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Focus Breathing: When Focusing Your Lens Changes Your Composition

Here's a term that most of you have probably experienced before, but some of you may never have heard before. It's called "focus breathing" (or simply "breathing"), and it refers to the shift in angle of view that often occurs when you focus a lens. If you've ever carefully composed a shot, refocused, and then discovered that your composition changed, you've been a victim of focus breathing.

The Photographer’s Introduction to Color, from Color Space to Monitor Calibration

If you're a photographer today, you're probably sharing your photos everywhere from Facebook to Flickr. Your photos are being seen on every device possible: iPhones, Samsung Galaxys, crappy Dell office monitors, and Mac Retina Displays. Each online service, each device, even each web browser handles color differently. If you're putting your photos up online, you really need to think about how you output files for the web. If you accidentally save to the wrong color space, you can really change people's perception of your photos.

The Best Free Online Photography Courses and Tutorials

Given my interest in lifelong learning and skill-development, I often ask people which new skills they’re looking to learn. The most common response? “I want to be a better photographer”.

And for good reason! Few things evoke the instant emotional response a great photo does. It’s what made Instagram worth a billion dollars to Facebook.

For those of you who, like me, are looking to kick their photography skills up a notch, I’m curating a list of the best free online courses and resources I’ve found. So whether you’re a budding photojournalist looking toward a career behind the lens, or just a hobbyist looking to take better shots on your next trip, I’m hoping you’ll find something useful here!

MTF Charts: The English Translation

This post contains absolutely no mathematics. Explaining MTF without math is sort of like doing a high-wire act without a net. It’s dangerous, but for any number of reasons is more likely to keep the audience interested.

Joey L Launches New Educational Website Packed with In-Depth BTS Tutorials

Online resources for learning about photography are anything but lacking. But every so often a new one comes around that changes things up a bit -- usually because it's created by a well-known, respected pro.

Last week we told you about Zack Arias' new site DEDPXL, and this week we have yet another educational resource to share. Joey Lawrence (affectionately known as Joey L), one of my personal favorite photographers, has put out his own aptly titled resource: Learn From Joey L.

Get Educated: Recommended Projects and Tutorials

As with most fields that are technology driven, in photography, if you don't keep moving you'll quickly find yourself dead in the water. This is why seasoned pros and amateur hobbyists alike should always be learning and expanding their abilities. It's really the only way to stay competitive. And I don't even mean that in a financial sense, I mean that just in terms of your skill set.

Hyperlapse Tutorial: Creating Your Own Moving Timelapse, from Start to Finish

Hyperlapse photography is an increasingly popular technique in which standard timelapse imagery is brought to life with camera movement. Rather than move the camera with a slider or with a crane, hyperlapse shots move the camera across very long distances.

19-year-old photographer Morten Rustad wanted to pass on some of the things he has learned about creating hyperlapses, so he created the helpful 9-minute-long video tutorial above. It's a great primer for anyone looking to get started with this type of photography.

How to Clean Up Your Old Cameras

Treasures are often buried under dirt. Well, that's usually the case, anyway. Treasures for photographers may mean finding a working copy of their dream camera at a flea market or on the second-hand camera market. However, more often than not, the camera may not be looking great.

A Tour of the Hardware Found in Modern Smartphone Cameras

Want to take better photographs using your mobile phone camera? It helps to know what you are working with. I'll assume you already know the basics for all kinds of photography (composition, exposure, focus and DOF, shutter speed, aperture, et cetera).

Once these are set, its time to get to know your equipment, and using that knowledge to your advantage.

Silent Changes: The Subtle Modifications Made to Camera Gear Over Time

Every so often I get an email asking me to jump in on some forum argument or other. I rarely do that because of the language barrier.

