This past February I had the great privilege of meeting Allan Henry, general manager and the main driving force behind the up-and-coming camera bag company Atlas Packs. After our first interaction, I knew that this product and company were doing something special.
Jared Polin, aka the Fro, brings us yet another real-world review, where he looks in-depth into the latest and greatest cameras on the market. This time it's Sony’s latest offering in the a7 III and I’ve been looking forward to this review since the announcement.
Something all photographers have to deal with on a daily basis is how to price their professional work. It’s something that’s not easy to quantify, and each job is usually a different monster requiring its own unique budget.
It seems like every time you open Instagram, someone is complaining about their post exposure or the algorithm on their profiles. Whether algorithm changes or some other inexplicable event have dropped their engagement, the reason they don't have a following yet is because Instagram is always holding them back. What we fail to realize is that this free platform that promotes our work really doesn’t owe us anything.
There is a lot of buzz around Sony’s recent announcement of the a7 III, and for good reason: at the price point, there is no camera on the market with a better feature set. But does the autofocus hold up to Sony’s extravagant claims?
These days there are a million things that you need to juggle simultaneously as a working photographer. You need to be managing your website, social media, and constantly be replying to emails. We tend to forget the actual craft of photography and most importantly telling your story with light.
While most of us here have been through the experience of your first paid photoshoot, there are definitely a lot of users here using the content of this site to further themselves to a professional level.
I went through some situations over the past four months that was making me question if I chose the right company in Sony. After hours of research and really weighing the pros and cons of all the big name companies, I chose to stick with them. In this video, I’ll give you my five reasons why.
At this year’s Outdoor Retailer trade show in Denver, Colorado, the biggest names in the outdoor industry came together for one event to show off their latest and greatest to the world. While most of the products at the show were geared more toward outdoor equipment and snow gear, there were brands unveiling products that most photographers and videographers who work in the outdoors will be extremely excited about.
A trade show is an organized event for companies in a specific industry to showcase and demonstrate their latest products and services, meet with industry partners and customers, study activities of rivals, and examine recent market trends and opportunities. What this means for photographers is that if you're in the niche of the trade show this is your chance to be face to face and rub shoulders with the big names in your industry. To fully maximize the network and contacts you can make from these events you need a game plan and some guidelines to follow. These are my personal five tips to maximize your networking at a trade show.
Back at it again, the charmingly abrasive but always informative Jaren Polin (or as most of us know him, Froknowsphoto) released a new real-world review on Sony’s newly released a7R III. Love him or hate him, Polin always puts out the some of the most in-depth camera reviews in the photography YouTube space, and this video is no exception.
You’ve got the fancy camera, the biggest and baddest lenses, and the technical know-how to shoot beautiful imagery in your field of photography. What do you do now to get the cash flow rolling in? Do you try to branch out your network reach to try to get the “in” with potential clients, make countless cold calls and emails, or giving away work for free to bring attention to your business? Many very talented professionals get to this point in their career where they have the skills but not the knowledge of business to make money. If you’re finding yourself in this spot of your career, watch this video from Sheldon Evans now.
Evan Ranft is a freelance photographer and short-form video maker based out of Atlanta, Georgia. While he has only been shooting professionally for a short time in the grand scheme of things, he has amassed quite the client base by shooting for brands such as Clif Bar, Mountain Dew, and Budweiser. Through his four years of shooting he has learned many things but in this video, he breaks down the three biggest mistakes he has made throughout his career.
For the longest time, I avoided shooting weddings at all costs. I personally thought they were something photographers only did to make money and that no one truly enjoyed them. But as I developed more and more as a professional I started getting the itch to just try one, just to say I could do it. Soon after, I got in touch with my contact that worked weddings and lined up a job as a secondary shooter the following week. When it was all said and done, those four hours were possibly the most fun and challenging times I’ve ever had with a camera.
As someone who shoots 90 percent of my professional work with wide lenses, it seems like a daunting tasking to go reaching for a 70-200mm or longer when looking to capture a landscape. Long lenses require a lot more thought in how the compression is going to affect the way the viewer sees the image and its a focal length that the human eye can’t really grasp until you look through the viewfinder. With that being said, learning to use these long focal lengths will go a long way in making us more versatile in our craft. Lucky for us, Thomas Heaton has decided to make a video specifically about this.
