the field is one where most of the boudoir photographers are women. The ratio of boudoir photographers from female to male is really irrelevant, so I didn't even bother trying to figure it out. Starting to offer boudoir services as a male photographer was a fairly daunting idea to me, particularly because the community in which I live is fairly conservative and the boudoir genre itself is not as widely accepted as it might be in other communities around the globe. If you find yourself in a similar situation then here are a few ideas to hopefully help you get up and running.

How a National Park Changed the Way I Shoot: Lessons From Yellowstone (Part 3)
1
by

I've never been one for collecting souvenirs, not even remotely. I have always much preferred to take some extra time to hunt down a few locations in which to shoot some landscape photographs. For me, the pictures that I get to take home are the best souvenirs that I could hope for. In many ways, the more work that it takes to capture such images, the more the pictures end up meaning to me. I get to feel like I earned the right to have such a fun and print-worthy memory. I would venture a guess that there are quite a few of you who take the exact same approach when you travel.

To Underexpose or Not to Underexpose, That Is the Question
30
by

Photography is all relative to the creator and the viewers, so the decision of whether to underexpose, overexpose, or to expose your portraits evenly is obviously subject to personal preference. There is merit to any of the methodologies that you could apply to your own photography and it really just comes down to figuring out what works best for you and your gear.

Fstoppers Interviews Renowned Landscape Photographer Gary Randall
6
by

If you don't already follow Gary Randall, I don't think it will take you very long at all to understand why you should be following him. I first ran across Randall's work on 500px back in 2012 when I first joined that site and was looking up landscape photographers to follow. He quickly became one of my all-time favorite landscape photographers and I have been inspired by his work time and time again. I feel lucky that I was able to spend well over an hour on the phone chatting with him, getting to know him a little better, and to learn about his approach to photography.

The Edit Photo Button: Brilliant Photoshop Tool Can Transform Any Image into a Masterpiece
17
by

Has anyone ever told you that you're cheating when you apply any post-processing to your image after the initial capture of that image? Well, the reality is that what you were told is completely true. You see, for decades, cameras have had the innate ability to perceive what the scene should look like. In fact, all cameras have always been built with special recognition and reproduction capabilities that quite literally take all the hard work away from the photographer. This leaves you, the photographer, with a much easier job. The advent of the Edit Photo button within Photoshop is simply another way that technology has made our job, as photographers, much easier.

Swimwear Photoshoot: No Beach Access? No Problem
10
by

I'll be honest, when it came to shooting swimwear, I went straight to Pinterest looking for whatever ideas and inspiration I could find. Swimwear is different enough from the other types of shoots that I was typically shooting that I really had no idea where to begin. Granted, my clients weren't clothing line companies, so I wasn't aiming for the more routine, catalog-style shots. Since the people wanting the shots were the models themselves, I wanted to make sure that the end results looked as good as possible and hopefully a bit more stylish.

Advanced Subject Selection: Take Complete Control of Your Backgrounds in Photoshop
8
by

I've actually had quite a few people request that I create a tutorial for my production processes wherein I add background textures into my studio shots. I know, it has taken me forever to get around to actually putting it together, but it's here now! The tools that I will go over in this tutorial are quite handy for a variety of uses. But for this tutorial, we will specifically use them to select and mask the background in a studio portrait shot.

How a National Park Changed the Way I Shoot: Lessons From Yellowstone (Part 2)
4
by

I think most photographers understand the desire to continuously acquire piece after piece of equipment. Looking back at my trip to Yellowstone, of course there are several lenses and at least one other camera body I wish I would have had for that trip. However, at the same time, I am pretty pleased with the images I was able to capture with the gear that I had while out exploring that beautiful place.

How a National Park Changed the Way I Shoot: Lessons From Yellowstone (Part 1)
20
by

It's been several years since I first had the chance to visit Yellowstone National Park, but I can honestly say that it was an incredible experience throughout and I can't wait to go back. The trip to the national park was honestly a game-changing experience for me and how I approach my own landscape photography. I learned so much on that trip, not necessarily about my gear, but about what to shoot and how to capture it in a way that would help me really remember what it was like to see things in person.

The Dehaze Tool: A Simple Tool That Can Make a Big Impact
8
by

When it comes to processing your digital images, there are so many tools available to you and sometimes the process can seem a bit convoluted. Personally, I like to use a mix of both Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop to make the most out of my images. Perhaps I'll throw Capture One in the mix one of these days, but for now all of my postproduction work is done using Adobe software. This brief tutorial goes over one of the lesser-known tools that exists both in Lightroom and Photoshop, the Dehaze tool.

A Quick Fix for Correcting Distortion in Stitched Panoramas
6
by

Sometimes when you're out shooting that epic landscape, in order to capture the entire view, you need to shoot a series of images on location and then stitch them together afterwards in post-processing. I think we've all been there. Depending on which lens you're using, that can create the particularly frustrating challenge of dramatic image distortion. In a nutshell, the wider focal length of the lens, the more distortion you are likely to see when stitching shots together.