Two of the common languages spoken on forums are CAKWAF (Complete, Absolute Knowledge Without Any Facts) and AFIDAWAB (Any Facts I Don’t Agree With Are Bullstuff). Since I am not fluent in those languages, I tend not to get involved in the more, uhm, enthusiastic online discussions. But sometimes I can’t help myself, repeating the behavior of adding facts to a ‘vigorous’ discussion and always expecting a different result.

Film Photography Technique Tips for the Digital Photographer

Film photography is similar in many ways to digital photography, and most of your standard digital photography techniques apply to film too. You just have to understand the peculiarities of film and its limitations and you’re good to go.

That will be explained in detail in this article, which presumes readers are already reasonably proficient at digital photography and are embarking upon film photography for the first time.

Dance-Lapse: Woman Uses Her Camera to Capture a Year of Learning to Dance

How good can you get at something in 365 days? If you're former Microsoft exec Karen Cheng, pretty darn good. Her goal was to learn to dance in one year, and she spent that year documenting the experience and showing her progress right up to her final impressive performance in a San Francisco subway station.

How to Shoot Starry Photos of Fireflies

Firefly photographs are commonly shot using long exposures from a tripod. The proper exposure depends on the ratio of the fireflies' luminosity to that of the background. That ratio is constant if we assume (as is usually the case) that the background lighting doesn't change much over the course of a session. We usually would like a rather long exposure because we want to see lots of fireflies in the final image.

The problem is that fireflies flash briefly, whereas the background illumination persists for the duration of the exposure. Over the course of a long exposure the background brightness builds up to the the point where it's as bright as the fireflies, and the image looks terrible.

My One-Shot, Zero-Setup, Sure-Fire Guide to Photographing Wedding Cakes

This guide is what I do during wedding days, and I typically photograph the cake right when I enter the reception location. Overall, I take 4 shots of the cake: 1 vertical, 1 horizontal, 1 detail of topper, and 1 detail of the base or whatever is the most interesting on the cake.

This process takes me literally 30 seconds. That’s it; done. Move on to centerpieces. This guide is for photographing real cakes on real wedding days for wedding photography professionals.

How to Photograph Kids… By a Former Poorly Photographed Kid

I am a former kid. I have lived through the trauma of bad photos taken of me by my father. I was not photogenic, and admittedly he had a cheap camera. He had a knack for catching the incredibly awkward moments of childhood in a way that now makes me cringe. If I could go back in time and give my 1970′s dad a few tips on how to take better pictures of me I would.

As a former kid recovering from the trauma of bad photographs, I feel like it is my duty to future kids of the world to give parents and photographers some tips I have learned on how to take some great photos of kids. Or, at the very least, photos that won’t make your kid cringe when they get older.

10 Easy Tips and Tricks for Looking Better in Photographs

Before running out for Botox or for a fancy photographer, here are 10 quick and easy things you can do to improve how you look in photos:

Have a lot of shots taken of you, and only keep the best. Focus on flattering posture and angles. Know facial expressions that work for you. Make sure your eyes are facing the light. Pay attention to what you are wearing, your grooming, the lighting and background.

How to Process C-41 Color Negative Film at Home, From Start to Finish

I know there are a few guides out there for home processing, some of which were instrumental in helping me get over my fears. All of these other guides seemed to be a little incomplete and that lack of detail made me wait longer than I should have before taking the plunge. In reality, it’s easy to do your film at home. Let me show you!

A Complete Guide to Star Trailing

Ever see those pictures where the stars streak across the sky in a big arc? Or maybe the whole sky looked like it was spinning? What you saw was star trails. The streaks were light left behind on the sensor or film from the star as it traveled across the sky in front of an open camera shutter. In fact, what are being recorded are stationary stars and the rotation of the earth as it spins past them. For me, the images seem to have a certain magic or mystery about them.

You must have heard a photographer talking about capturing that perfect moment in time. Well for capturing star trails you will need to capture the perfect hour or two in time. For such amazing looking images, the technique used to capture them is really quite simple. Keep reading for a complete set of instructions from start to finish.