When you’re running your own photography or videography business we all know that going out and shooting is only a small portion of the job. You have to make the connections to get the job. You have to go through the process of meeting with the client and assessing the needs to get the desired finished product. Then you have to find out the client’s budget and figure out how to accommodate them while charging properly for the shoot. After all that is said and done, and the project is finally coming to fruition the final thing left to do is send out the invoice for the job.
Anyone who pursues photography professionally knows all too well how absolutely time consuming the business side of the industry truly is. Between managing clients, keeping your inbox at zero, and still trying to find time to pursue personal projects or just have a life outside of photography, you can sometimes lose yourself to the rat race. That’s why when I saw Evan5ps' newest video it really struck a chord in me.
At this point, we should all know that almost all jobs and opportunities to find success in photography are built off networking. Now there are tons of ways to network and the path you pick will depend solely on the niche you associate with. Either way, the main goal is to meet people with the same professional interests as yourself to feed off each other creatively and to broaden your reach in the community. We tend to forget about the community aspect as we get caught up in chasing money or companies but what we sometimes need to go to that next level is support system built off our love for photography.
Thomas Heaton is a landscape photographer based in the United Kingdom and has grown exponentially in popularity since gaining steam on his YouTube channel in the early part of 2016. While known for giving a great professional insight into the world of professional photography, he’s also a great educator on handling yourself in the outdoors. In his latest video, Heaton goes through the entire contents of his hiking backpack and explains each items utility and how it fits together as a system.
Since the beginning of time, humans have been drawn to the mountains. Naturally, if you’re a photographer and have a taste for adventure, the mountains seem like the best place to go shoot. Dramatic landscapes, beautiful colors, and natural majesty of the great outdoors is the perfect recipe for compelling imagery. However, we must prepare properly and to be aware of the dangers in these places because a mistake in the mountains could be fatal. If you take the time to research and know the variables that Mother Nature presents there is no reason your shoot won’t go as planned.
Even in today’s world where all the information you’ve ever wanted is in the palm of our hand, we still get caught up in the latest and greatest tech and forget about what most important — the story. We all go through stages where it’s easier to make the excuse that you’ll start putting out better work once you buy a specific piece of gear or you’ll start practicing your video work once you get that gimbal you’ve been safe keeping in your online shopping cart. We just need to spend more hours behind the camera constantly shooting than daydreaming about the gear that we’ll have soon.
When making films, we experiment with different camera setups, locations, times, and various equipment to try to nail that scene exactly how we see it in our head. Lately though I have been experimenting a ton with movement. It really immerses you into a location and gives you the feeling of being there yourself. It also is great way to piece a story together seamlessly. Now when I saw one of my favorite filmmakers make a video this specific subject I knew I had to share it.
Sometimes as creatives, we lose sight of what originally attracted us to the creative process of photography and videography in the first place. We get lost in the noise while we are busy juggling social media, websites, managing shoots, pitching to clients, and constantly reinventing our work. Every now and then we need an image or a video to really put in perspective why we feel the way we do when we raise our cameras to our eye. The wonderfully directed short film "Too Far Gone" does just that.
About a week ago I was in New York City visiting for pleasure and decided there was no way I could leave without visiting my favorite store in the city: the B&H superstore. This was something I had been looking forward to since it would be the first time I could get my hand on the new Sony a9 and see what all the fuss was about. During my visit, I was absolutely floored by the performance of the a9 and how the Sony kiosk had way more attention than anywhere else in the store. This along with the recent announcement of Canon’s 6D Mark II and Nikon’s company woes made me realize how much the industry needs a company like Sony.
Cranes are quickly becoming a staple in the bags of many videographers and for good reason. It has a smaller footprint, lower cost of entry, and has a relatively low learning curve than most gimbals on the market. Even though most users can pick up and go without ever opening the manual. There are still fundamental crane movements that you need to learn to take a good scene and make it a great scene.
