Ah, the night, what a wonderful time to go out and do some street photography! As a photographer who got his start in the streets of Tokyo, it was inevitable that I would end up photographing mostly at night.
If photography is your chosen career path or even just a hobby, at some point, someone is going to ask you to take some photographs in exchange for a paycheck.
There is a wealth of information on the internet about composition—endless blog posts about visual rules, geometric concepts, and photos with all kinds of lines and shapes drawn over them to the prove the point. But all of this information focuses on the "what" of composition rather than the "why." A photographer must stop and ask themselves: "why even bother following visual rules?"
Last year, I used a custom-built setup to shoot a timelapse of an eternal terrarium in my kitchen. Over the course of 10 months, a camera took two photos every hour of the day, while the plants inside the terrarium grew on their own without disturbance.
Adobe has just uploaded a very quick-but-useful tutorial that will help you get more realistic results when using Photoshop's Content Aware Fill tool by altering one lesser-known setting: Color Adaptation.
Photographer Tajreen Hedayet of Tajreen&Co has released a simple, straight-to-the-point tutorial that will show you how to capture soft, colorful, 'dreamy' looking portraits even if you don't have much budget to work with.
Today marks one year to the day that my book went on sale. It’s a very personal project that means a huge amount to me. I wanted to write a post that not only reflects on the past year since the book became available, but also on the project itself. It took a huge amount of work to get to that stage in the first place.
Landscape photographer Mads Peter Iversen has put together a helpful video where he covers 5 "crucial" mistakes to avoid in landscape photography. Crucial might be an overstatement, but the video points out five of the most common mistakes you'll see from novice landscape shooters in particular.
In this video, wedding photographer Taylor Jackson takes you behind the scenes on one of the most stressful and challenging wedding photography scenarios you're likely to run into: shooting an entire wedding after dark, using ambient light.
Ryan Breitkreutz over at Signature Edits has created a useful tutorial that dives into one of the most critical aspects of portrait photography: skin tones. In this 30-minute video, he shares some his personal tips and techniques for capturing natural-looking skin tones, first in-camera, and then in Lightroom.
When it comes to Lightroom alternatives, nobody has taken more users away from Adobe than Capture One Pro. But if you've never used Capture One and you need a crash course on the basics, Ted Forbes of The Art of Photography has put together a helpful video that you might find handy.
When you’re just starting out, building a fashion photography portfolio can be quite a daunting task. Having to organize and prepare shoots can be difficult, especially if you have no budget. These are my tips for shooting on a shoestring when you’re just starting:
Portrait photographer Miguel Quiles is back with another useful video for aspiring portrait photographers. This time, he's put together a video outlining the five most common portrait photography mistakes that he's seen over the years, and how he suggests that beginners avoid or fix them.
Filmmaker Daniel DeArco is back with the promised Part 2 of his tutorial on creating cool and compelling "match cuts" to up your transition game. In Part 1, he showed you how he captured the three shots that he would be using to create the match cut; in Part 2, he takes us the rest of the way there in post.
Creative consultant and talented videographer Daniel DeArco is one of the best there is at creating impressive transitions from shot-to-shot in his videos. In his latest video, he'll take you behind the scenes to show you exactly how he created one of the coolest cuts in his recent empathy video.
Rachel and Daniel of Mango Street—one of the most popular photography channels on YouTube—have put together a great, straight-to-the-point guide to capturing that "moody" style of portrait that's become a popular counter-point to the "dreamy" overexposed look that often dominates lifestyle imagery.
Photoshop expert Sid Vasandani of StyleMyPic has put together a fantastic, in-depth look at luminosity masks that could significantly speed up your photo editing workflow. If you don't understand luminosity or you've never used luminosity masks, this tutorial could legitimately change the way you make selections.
Video journalist Logan Baker over at Shutterstock put together a handy primer for anybody who is looking to get into black-and-white photography for the first time. The tutorial amounts to an easy-to-follow beginner's guide that we highly recommend you check out if you're just getting started in this genre.
"Super-resolution" and "pixel-shift" photography isn't just possible if you have a fancy camera that can move the sensor 1 pixel between shots. As Usman Dawood of Sonder Creative demonstrates in this video, you can even do it with your run-of-the-mill smartphone, shooting hand-held.
Kirk Schwarz over at Practical Photography recently put together a short tips video for anybody who wants to get into toy photography. If you've never taken these kinds of photos but have always wanted to try, you'll find Schwarz' tips for shooting an "explosive" toy photo on a budget in the video above.
