Articles written by Rex Jones

According to a news update by Facebook, there are more than 1.2 billion people who are connected via Facebook to a small business in another country. In an age where digital products and online services are easier to create and sell, it naturally makes sense to open up target markets across borders. Last year Facebook introduced cross-border solutions in order to help business connect to the ever increasing mobile market through the social media platform. Facebook just recently updated the marketing options available for businesses who use the platform to market to customers online. There are four new market targeting options, within the Facebook Business module that allow you to connect with new customers who live in areas that would previously have been more difficult to identify.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.