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Alex Ventura

Spring, TX
Alex Ventura | Advent Works
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Articles from Alex Ventura

Why You Should Add a Macro Lens to Your Arsenal

Do you have a macro lens in your camera bag? If you don’t, is it because you don’t shoot macro photography? If you do, are you limiting the use of the lens? There are several lenses out there that some photographers use only for a specific reason, and a macro lens is one of them which many photographers limits to macro photography.

Easily Merge Your Photos for Focus Stacking

Even when shooting at f/16, not every part of the photo will be in focus. Depending on where you focus is at, there will still be some fall off. What if you wanted to get your entire photo in focus?

How to Add a Splash to Your Product Photos

In product photography, you always want to capture the product in the best and appealing way. Sometimes you want to take that product and give it a sense of motion or life. If you happen to be shooting with liquids for your products like a martini glass or maybe even for the drink itself, one powerful way to add motion and life to the image is with a splash. 

Quick Tips to Improve Your Cosplay Convention Photos

Lately, I have been attending more events to cover as a photographer, especially anime and comic conventions. My approach to most of my convention coverage is walking around the event and trying to take as many photos as possible of the cosplayers there, kind of a run and gun approach.

How to Add a Glitch Effect to Your Videos

It’s always good to know several different editing techniques to add visual effects to your project, as you will never know when you'll need them. Adding visual effects to your videos can make your amateurish video look more professional, just as long as you don’t go overboard with them.

How to Deal With Lenses When They Fog Up

Living in Houston, it’s usually very hot and humid here. One of the downfalls is coming from inside a building or the car with AC on cold and then proceeding to go outside to shoot when it's hot outside. Whether it's moving from a cold to warm environment or vice versa, the drastic change in the temperature could cause your camera lenses to fog up. What can you do? 

Five Easy Transition Techniques Done In Camera

Transitions can be very useful in your video to move between scenes instead of just having the end and inserting the new one. There are several different transitions to use, some are very creative and some involve some great skills behind the computer.

How to Clean Your Camera's Sensor

One of the critical things for your camera is to keep the sensor clean. Dust floats around almost everywhere; Once it gets inside your camera it can cause major problems and will cause more work for you in postproduction trying to remove the spots in your photos. 

Advice for Working With Animals on Set

Photographing kids can sometimes be difficult, and even some adults can present challenges during a photoshoot. Shooting animals can present similar challenges along with whole new ones you may not have thought of before. Whether or not the animal is professionally trained to be in front of the camera, you need to be prepared. 

How to Quickly Replace the Sky In Any Photo

As a photographer, you should come to expect Mother Nature isn’t always on your side. Maybe you found the perfect location for a shoot, and when it’s finally set up, the sky isn’t exactly how you want it. Maybe you are just traveling around and taking photos of the beautiful landscape, but the sky leaves more to be desired.

7 Quick Tips for Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom can be a powerful tool in your photography workflow. There are a lot of features that are included, but as a new user or even someone who has been using it for a while, there might be some useful tricks within Lightroom of which you are still unaware. How many of these are new to you? 

How to Add Color to Your Shadows With Gels

Looking to add some color to your shadows? There are a few different methods to achieve this, but what if you could do it all in-camera? Well, you can. Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens covers four different ways to add some color into your shadows with gels. 

What Does it Take to Crash The DJI Spark?

While shopping the market for a drone, there are many things to consider. Is durability one of them? Well, it should be, but it's not usually taken into account while shopping.

Why You Should Use ND Filters for Filming

There’s a lot of things to consider while filming to get smooth footage for your project. There are several tools to help out as well, but are ND filters in your arsenal? They usually don’t come to mind when you are thinking about how to get smooth footage but they can help when the scene is too bright. 

DJI Spark Attacked in the Sky

We have heard stories of drones being shot down from the sky before, but have you heard of them being attacked midflight? That’s exactly what happened when Colin Smith from P hotoshop Cafe decided to fly a new DJI Spark for a review. 

