technique

Visual Balance: The Composition Technique That Changed My Photos

This landscape image has most of the ingredients that can make it a great photograph. It has a clear subject and focal point, the lighting is great, and a nice edit and mood, but… don’t you have the feeling that there is something off, and at the same time you can’t really tell what it is?

Photographing Mushrooms in Their Natural World

I’ve taken quite some mushroom photos over the last few years and most of them were done with my macro lens. Mushrooms are often tiny, and it’s very inviting to single them out with a beautiful soft background. I wrote a specific article about this back in 2020.

Wax Paper Photography: Getting the Large Format Look With a $300 Soviet Camera

Anyone who has trawled through a historic photo archive knows the feeling of spotting a large-format photo. Like spotting a beautiful woman in a crowd, it’s hard to drag your eyes away. That depth and clarity, which seems to top reality itself, has only ever been possible with a film plane measured in inches rather than millimeters.

A motorcycle mechanic photographed for a lifestyle photoshoot by Blair Bunting. The portraits were photographed on location at universities and shops across the US over a period of a month.

Using Manual Focus on a Commercial Photo Shoot: Try It At Your Own Risk

There’s something about the passion that exists between a mechanic and a motorcycle. Their hands and tools are their paintbrushes, and their grease-stained nails are their paint. I was fortunate to witness them create their art and document it all while creating my own.

How to Deal with Extreme Dynamic Range in Landscape Photography

No doubt most of us have found ourselves in the following situation... You’ve discovered a beautiful landscape scene that you’ve carefully composed in your camera’s viewfinder. Your camera is on a tripod and there’s no wind, so you’re feeling confident that you’ll be able to capture everything in one shot with both a small aperture and a slow shutter speed. Things are looking great!

Rule of Thirds in Photography: A Complete Guide

The rule of thirds is widely considered to be one of the most important first techniques you can learn to create better compositions and help you progress from “taking pictures” to “making photographs.”

How to Use the Zone System in Photography

Even though the Zone System is over 80 years old, it is still relevant today whether shooting modern films or digital capture. This article is for photographers wanting to learn more about the Zone System for their particular workflow.

How to Shoot ‘Space Nebula’ Smoke Photos at Home

During long periods of cloudy weather, it can be really frustrating as an astrophotographer to wait for the sky to clear up. Over the years, I’ve learned how to handle these long downtimes.

My Journey to Cubist Photography

Nude Descending a Staircase, N0 2. The 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp is what started me on my exploratory journey into cubist photography. I thought to recreate it with a long exposure and multiple bursts of flash. But I don’t know anyone with a long open staircase nor anyone willing to model naked on a public staircase.

How to Shoot Macro Photos with Regular Lenses and Extension Tubes

Macro photography works well with conventional lenses and inexpensive extension tubes. The combination achieves 0.3x to 0.5x magnification. Depth of field is much greater with these moderate magnifications than at the 1x magnification possible with macro lenses.

Why I Use Stacking Instead of an ND Filter for Long Exposure Photos

In this article, I'll share a technique that I learned many years ago and that I still use occasionally. You can use it for removing people from a scene, but in this case, I will be using it to mimic one of a neutral density (ND) filter's main purposes: longer exposure.

The Split LUT Technique in Photoshop to Get Separate Controls

I'm Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE.com. In this 4-minute video and article, I'll share a new Photoshop technique I came up with that gives you separate control over strength, color, and luminosity in LUTS. I call this the Split LUT technique.

Dreaming With Eyes Open: An Ode to Multiple Exposures

As a busy Dad of two young boys, life gets hectic quite often. I still do plenty of photography, but gone are the long days spent in a blind waiting for a bird to appear. Nevertheless, I've found other ways to fulfill my creative desires.

How To Get Super-Sharp Photos Every Time, With Any Camera

As a professional photographer, I use a lot of different cameras. At any given time, I can use really expensive full-frame cameras combined with the best glass money can buy, to mid-range cameras with kit lenses, all the way down to even compact cameras that fit in my pocket.

