Articles from Rex Jones

You've spent all the time outside late at night, photographing the stars, and now, you have these images with all the potential and you're about to process them. Before you simply dive into any normal routine for processing astrophotography shots, you'll want to check out this new tutorial by Milky Way Mike concerning how to use the Dust and Scratches tool to improve these shots.

Have you ever seen those epic lightning photos from people who happen to capture those electric bursts and wanted to go capture your own versions of such photos? Well, lucky for you, Hank Schyma has put together some absolutely fantastic tips for how to do just that.

As a photographer you are often presented with a wide range of both challenges and opportunities. Along with managing your lighting, your camera settings, and your location selections, the physical proportions of the individuals you work with will also play a part in how you set up specific poses and shots.

There have been more than a few different comparisons of Canon's 5D Mark IV and Sony's a7 III, though many of them have focused primarily on landscapes and astrophotography. If you've ever wondered how these to low-light powerhouse cameras stand up to each other in a portrait scenario then this is one comparison you won't want to miss.

What do you do if what you want necessitates a long exposure but external factors such as wind make that difficult? Well, lucky for you, this tutorial by Mike Ver Sprill will show you how to overcome that by blending shots made with both long and short exposure times.

Breakthrough Photography has been producing high-quality lens filters since opening in 2015. Now, with their most recent product release, you can acquire these great lens filters in a magnetic design.

Let's just be honest here, standard HDR photo processing techniques are about as relevant as dial-up Internet these days. There are many other ways to achieve better dynamic range in the final edit of an image and one of the best ways is that of using luminosity masks.

Meet the Irix 15mm f/2.4 Blackstone, a wide-angle lens designed for photographers who need a dependable lens even in extreme situations. The lens, coming to you from TH Swiss Company, first debuted in 2016 and is now widely available for Canon, Nikon, and Pentax mount systems.

With the post-processing power of Photoshop, there are some incredibly creative ways to process digital photographs to create incredibly beautiful results. In this realm of the powerful program by Adobe, exposure blending is not necessarily a new technique these days, but there are always different ways to use the techniques to create visually pleasing and even surreal imagery and this processing tutorial plays with the concept of time and exposure blending. 

It's not unusual for a software company like Adobe to continually add features and modify preexisting ones to programs with which we are already familiar. One of these features which recently got an upgrade, Profiles, is a tool created to add new looks and styles to your shots which can't be achieved by using the standard sliders or controls in the program.

That's right you boudoir photographers, if you haven't tried shooting boudoir outside before then you are seriously missing out. There really are quite a few reasons why you should give it a try here are a few of my favorite reasons why I shoot boudoir outside instead of in a studio.

Using a high ISO setting to capture starry skies is a pretty common practice when shooting astrophotography, though such an ISO setting can result in a fair amount of noise in your image. This tutorial takes you through several processes in Photoshop to reduce the amount of noise in your final image.

Every year, through Share the Experience, hundreds of thousands of people have the opportunity to participate in one of the longest running and highest profile photography contests. The contest for 2018 just recently opened, and will be accepting submissions until December 31, 2018, but there's no time like now to join in fun.

Regardless whether you are just starting out as a photographer, or you if you have decades of experience under your belt, chances are you hit a point when you wondered where this whole photography thing was headed. Am I right?

Hey, who doesn't like a good vacation? If you're anything like me then a big part of the vacation is not just going to be what you see and what you eat, but a good portion of it will be what you get to take home with you.

Chances are you've seen this type of composition before. Well fortunately for you it's easy enough to do, so here's how to set it up.

Post production has been a significant part of photography ever since the beginning of the medium. Back before digital, it was all about how you handled the development of the film and then the enlargement of your print, now it's about how you handle your digital files.

At this point in time, I have lost track how many photographers I have run into who view other photographers around them as mortal enemies. Don't be that person; instead, realize that your camera-laden peers can be incredible sources of friendship and reciprocity.

Slot canyons can be found all around the world. These narrow canyons can be made of sandstone, ice, granite, clay, or other naturally occurring materials. Some of these canyons can be rather large in both width and depth, while other canyons can be incredibly narrow and difficult to navigate

Capturing those beautiful seaside scenes can be incredibly fun as well as a completely unique challenge. If you are planning on going after some beach compositions of your own, then this video is made just for you.

I had originally been using a simple program called NameChanger to rename all my files before importing them to Lightroom, but ever since I realized that Lightroom had all the controls that I needed for setting up custom naming sequences for my files, this is all I use anymore. Here's how you find and use it. It's pretty simple.

Photography is one venture that has an endless amount of opportunity and possibility. With these possibilities comes a tremendous potential for education and improvement.

One of the things that I thoroughly enjoy about photography is the range of possibilities for style. Style is such a personal thing to each of us. We all have our own very different tastes in style, we all come from different backgrounds, and we all have different opportunities for learning and evolving our own styles. Just think about it, even if we were to all use the exact same sets of presets and programs to process all our images, the end results would still be different because of what we put into the shot while actually on the shoot.