Photographer Karl Taylor recently put together a quick tutorial video that shows you how to use ND filters to "burn" a long-exposure in-camera while you're taking the shot. It's a neat trick, and a good solution for those times when a graduated filter won't work.
Recently I made my own custom-built camera rig for shooting Through-The-Viewfinder videos on a Nikon Z6 through the viewfinder of an old Lomo Lubitel 166. With my setup, I can have the whole camera in the frame but without distracting hands visible. Here's how I did it.
Talented creator Daniel DeArco—who goes by "Industrial Content Director & Creative Consultant" these days—recently dived into a topic that isn't often covered for creative business owners, freelancers, or just creators in general: empathy. Specifically, how empathy can transform the work you do and help you connect with clients.
YouTuber and Photoshop expert Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect has put together a helpful and detailed guide that shows you exactly how to set up your Wacom tablet and keyboard shortcuts for the best photo editing and retouching experience.
Photographer Isaac Alvarez of Unplug Productions is at it again in a video that shows you how to capture striking, professional-grade "ink-watch" photography in your own living room using only the most basic equipment.
The latest crop of smartphones all feature incredible low-light photography modes that can capture things that were unthinkable just one year ago. Case in point: Zach Honig, Editor-at-Large of The Points Guy, recently captured the Northern Lights in Coldfoot, AK using just an iPhone 11 Pro Max... handheld!
The latest Sony cameras have the ability to shoot "pixel shift" images that create an ultra-high-resolution version of your scene. But what if you don't have a Sony a7R III or IV? Do what wedding photographer Ben of Bach Photography does in this video and steal a technique from landscape photographers.
Handheld focus stacking is a brilliant solution for many scenarios. It saves you all the troubles of using a focusing rail in the field and provides a maximum of flexibility. Whenever you need more depth of field than you can get with trading off image quality, this is the way to work around it.
Did you know that Photoshop has a built-in focus stacking function? This article explains about how it works and how to make the most of it.
Talented landscape photographer Michael Shainblum has put together a helpful tutorial that shows you two ways to dodge and burn your landscape photos depending on how selective you want to be.
One of the greatest challenges in macro photography is the depth of field, or DOF for short. Not only does the zone of sharpness drastically fall off as we get closer to our subjects, other factors such as the lack of light and diffraction softening make it tricky to use narrow apertures on top of that.
If you develop your own film or wet plates, photographer Markus Hofstaetter has a great tip for you. With just a tiny little DIY tweak, you can turn a $5 all-in-one IKEA gadget into the perfect all-in-one Darkroom timer, thermometer and clock.
Commercial photographer, director, and artist Isaac Alvarez of Unplug Productions recently set out to see if he could capture professional-grade commercial product photography with a single LED panel for light, and a junkyard as his "studio." It seems the answer is yes...
Attaching the variable neutral density (ND) filter to a lens basically means that we have added a fourth dimension to our camera. The exposure triangle -- aperture, ISO, shutter speed -- has been expanded with a fourth variable with which we can play to achieve a desired effect or outcome. This opens up for new creative opportunities in our photography and also adds a lot of flexibility to our shooting.
Photographer Neil van Niekerk recently invited his friend Marco Leibetseder into his NYC studio for a photo challenge: rather than using flash, Niekerk and Leibetseder set themselves the challenge to capture some creative portraits that showcased "depth" in-studio using only continuous lighting.
My name is Paul Schmit, and today I want to describe to you the journey that led to the time-blended astrolandscape you see above.
There are all sorts of tools out there for making cinemagraphs and "plotagraphs" by animating certain parts of your still photos, but you don't need any of them. This short tutorial shows you how to create these animations using Adobe Photoshop.
It's more and more difficult these days to photograph places without crowds or cars. One of the strategies that can help achieve that is to wake up early and be there at sunrise, but in very popular places, there will be other photographers with the same idea as you. So, how can we take a picture of a scene without this crowd?
YouTube channel KINETEK has released an extremely informative video by Director and Cinematographer Matthew Rosen, in which Rosen explains how to achieve and utilize color balance, and why it's important to avoid balancing everything.
The aurora season is here again and I figured I’d do a short post here regarding when and where to photograph it. When I’m browsing pictures online, sometimes seeing aurora pictures and checking the comment section, I see a lot of questions and responses from people that all have something to say about the northern lights (aka aurora). As someone who has seen and photographed the aurora many times, here is my little guide.