How Not to Be a Photographer

After almost five years in Germany, I've amassed an impressive body of work. I love many of the photos I have taken here, and some of them are even selling rather well. Yet, I have very few images to show when people ask me to show photos of Germany as most people are not into architectural abstracts.

I Shoot Snow Portraits by Sticking My Face Into Snow

My Snow Portrait series consists of photos taken using a technique I "invented" 8 years ago that utilizes the "hollow mask" 3D optical illusion. All the shots in this article are imprints of my face in fairly deep snow lit from underneath, almost like a lithophane. No Photoshop. No filters.

A Quick Look at Using Negative Space in Photos

Negative space in photography, design, sculpture, or any other creative pursuit is equally as important as is positive space in overall composition.

My Process for Creating Insect Portraits with Macro Photography

Each print that I create is a composite of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of individual photos digitally stitched together. Using a method of macro photography called “photo stacking” it’s possible to create images with an incredible amount of detail, even when printed on a very large scale.

How I Shoot Insect Macro Photography in My Home Studio

Insects and other animals have fascinated me since I was a small child. I remember well how I used to pick them up and simply stare at them in wonder for hours. The concept of photographing insects indoors had been on my mind for years, even when photography and playing with light was a hobby, and long before I considered photography a profession and way of life.

How I Shoot Solargraphs with a Digital Camera

Solargraphies (pinhole images on photographic paper that capture months of the sun arching across the horizon) were a thing starting sometime in the 2000s. When this caught on broadly in the early 2010s, it got a lot of people excited for film again.

How to Do Top-Down Light Painting in a Room

I'm light-painting photographer Russell Klimas, and in this article I'll share how I do top-down light painting in a room. I was originally inspired to do this technique because when I had done it with a drone I had a troll complain that the images weren’t clear enough.

Intentional Camera Movement: An Intro to ICM Photography

I have been getting quite experimental with my photography this year and recently stumbled upon Intentional Camera Movement, or ICM, photography. I fell into the work of photographer Andy Gray and was immediately blown away by the painterly feel of his images.

Adding Foreground Flare to Portraits

There are a million-and-one ways to add creative flares and effects to your shots in post-production after you’ve taken the image, but nothing beats the look and feel of an image that has used in-camera flares and bokeh effects.

How Technical Do You Have to Be to Take a Good Photo?

I have a confession to make. I often shoot in aperture priority mode. I’m a reasonably competent photographer with a solid grasp of the factors that drive exposure, but I don’t want to fiddle with multiple dials when I just want to take a photo.

How to Shoot People-Free Photos of Crowded Places

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?

How to Light a ‘Big Budget’ Photo with $5 Lights

I have a client who builds amazing luxury apartment complexes all over California, and I’m their pool guy. I know it sounds funny, but they call me whenever they need exterior images and pool images (they call another photog to do the interiors of the model apartments).

How to Enhance the Starry Night Sky in Photoshop

Let's say I would like to enhance the stars in this Milky Way landscape photo. I could load the image into Camera Raw and add some Clarity at the risk of adding noise and artifacts to the night sky. Another way of doing it could be to use “Select Color Range” combined with a curves or levels adjustment. However, I often find that these methods don't yield satisfactory results.

How to Shoot a Day-vs-Night Photo in a Single Exposure

Here's a creative technique to add to your bag of tricks. In this 9.5-minute video, we’ll show you from start to finish how we took an ordinary scene and turned it into to go from day to night in one single exposure, in-camera.

How To Bracket For Perfectly Exposed Landscape Photos

Perhaps one of the more difficult aspects of landscape photography is determining how to properly expose your scene under less-than-ideal lighting conditions. These types of situations are a common occurrence with outdoor photography as it’s often a struggle trying to properly expose an image consisting of a bright sky and a dark foreground in a single image.

Imitating Hazy Backgrounds with Diffusion Gels

Shooting in a studio has its advantages. But although being warm, dry and convenient are greatly appreciated, shooting between the same four walls can get a little boring if you’re constantly using them as backgrounds for your shots.