By now we all should know that Adobe has ditched the traditional one-time purchase for programs in favor of the new Creative Cloud subscription model. During the transition, there were growing pains and outrage amongst the creative community. People were upset that they would no longer be getting updates for the programs that they owned and the only way to stay current would be to subscribe to Adobe’s service. Now that the dust has settled from the transition, Justin Odisho weighs in with his thoughts on the subscription and if he thinks it’s worth it as a professional in the industry.
While we all might not all be a fan of his on-camera persona or his punchy photography style. I think we can all agree that Jared Polin aka FroKnowsPhoto does a great job of testing out and reviewing the latest and greatest in the Photography industry. In his newly released “Real World Review” Jared takes the newly released Sony a9 and puts it through the paces at a professional soccer event in Philadelphia.
Unlike most people in Photography, I didn’t pick up a camera for the love of making art. I never thought of myself as an artistic person but I wanted something better than my phone to document my hikes in the Appalachian Mountains. Quickly after getting my first Sony a6000 just like with all my hobbies I had to know everything about it and so I ran down the photography rabbit hole (and haven’t come back). Even though I do more with my camera nowadays than just documenting the trail, it has taught me a few things that have helped me immensely in my work.
Jakob Owens is a visual director based out of Los Angeles, California. He directs music videos, commercials, short films, and manages his YouTube channel TheBuffNerds. Ever since discovering Owens through YouTube, I have used his channel as a constant source of industry information and inspiration. In his newest video, he announces his recent acquisition of the 6K RED Dragon and while explaining the purchase he gives insight on how he justified this milestone purchase.
With every job or concept we go to shoot, our gear that we take with us is constantly changing. We take our full lighting setup for a day in the studio then we turnaround and pack a separate bag to go shoot in the mountains for that perfect sunset. The gear we take with us is on a constantly turning roundabout between our bags and kits. Through all the madness there does seem to be a few items that are consistently put into every setup. It’s those pieces of gear that work in all scenarios that are invaluable to us and how we work. These are the five items that I won’t leave the house without regardless of what’s on the agenda.
We’ve all had one of those moments where we were in the middle of watching a video and realized that the pacing just didn’t quite feel right. It’s something that once it catches your attention can ruin the rest of the video for ourselves. Whether it be fast jump cuts to a slow song or vice versa, the pacing of our videos is a highly important variable that can quite easily be overlooked in the video production process.
In April, Sony shocked the photography community by announcing the rumored Sony a9 to the world. The camera attacked all the critics by improving on most of the aspects that many believed to be holding Sony back from being a true “professional” camera. Dual SD card slots, 20 frames per second burst with autofocus, and improved battery life all made it seem that the a9 would be the camera to battle the Canon 1DX and Nikon D5 for the top sports camera in the industry. While on paper this camera seemed to be perfect but recent events have come to light showing Sony’s true Achilles heel is still reliability.
Social media consumption is at an all-time high and is on pace to increase at an exponential pace for the foreseeable future. We all seem to have capable technology on us always, whether it be a cell phone or dedicated interchangeable lens camera. With this rapid rate of consumption and the accessibility of technology we are living in a world saturated with quality content everywhere we look. Standing out among other photographers is getting more challenging daily and that’s why I put together these three ways to help separate yourself from other photographers.
When it comes to using camera gear, our carrying and mounting systems are truly paramount to being efficient in many shooting scenarios. While many brands have attempted to perfect a “one-size fits all” system, only one in my opinion hits the nail on the head for all my needs. In his latest video, fellow YouTuber and Sony shooter, Jason Vong, agrees with me that the Peak Design system flat out works. Individually the products are great and high quality, but used together they provide a seamless experience found with no other product line on the market.
In today’s world, the quality of work being put out into the creative space is as high as has ever been. Now with the cost of entry being low and the quality of technology being constantly updated, making a name for yourself is getting harder and harder daily. We are always looking for that “edge” as professionals that set us apart from the crowd or that little extra boost of energy needed to finish that late-night editing session. Lucky for us the answer isn't more caffeine (though it never hurts) or something we have to go out and buy. It's as simple as dedicating a few minutes a day to personal fitness.