How to Avoid Ugly Newton Rings When Doing Nikon Glass Scanning

The Nikon Coolscan 9000ED scanner is an excellent scanner. The included holders are of a very good standard and many extremely useful and high quality optional holders are available. None of them, however, are cheap.

Photojojo University: Learn the Basics of Snapping Photos With Your Phone

Smartphones are being used more and more to capture daily life photography, but many of its loyal users are perpetually stuck at the point-and-shoot level of photographic know-how. If that describes you, and you'd like to add a little more technical understanding to your brain, Photojojo has a new service designed just for you. It's called Photojojo University, a new educational service that teaches you photography lessons through bite-sized tutorials and assignments delivered into your email inbox.

Tutorial: How to Create a Wet-Plate Look Photography Using Photoshop

Faking the look of old films is becoming ubiquitous in the world of mobile photo sharing apps, but so far the popular apps have stuck with various films and not older photographic processes. If you want to create a photograph that mimics the look of a wet plate, it's actually pretty easy to do in Photoshop.

How to Use a Holga as a Handheld Wet Plate Camera

Wet plate photographer Ian Ruhter has received a good deal of attention over the past year for using a custom camera van to create giant collodion process metal photos. When he's not turning large sheets of metal into photographs, he's sometimes working on the opposite side of the spectrum.

One of his recent interests has been shooting pint-sized photos using a Holga toy camera that he converted into a wet plate camera.

How to Create a Surreal Self-Portrait That Shows You Holding Yourself

Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a photograph of you holding yourself up. I hope it will give you a good idea of how I create this type of image so that you can create a similar image yourself! Obviously, this is not the only way to create this type of image, but it is the way I have found most believable, as the connection between the two subjects actually occurs in real life. Enjoy!

Processing a Space Shuttle Endeavour Flyby Photo Using Lightroom

When Space Shuttle Endeavour was making low level flyovers of famous landmarks across the United States a couple of months ago, Adobe Lightroom Quality Engineer Ben Warde was able to photograph it flying by the Golden Gate Bridge. The 10-minute video above shows how Warde post-processed one of his best shots from that day using basic Lightroom adjustments. While the information may be basic for many of you, it should be helpful for people who are just starting out with programs like Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, or Aperture.

How to Retouch Portraits Without Losing Skin Texture with Frequency Separation

Here's a great introductory retouching tutorial by photographer Sara Kiesling, who writes,

Basic skin retouching using frequency separation and dodging & burning. I use this process on every photo that I do, and I usually spend about 4-5 minutes on headshots like this (and less time on full body shots when there is obviously less detail in the face). This is not intended to be a high-end retouching tutorial, but techniques that can help people who want to do natural-looking retouching while maintaining most of the natural skin texture!

Frequency separation is a technique that allows you to give skin a smooth-yet-sharp look.

A Graphical Comparison of Mirrorless Camera Sensors Sizes

Mirrorless cameras feature sensors larger than compact cameras and bodies smaller than DSLRs, but how do their sensor sizes compare with one another? To give you a better idea of how formats such as Nikon CX and Olympus/Panasonic Four Thirds stack up against each other, Digital Camera Database created this helpful graphic showing the relative sizes of each format.

18 Facts of Life for Photography Students

Every year, I go to my alma mater and give a lecture for 3rd-year advertising-photography students on the business of photography. At this two-hour lectures, I cover all sorts of points about the ups and downs of being a busy commercial photographer in NYC, and also try to tell them straight facts of what the “real world” is like. Here is a summary of some of the most important words of wisdom I try to pass on to young photographers.

Fascinating Facts About How Humans Perceive and React to Color

Unless you only shoot in monochrome, color likely plays a huge part in the experience of viewing your photographs. You may be aware of how you use them, but do you know how the colors in your images affect the people that look at them? PBS Off Book put out this fascinating video today that explores just how powerful colors are.