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Infographic: The Difference Between CMOS and CCD Sensors

Over the past couple of decades, CMOS sensors have come to dominate the digital photography landscape thanks to their increasing quality and falling costs. If you're unfamiliar with the differences between CMOS and CCD sensors, CEI-Europe has created a helpful infographic that compares the two technologies.

8 Common Autofocus Problems and Their Solutions

Having trouble nailing tack-sharp autofocus with your camera? Aside from technical proficiency, there are a number of other issues that could be causing you AF grief. Here's a 14-minute video on 8 common AF problems and their solutions.

How Long Will It Take to Learn Photography?

How long does it take a person to learn photography? Can -- or should -- you make the jump from newbie to working professional professional in a heartbeat? That's the question discussed in this insightful video by photographer Mike Browne.

A Guide to Mastering Manual Focus

Have you ever cursed your camera for missing that special moment in the streets? Do you ever struggle to get the subject quickly in focus before the fleeting moment is lost forever in the aether? Well then why not try manual focus?

To Get Better at Lighting, See Light Through the Eyes of a Cinematographer

Almost everything I do as a photographer comes back to this challenge: seeing light as a cinematographer would on set. I was recently reminded of this in conversation with a friend and fellow photographer as I was trying to think of the best advice I could give to someone wanting to step up their lighting game. So I’m sharing one of my lighting journals from film school, it was my sort of “ah ha” moment after several semesters of confusion and frustration when it came to lighting.

How to Take Better Photos with Your iPhone

If you're completely new to taking pictures with an iPhone, here's a 4-minute video that'll help you hit the ground running. MacRumors put together a number of basic tips and tricks you can use to take a step beyond simply tapping the on-screen shutter button.

This is How Camera Tripods Are Made

Here's a recent episode from the Science Channel's show How It's Made that shows how modern camera tripods are manufactured. We get a tour of a Manfrotto tripod factory, starting from when aluminum tubes are sliced to specific lengths by precise machines and up through when tubes are joined through custom housings by hand.

Selecting a Portrait Lens With Correct Focal Length

I know this topic is covered here and there and everywhere: in school and online, in workshops and lectures, on street corner posters and graffiti under freeway overpasses… However, one way or another this topic seems to either elude a lot of photographers entirely or perhaps they ignore it knowingly. Either way, after continually seeing tight headshots done with lenses possessing an obviously incorrect focal length, my personal OCD has reached a boiling point and I decided to finally do this little post complete with a demonstration.

Apple Stores to Offer Free 1-Hour Photo Workshops

Guess who's getting into the world of photography workshops? Apple.

That's right: the company wants people to be more adept at shooting photos with their iPhones and editing photos on their Macs, so it's now launching free 1-hour workshops on those subjects (and more) in its sleek Apple Stores.

An Introduction to the Many Kinds of Clamps Used in Photo Shoots

Photographer Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens made this helpful 7-minute video tutorial that provides a crash course on the different types of clamps used by photographers during shoots.

"This is not super glamorous stuff to talk about," says Morgan, "but it’s the basics that we use every single day that we’re on set."

DNG: The Pros, Cons, and Myths of the Adobe Raw File Format

Is it wise to convert your raw files to the Adobe DNG format? If you are using Lightroom or Photoshop with Camera Raw, you have the option to convert your master files to DNG. In this article I want to focus on the benefits of converting, the reasons why converting to DNG may not always be ideal or necessary, as well as tackle some of the misinformation about DNG.

How Shooting Street Improves Your Wedding Photos

As a wedding photographer it’s imperative that you provide images that your couples will love, but it's equally necessary to stay inspired and shoot for yourself. Wedding photographers must advance in their skill year on year, grow and produce stunning images that couples will book you for.

When looking to improve, many photographers turn to workshops -- there are hundreds out there for wedding photographers. Many seem to be provided solely to earn a quick buck for the teacher.

How to Fake Depth of Field Blur in Photoshop Using Z-Depth Pass

Here's a tutorial on how you can create fake depth of field blur in the background of photos using something known as "Z-Depth Pass." I'm not saying that this technique is better than other methods -- because it has some problems -- but it's quite different, and some of you may learn something new.

This is How Cameras Glitch with Photos of Propellers

If you've ever photographed spinning airplane propeller or helicopter rotor blades with your smartphone, you may have found that the spinning blades were turned into bizarre shapes in the resulting photo. What you're seeing is distortion caused by a rolling shutter, when a CMOS sensor captures a scene by scanning across it very quickly rather than capturing the entire frame at once.

This PSD Reveals What Every Photoshop Adjustment Layer Does via Curves

Want to see what Photoshop's adjustment layers are actually doing to your photos in terms of curves? There's an easy new way to do so.

Los Angeles-based photographer and retoucher Edmon Amiraghyan has created a special PSD file called Live Curves. It's simply a Document window that contains a Curves view of the document that updates in real time.

This Interactive Exposure Tool Helps You Understand the Exposure Triangle

Understanding the exposure triangle of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO is one of the first steps in learning photography. To help people wrap their heads around the concept, photographer Tony Catalano has created the Interactive Exposure Tool, an online tool for experimenting with how changing camera settings affects the resulting photo of a scene.

Tutorial: How to Light One Room with Three Different Atmospheres

Dedolight celebrated its 30th anniversary this year by holding an international competition in which competitors create the best tutorials they can for passing on their lighting knowledge.

The video above is the entry by the Freiburg, Germany-based film production company Dugly Habits. It's a creative 15-minute tutorial in which the instructor steps into a room and shows how you can create three drastically different environments in it by changing how its lit.

A Look at Photo Steganography, the Hiding of Secrets Inside Digital Images

Here's a fascinating (but very heady) video by Computerphile, which recently sat down with image analyst Dr. Mike Pound of the University of Nottingham to talk about the subject of digital image steganography.

Steganography is the practice of hiding one piece of content inside another. In this case, Pound talks about the idea of being able to kind all kinds of content inside digital photograph files.