Do you have old photographs just hanging around on your hard drive, taking up space? If you do, then perhaps you should consider uploading them to Adobe Stock. You never really know what sort of image someone out there is looking for - they might just want to use that shot that you currently have buried away in the archives. Sometimes, these old shots may require a little bit more work in order to ensure that they will measure up to stock submission standards, but the opportunity to make revenue on work you've already shot makes it a worthwhile venture. If you have old files you want to breathe new life into, the following guide for prepping and submitting those archived shots is just for you.

For a while now, I have been a big fan of the videos that Tony and Chelsea Northrup put together. Their channel is a wealth of knowledge that I visit many times. This particular video, one of their most recent, is one I found to be particularly helpful. If you are like me in that you don't often have the chance to shoot in fog, much less shoot in it frequently, then these tips will be helpful to make the timing and execution of your foggy excursions be that much more successful.

I don't know about you, but I often find myself in this weird limbo state with Instagram. Sometimes I feel like I'm doing really well with how I interact with those that I follow and those that follow me. Yet there are still plenty of other times when I stop and just wonder how the hell am I supposed to put this app to any use? Social media is changing the way that content is created, the way it is shared, and even the way it is understood by those who view it. I am continually learning about how to best put it to use the way that it is designed to function.

I think we all tend to figure out, one way or another, what works specifically for us as individual photographers. There are some styles that I simply don't shoot, some subjects that simply don't interest me, and elements that I simply would not put together for a shoot. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have many times found myself in a creative rut. You know, that mental state where you can think through the mechanics of most your shoots and it's just not as interesting as it has been in the past?

I realized a while back that I watch a lot of YouTube videos. Sure, I'll kill some time while laughing at something completely idiotic, but most of my time on the website is looking for my next lesson in photography. For me, photography is something that I don't think I will ever stop learning, and it's one of the things I like most about it. I love the fact that there is always something else for me to learn, something new for me to try, and countless of other photographers from whom I can learn.

Some time earlier this year, I had this idea to try and find my own approach to portraiture solely for children. It was a multi-faceted idea which came to me pretty much at random. I was reviewing some of my recent portrait work when I realized that I had only ever worked with a couple of children as my subjects throughout my entire running career as a photographer. I figured out a long time ago that family portraits really just weren't something I was interested in, but that didn't really have anything to do with my actual choice of subjects. Just because I didn't want to shoot family portraits didn't necessarily mean that I couldn't work with kids.

For a long time cameras have been used to document history both in still images and in motion pictures. Some of these pictures have been around and publicly available for a long time, others are only available to the individuals who actually own the footage, still there are others that have been kept classified and completely unavailable to anyone without the right security clearance. This has been the case for many videos of the nuclear tests conducted by the United States, until now. The researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have just released 62 of these nuclear test videos that are newly declassified.

Personally, I love shooting in winter, I love the challenge to find and create good compositions while my extremities are slowly going numb, and I love the freedom to go and shoot more beautiful scenery while it is devoid of most tourists and travelers. Over the years, my choice of locations has gotten more aggressive in comparison to my earlier ventures out into the cold. I want to go further, I want to hike deeper, and I simply want more ice and snow in my shots. Chasing after some of these views has resulted in the need for more planning, better timing, and investments in higher quality gear.

Chances are that many of you are familiar with the works of Michael Shainblum. Not only was he Fstoppers' Photographer of the Month earlier this year in September, but he also garnered quite a bit of acclaim for his iconic shot of the solar eclipse in August this year. Aside from being an impressively accomplished landscape photographer, Shainblum is a skilled photography mentor. I've been a fan of his work for years now, and to this date, his tutorial covering post processing for star photography is one of the most enlightening courses I've ever purchased.

Creating landscape images in wintertime is always a unique challenge filled with its own obstacles and rewards. Chasing after that one composition that you've been dying to capture, trying to get out and capture that crisp winter scene before any of the snow becomes filled with the footprints of other photographers and adventures, and simply having the opportunity to see familiar views in a completely different season is something that many photographers look forward to.

The national parks system in the United States has provided enjoyment of the outdoors for millions upon millions of people since August 25, 1916 when the National Parks Service was founded. For over 100 years now we have had access to some of the most incredible hikes and views to be found on the planet. As is similar to any well used item, the parks often fall into disrepair and need to be maintained and upgraded with continued use. The Art Rangers has stepped up to help the National Park Foundation in generating funds to help with the costs of maintenance for the parks.

Utilizing layer masks within Photoshop isn't going to be anything new to some of you but if you are one who is somewhat unfamiliar with using masks in your work then this quick tutorial by Colin Smith, with photoshopCAFE, is just for you. Layer masks are best known for hiding or revealing sections of an image in a non-destructive manner. This could be compared to an eraser tool that can be reversed at any time without having to resort to your history panel. Even though the history panel in Photoshop CC now lets you set the controls to record up to 1000 history states, by using layer masks you don't have to undo all of your work in a sequential order in order to go back and modify the layer that you are masking.