Landscape photography in the summer can be frustrating, especially when shooting woodlands and forests. The forest is thick with green foliage, and parts of the bright blue sky shine through the canopy, creating hotspots in your image. But surely landscape photographers don't stow their cameras away for six months every year, so there must be an alternative?
A few years ago, when the shutter on my Canon 5D Mark II finally gave out after 12 years of use, I needed to upgrade my equipment. With so many mirrorless cameras available on the market, it was a difficult decision. However, one camera consistently stood out to me. No matter how many times I tried to convince myself that there might be a better option for my needs, something kept drawing me back to it.
Photography is currently undergoing a crisis of distinctiveness. Landscape photography, in particular, falls victim to mediocrity: a convergence toward a homogenized aesthetic. In today’s world, where algorithms reward consistency over unique culture, the cookie-cutter approach to landscape photography has become a currency rather than an art form.
What do you do when you're planning a shoot in the woodlands during winter, but you live in a region that doesn't see much snow or fog? You walk for hours in this unforgiving environment, trying to find a decent composition, and you end up feeling frustrated that nothing is working.
These days, it’s becoming easier and more affordable to photograph our night sky. The introduction of smart telescopes has opened the door for keen amateurs and hobbyists to get started in astrophotography at a fraction of the cost of a high-end professional setup. The ZWO Seestar S30 Pro is making the growing smart telescope space even better.
For landscape photographers, one of the most crucial purchasing decisions is not always the camera gear, but the backpack you stow it in. Will the WANDRD FERNWEH 50L tick all the boxes? Or is it just another backpack among thousands of other choices available today? Let's find out.
Modern mirrorless lenses are beautifully crafted technological masterpieces. Yet, these lenses come at an expense. What if investing in older technology provides a comparable, if not more pleasing, result at a fraction of the price of its modern-day equivalent?
When it comes to photography and filmmaking, there are numerous filters to choose from. However, when it comes to choosing the right filters for the job, NiSi made that choice much easier with their latest design.
As a landscape photographer, I find joy in exploration, seeking out compositions that have yet to be captured and waiting for the perfect light to illuminate them. Often, it leads to frustration when the weather turns bad and forces me to retreat to the car for shelter. However, learning to embrace the elements of nature and using them to your advantage to tell a story will ultimately yield a greater payoff.
I've always been skeptical about the introduction of AI into popular applications such as Photoshop; however, as time went on, I started experimenting with specific features, and eventually, Luminar Neo emerged as a standalone and plugin app for Photoshop and Lightroom. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued, and I had to test it out. To my surprise, I found it so helpful that I wondered why I had been using Lightroom in the first place.
As a photographer, your photo library is one of the most important things to keep safe and backed up. Of course, you can have backups on multiple drives, cloud storage, and servers, but hardware can still fail. The risk is exceptionally high during or after a shoot, between the time you take the SD card out of the camera and plug it into your card reader. The last thing you want to see is a drive read error, but it happens. Luckily, there's an easy solution.
With so many carbon fiber travel tripods on the market, it's hard to know which is right for you. However, Falcam has just released its latest TreeRoot tripod, which will turn some heads.
Have you ever found yourself with many snapshots of buildings and architectural features of a city you visited while traveling? Perhaps you looked at these photos thinking they're just ordinary snapshots. What if there were a way you could transform these photos into architectural fine art pieces using Photoshop?
Photography can be challenging at times. It may frustrate you and lead you to think that buying new gear would solve your problems. But before you press that add-to-cart button, perhaps it's best to go back to the basics.
When starting with photography, you'll find many tips and techniques to understand, from the basics of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO to composition and lighting. However, today, we will focus on five techniques worth checking out when you embark on your first landscape photography trip.
As a photographer, I'm starting to use video more often, whether to work on a client's project or promote my work using video. Most, if not all, mirrorless cameras on the market today can also produce high-quality 4K video. However, there is one factor that needs to be taken into account when making a video: sound. Sound is often overlooked, yet it is one of the most essential factors in any video or film.
When I first discovered photography, I was immediately drawn to landscape photography. From day one, I started trawling through photography-related sites and looking at how other photographers captured the world. However, I discovered panoramic landscapes when my photography college lecturer brought a Fujifilm GX617 to class one day. When I saw what it could produce, I was hooked. While unable to afford the GX617, I wanted to replicate the look and feel of the pictures it created with my own camera. So, I researched whatever was available on the internet then and started experimenting with my camera.