Using Off-Camera Flash to Create More Interesting Wedding and Engagement Photos

There are several ways to create more interesting photos, one way is to use off-camera lighting to help separate your subject from the environment or even making them the main focus of the shot. Carsten Schertzer shares 10 flash techniques he uses in his wedding and engagement photos to make them more interesting.

Five Slider Tips for Beginners

There are several tools out on the market for filmmakers to help improve your video with smoother motion throughout the film. One popular choice is the camera slider. There’s no doubt you have seen a smooth camera motion from the result of a camera slider before.

Cloning Yourself in Photos or Videos

How many times have you seen a video or photo where a subject or even the artist themselves appear in it multiple times and wondered how they did that? Having a background in graphic design, I always guessed you just merge the footage or photos together and mask sections out to reveal the subject in each area.

7 Items you Need on set as a Filmmaker

While preparing for a shoot, whether it’s for film or photo, there usually is a few miscellaneous tools you don’t think of until you needed them.

How to Get Smoother Handheld Footage

If you shoot or looking to shoot video, one question that you might be trying to think a solution for is how to get smoother video footage.  I am not sure how many people would be interested in watching a video that you are trying to produce if it is entirely too shaky especially if that doesn't fit the mood of the video.

How to Add Fake Slow Motion to Your Footage

While editing video, there are several effects you can add to the project to exaggerate, dramatize, or put focus on a specific portion. One popular method to do this is to slow down the footage. Many of the new cameras that are coming out today are able to shoot in higher FPS (frames per second), allowing this technique to be achieved effectively in camera.

Adding Color to Your Black and White Photos Just Got Easier

We all know someone that has an older photo taken in black and white and many of us have seen those request to transform those photos into color. Converting old black and white photos to color may have just gotten easier with a new app. 

Become a Better iPhone 7 Photographer With Latest Videos from Apple

With the availability of cameras in mobile phones and the ever-growing presence on social media, a lot more people are taking photos of all sorts of theses. The quality of the cameras have improved over the years, so much so that there has been some professional photoshoots done completely using the camera on their phones. 

Why You Should Start Printing Your Photos

Since the birth of digital cameras, there has been less need to print your photos. Many of the newer photographers have never printed or even sent their photos to be printed at a lab. Why should you if your audience is all online? 

How to Shoot Suspended Objects with Fishing Line

Shooting suspended objects in your images can be done a few different ways, from the use of Photoshop to the simple and effective use of wire or fishing line. My first instinct would be to grab clear fishing line.

Improve Your Videos With Better Transitions

While working on putting together great video work, you will come across breaks in scenes where they need to come back together. In most cases, a transition effect is used to merge the scenes together instead of having one stop completely and the next one begin. A great transition can improve your video, but they can also be used incorrectly and ruin your film. 

Studio Workflow to Organize and Back Up Your Media

With digital media, the quest for more is always on the horizon. From constantly shooting photos and videos with the resolution increasing as well, the amount of space required to store all of our work is growing at an alarming rate… well at least in my case.

 

How to Create Fantasy Composite with Your Photos in Photoshop

Peter McKinnon is back with another video, this time to show how to create a fantasy composite in Adobe Photoshop. A composite image is an image made up of various photos which are placed and blended together to make one image. When it comes to fantasy, it’s just that... fantasy.

How to Shoot Panoramic Portraits

Environmental portraits are great for capturing people with the scene around them. If you want to show more of the environment you should try doing panoramic portraits. While traveling in New York shooting panoramic landscapes, Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens had a thought to add people in the photo so he gave it a try.

Five Tips for Product Photography with David Butler

Have you thought about trying your hand at product photography? Most of us see it in some form or fashion everyday. Some people might not give it much thought when they look at the products in the photo. A great photo will help tell the story of the product, so where would you start if you wanted to try it yourself?

 

How to Shoot Company Groups

Have you been booked or plan on shooting a large group for their company team photo? Not sure what you need to do or even how to start? Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens is back with another video with some of his tips on how he shoots his corporate group portrait photos.