Let’s face it – cars are meant to be driven. And there is no better way to show off a car than with a rolling shot, or “roller”. Here, I’ll go into detail about how to set up your camera and everything else needed to create the perfect roller using an image from a shoot with Performance BMW Magazine.
This article is for all of the new photographers new to lighting and to all who think they are limited by their lack of gear! I will show you how you can create this whiskey image with just one light, in-camera, and with no editing.
By carefully applying blur to a portrait, you can make it look like it was shot with a shallow depth-of-field using a fast (and expensive) lens. Here's a 12-minute tutorial by PiXimperfect that teaches the key to creating this faux blur in a realistic way.
Have you ever found yourself looking at your children's toys and thought to yourself, "Man that would look great in an image?" Well I have, I do, and I love creating images this way, trying to create a realistic/surreal image which tells a story from using nothing more than a piece of plastic.
My name is Aaron Chen, and I'm a photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was in Yosemite for the 2019 Firefall and would love to share my experience so that others can do it themselves!
I was often disappointed by my Canon 5D Mark II not having a flipping or better yet a detachable monitor. Instances of this happened when I placed the camera on a fully extended tripod and had the camera pointed downwards to make a photograph of something on the floor. Getting one’s eye above the view screen was sometimes impossible.
Each year from summer of 1872, the owners of Glacier Point hotel started the event of Yosemite Firefall. For seven nights a week, they would spill hot embers from Glacier Point down to the valley 3000 feet below. The event ended in 1968 when the National Park Service ordered it to stop because the overwhelming number of visitors that it attracted overwhelmed the meadows, and because it was not a natural event. NPS wanted to preserve the Valley, returning it to its natural state.
Seeing spots in your photos? Your camera's sensor might need a cleaning. If you'd like to go a do-it-yourself route and beyond a simple bulb blower, Michael The Maven made this 13-minute video walkthrough on how you can go about cleaning a mirrorless camera sensor.
It has been said that meat consumption should decrease by 90% in the West if we want to avoid dangerous climate warming. And because all of us should be involved to achieve this goal, I of course decided to invite zombies to join in the effort of combating climate change.
Occasionally when examining a RAW file I get a reasonably clear idea on how I would like the end result to be. In this instance, I had an inner picture of trees glowing from the sun, rather dark shadows, and a sky with nice color contrast.
Back in June of 2018, I was fortunate enough to make a 9-day trip to Yosemite National Park, California to capture the Milky Way galaxy over Half Dome. My entire trip revolved around capturing this image since I had captured nearly this same panorama two years prior during my first ever trip to the park in 2016.
Want to see how Leica does its official digital camera sensor cleanings? Here's a 20-minute video that steps through the process.
After recently sharing a portrait on social media, I was asked by a lot of people to write a breakdown on how I achieved the shot.
Back in 1865, if you wanted to be a photographer, you needed to be patient, determined, and a bit crazy (not all that different from today, though for different reasons). As an artist and photographer, exploring new methods and mediums is an important part of the journey.
How do you go about shooting one of the rarest sports cars in the world? Here's a 17-minute tutorial in which automotive photographer Mike D'Ambrosio shares the 5 steps of his "night flare" style while shooting a $2.75 million Maserati MC12.
In our hallway, we have some family portraits of our kids, but the portraits were taken some years ago -- time for some new ones! But we would also like to hang the portraits of their partners. The previous portraits were color portraits, and this time I would like to do some black and whites. So the challenge is taking seven portraits, each with the same look and feel. This is how I did it.
Last month, during the full moon of November, I planned and shot a photo of the full moon rising behind the 800-year-old Frösö church in Sweden.
Photographer Tyler Shields recently paid a visit to Hidden Light LLC, a fine art printing business in Arizona. While there, he watched as printer Matt Beaty used the platinum/palladium printing process to turn one of Shields' photos into a black-and-white print that can last 1,000 years or more.
Back in its heyday, Polaroid made seven 20x24-inch instant cameras, and only six of them are known to exist today. Marco Christian Krenn of Analog Things recently paid a visit to the camera found at Supersense in Vienna. In this 10-minute video, Krenn shows how this ultra-rare camera is used.
Can you do a professional retouch of a portrait photo using only Photoshop's Brush tool? That's what the Brush Tool Challenge is all about, and here's a neat 22-minute video by photographer and retoucher Aaron Nace of PHLEARN showing how it can be done.
Want to shoot an "impossible" f/0.2 portrait? Here's a 3.5-minute video in which photographer Tony Northrup demonstrates the Brenizer Method, which effectively turns a telephoto lens into an ultra-fast wide-angle lens.