A few months ago, I explored a new photography challenge and invested in an infrared filter for landscape photography. I could've bought an already converted used camera, but after looking at what was available on the used market and specialist conversion services, investing in a filter seemed to be at a more appealing price point and the best of both worlds. After several trials and tribulations, I became hooked on this newly discovered world of infrared photography.
When editing landscape photographs, there are many ways to get from point A to point B. In this tutorial, we'll cover using Adobe Camera Raw to get the most out of your raw files.
When it comes to photography, there are a few fundamental basics one needs to cover before shooting. Besides needing a camera, decent battery life, and a reliable and solid support system, you need filters to combat the daylight sun's harshness, introduce contrast, remove the annoying infrared noise, and polarize the sky or any reflections. Some filters also allow you to create those beautiful, abstract, long-exposure, misty seascapes with streaky clouds overhead.
During World War I, French astronomer Henri Chrétien developed a wide-angle viewer for tank operators, enabling the crew members to see a 180-degree view of the battleground. His invention wasn't used in the cinema until after the war in 1927 when director Claude Autant-Lara decided to use it for his film, "To Build a Fire." Sadly, this invention was only picked up again over twenty years later when Twentieth Century-Fox purchased the rights to the Cinemascope Widescreen Aspect Ratio technique.
As photographers, it's vital not to keep all our eggs in one basket, but to expand our means of income by setting up different revenue streams, one of the most popular of those streams being YouTube. But is it still possible to make money from it in 2020?
Around four months ago, amidst a harsh lockdown here in South Africa, I moved from the big city to a small coastal town, Betty's Bay, nestled between the Overberg mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. There was no work coming in, and there was no budget to rent additional gear for any shoots. It was worrying, but on the upside, I had to do something to occupy my mind and pass the time, and luckily, I had my camera to shoot while I wait. What followed was two months of intense filming and editing for my first narrative short film.
Since the introduction of color in film, photographers and filmmakers have been using it to subconsciously tell a story, to make the viewer of a photographer or film feel a certain way, or to further elaborate on a story. How do we, as photographers and filmmakers, use color to our advantage and utilize the full potential without going overboard?
Creating a time-lapse can be one of the most time-consuming practices in photography. Due to the nature of time-lapse, you spend a while finding a suitable composition, set up your camera and wait.
This year has forced many photographers and filmmakers to take an extended break from their day jobs and stay home. The newfound stresses that come with quarantine have left a lot of us uninspired, while others have used this time to pursue projects they couldn't find time for before. One professional filmmaker used his time during quarantine to create a beautiful Sci-Fi short film, from the comfort of his own home.
The world of macro photography can become endless once you venture down that path. There are so many new textures, creatures, and plants to discover. You can quickly lose hours by photographing the miniature world, but how do you get started?
Da Vinci Resolve is a complete video editor with a full set of tools for editors of any level, which means you can build your videos for YouTube, or a feature film, right here in Resolve.
One of the great things about photography is that you can practice it anywhere. You don't need expensive equipment to get the shot or a massive studio to get the photos you need.
I know a lot of us can't go outside right now to shoot panoramas due to quarantines and self-isolation, but perhaps you have some panoramic shots you took months back on a trip somewhere, buried away on a hard drive in the cupboard. Now's a good time to dust them off and get to work!
If you're a photographer interested in exploring video, there is a plethora of options available for you right now. Since the launch of the Canon 5D Mark II around a decade ago, video functionality has been a growing part of every DSLR and mirrorless camera to date. But there's always a trade-off when it comes to hybrid cameras. Here's why you should consider buying a dedicated video camera if you want to diversify your work and make video a dedicated service along with your photography.
By now, most of the countries around the world are under full lockdown or about to undergo lockdown. At the time of writing, my country (South Africa) would be one of the latest to undergo lockdown. Tensions seem to increase the day before the actual event, as people question what they'll be doing with themselves while locked in a house for three weeks or longer. Luckily, it doesn't need to be as scary as you think, especially if you're a photographer.
If you’re a video editor working on Adobe’s Premiere Pro, you’re probably well aware of all the frustrations that come with using Adobe’s answer to video editing daily. The sluggish playback, the generic error issues, random crashes, and in some cases corrupted project files. We’re all well aware of how bloated and buggy this once prized piece of software had become, especially as of late.
Concerts and events can either be exciting and fun or quite challenging for us photographers due to the low-lit environment and having to share the space with other photographers, all while being crammed into a tight space. Luckily, a little bit of planning and preparation can go a long way to avoid any disasters while shooting.