Highly stylized looks offer a great learning opportunity to the beginner or intermediate product photographer. When items are placed on a composite-heavy background, there are certain considerations we can make in-camera to avoid a headache in Photoshop.
It started as a regular booking inquiry from a client. They wanted to book me for an engagement shoot a month before their wedding. The destination was decided (the Port of Jaffa), and the time was set (an hour before sunset).
As a still life photographer, I spend a lot of time in my studio experimenting with different types of products. In a recent shoot, I did just this by photographing a perfume box. But instead of photographing the packing by itself, I used everyday objects to create the scene.
It seems that every visitor to Hollywood wants to photograph the mountain with the Hollywood sign on it but rarely do people want to make the effort for a Hollywood sign hike to go photograph the back of it. If you can put in some extra time, photographing the back of the Hollywood sign will provide you with an amazing photo opportunity and a stunning 360-degree view of Los Angeles.
“I Bloom For You” is a new photo in my series I Found The Silence. The idea was created in June 2018, and it was followed by 3 months of planning.
The popularity and widespread use of focus stacking in landscape photography have dramatically increased over the last few years. The concept typically reserved for macro photography has quickly won over countless outdoor photographers worldwide. With more and more landscape enthusiasts using wide angle lenses to capture images with dramatic foreground elements, it’s become nearly impossible to create front-to-back pin-sharp photos.
For the past several years my photography website called Squarespace home. Among online, fully-contained, content management systems, it is hard to go wrong with Squarespace. Offering domain registration and hosting, plus well-crafted templates, Squarespace makes it easy to create a professional looking website.
As a photographer, I've never really planned my shoots too much. I kind of look at what I'll be shooting and think of cool-looking images. Then I try my best to match what I'm seeing in my head through photography and sometimes post-production.
My Name is Swen Cubilette, and I'm a 34-year-old photographer living in the Central Pennsylvania area. I’ve been shooting photos for about 5 years. In this article, I'll share how I shot this levitation portal photo.
This idea had been rolling around in my head for years. I use flashes a lot in my photography. Whether that is a Speedlight on or off camera or in the studio with some big strobes and modifiers. But this is the first time I have ever used an aerial drone-mounted flash.
It is the hottest time of the day during the hottest month of the year in Montana, but two hundred feet above me a pair of nighthawks sense a change. They dive and twist with a grace somewhere between fighter pilot and falling leaf, air buzzing through their wingtips, raspy calls beckoning night, commanding the sun to set. The single, sand-rock knob that I sit on here in the prairie while I watch their aerial display will hold the heat I feel through my jeans well into darkness.
I do a lot of automotive lifestyle personal projects that I use for self-promotion and am constantly on the hunt for new ideas. A friend of mine recently turned me on to Turo, an app for peer-to-peer car rentals. In the past, you had to hire a picture vehicle company to get vintage cars for shoots, and those can be really pricey and are severely limited in terms of how far you can drive the car.
My name is Connar L’Ecuyer, and I’m a landscape photographer based in Southern California. A little while ago, I was driving on the highway at night and there is a section where the highway goes up some mountains. The moon was just rising over the highway. I thought to myself “That’s pretty awesome -- I want to get a shot of that!”, and a few weeks later I was able to shoot it!
When low-quality photos or videos are posted online, people often say that they were shot with a "potato camera." But if you actually want to shoot photos with a literal potato camera, how would you go about doing so?
Thinking of putting together a professional photo portfolio as a high-impact way of sharing your work with potential clients? Check out this informative and inspiring 5-minute video by photographer Caleb Kerr, who recently built a portfolio of his own and put together a helpful walkthrough for anyone interested in doing the same.
Mixing ambient light with flash is a tough technique to get around. I can do it no problem, but when someone asks me to explain it I draw a blank. There’s a very good reason why it’s hard to understand: you’re smashing two distinct schools of lighting an image together.
Here's a 16.5-minute video by OWL BOT in which photographer Omar Kenji demonstrates how you can develop C-41 color film in your own bathroom instead of passing it to a photo lab.
If you're interested in branching out your photo business to include corporate headshots, here's a helpful 24-minute tutorial that can help you get started. In it, photographer Sean Tucker shares his system of effectively photographing a large number of people in a short amount of time.
Photographer Markus Hofstaetter often gets asked about how he acquires the plates he uses for wet plate collodion photography. To answer that question, Hofstaetter made this 7-minute video showing how he has them custom cut on a 75-year-old machine.