walkthrough

Creating Wedding Cinemagraphs with Photographer Lindsay Adler

New York-based photographer and instructor Lindsay Adler recently collaborated with cinemagraph software maker Flixel to create a set of three stylized wedding portraits to show off at the upcoming WPPI conference. The behind-the-scenes video above offers a quick introduction to the project.

How I Created Those Viral Photos Showing a Beautiful Flipped Iceberg, From Start to Finish

Last month, a number of my photos showing a flipped iceberg went viral online and in the media. The video above is a 15-minute overview of what it was like shooting in Antarctica, the gear used to capture the images, and a little bit on the release process and how I manage outreach. I’ll elaborate below, but do watch the video as it includes some video of the iceberg which I haven’t shared previously.

Walk Through a Wedding: 20 BTS Videos That Cover a Wedding from Start to Finish

Last year, lighting company Profoto teamed up with New England-based wedding photographers Justin and Mary Marantz to create a series of behind-the-scenes videos showing how the duo goes about shooting a wedding from start to finish. The Walk Through a Wedding series started in February 2014 and ended in December of that year with 20 short videos.

How I Replaced the Shutter in My Canon 5D Mark II By Myself and Saved $400

The shutter on my old Canon 5D Mark II died while on a trip to Fiji earlier this year. It happened quickly; I was shooting a panorama when horizontal black bars started appearing in some of the shots. After about 10 more photos in between turning the camera off and on again, it was dead. The shutter was stuck closed and powering the camera on yielded a helpless sounding soft ‘clunk’ and an “Error 20″ message.

I was quoted around $500 to get this fixed at a repair shop. But.. an OEM replacement shutter is only $90 on eBay. So, after about 6 months of putting it off I finally built up enough #YOLO fever to have a crack at fixing it myself, saving $400 and learning a few things along the way.

Creating a Star Wars Themed Christmas Card Photo of Santa in Carbonite

Here's my 2014 Christmas card: Santa in Carbonite! At the end of every year my studio collects all of the cool card ideas that we thought of during the season. I then create a calendar event for the next November, listing out the ideas we thought of. Last year we came up with a Star Wars Christmas card idea with the boys guarding Santa Claus, frozen in carbonite. Call them Imperial Elves.

Impressive Product Photograph Captured with a Smartphone, a Lamp, and a Few Flashlights

Inspired by Alex Koloskov's popular iPhone vs. Hasselblad whisky glass video, photographer Tilo Gockel decided to give cheap gear professional product photography a try of his own -- and he knocked it out of the park.

Using just an old iPhone 4s, an IKEA lamp, two LED flashlights, and a few Translumfoil cards (you can use parchment), he captured the photograph you see above.

Selling Art in Galleries: Everything You Need To Know

I’ll admit, there is a lot to learn if you’re hoping to start selling art in galleries. How do you approach a gallery, and then if you do finally get a meeting, what do you say? What are they even looking for? When they ask to see your portfolio, what does that even look like? Do you price your work or does the gallery price your work? How much commission is the normal amount for a gallery to take?

And on and on and on and on…

Well, I’m going to try and answer all of those questions and more, all in a single post. Wish me luck.

How I Got The Shot: Blood Moon at Antelope Island

All too often, people ask me to put my camera down and join the party. I get that stink eye on many occasions when I plop myself in the corner of a campsite, drag my cooler within reaching distance, and point my camera towards the night sky. Friends wouldn’t notice at first, but then start to realize that they were missing someone around the fire ring. “Where did Nick go?” I could hear people snarkily asking, like I was off doing something more interesting than they were.

ColorChecker: How to Get Perfect Skin Colors With Every Camera

One of the best kept secrets within the fashion and beauty photography is the way to obtain absolutely perfect and flawless skin colors, brightness and texture. That’s an art, absolutely, and often a quite technical challenge.

In this article I will explain how to obtain perfect skin colors, with the help of a ColorChecker. But not just a simple ColorChecker workflow with the standard, bundled software. No, there’s a neat trick which saves a lot of time and a lot of custom color editing (and desaturating) of skin tones.

It’s a quick, transparent automatic workflow, once set up and created. Your camera needs to shoot in RAW.

How Many Studio Lights Do You Really Need?

When it comes to the quantity of lights that one needs, opinions are often heavily polarized and a hotly contested debate often rages. There are those that are staunch supporters of one light while others claim that a handful of lights are needed before anything meaningful can be done. Ultimately neither group is right as there is no definable minimum or maximum number of lights that one should use.

Tutorial: Easily Focus-Stack Using a Photoshop Feature You Probably Didn’t Know About

Focus stacking is a fairly common technique used in the world of macro photography, but the process of focus stacking isn’t always a straightforward one. Sure, certain programs can automatically achieve a result for you, but when you’re looking for much more control, getting it done by other means is sometimes a necessity.

In the video above, Adobe's Bryan O’Neil Hughes shows you an effective way to stack focus using a feature that's been baked into Adobe Bridge and Photoshop since CS4.

Back to Basics: The Difference Between SD SDHC & SDXC, and Which is Best for You

I will start off by saying I am partial to SanDisk memory cards, but I recently found a great write up on their website that is pretty much universal, explaining the difference between SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards. I wanted to share this information with everyone because sometimes it can be confusing trying to figure out which SD Card is best for you.

6 Things You Don’t Know About Apertures, But Probably Should

One of the first things that we learn when we start taking photographs seriously is that ‘aperture’, the size of the hole in the lens through which light passes, controls depth of field.

A large aperture creates shallow depth of field while a narrow one creates wide depth of field. But there’s a little more to aperture than that, let’s take a closer look at this most fundamental photographic control.

5 Great Tips from Adobe On Keeping Your Lightroom Catalogs Organized & Efficient

Whether you’re just diving into Adobe Lightroom or have been using it for a while and are simply in need of some productivity tips, the above video on keeping your catalog as clean and structured as possible will likely come in very useful.

Created and narrated by Adobe Evangelist Terry White, the video runs through 5 things that you should know to get the most out of your Lightroom image catalogs.

How To Convert Your Room Into a Giant Camera Obscura

We heard how dangerous it could get outdoors with all of the traffic-crossings, pollen, UV rays and so on, and so we decided to stay inside and paint our walls with a live stream of the outside world...

Chasing 5 Pointz

I first heard about 5 Pointz in a Wall Street Journal article in the summer of 2011. The article detailed the recent attempts by the owner to knock what had become an internationally-reknown street art mecca down, and build high-rise condominiums.

From Prep Work to Post-Processing: An In-Depth Star Photography Tutorial

As a photographer, there is nothing more intriguing to me than the unknown. What’s out there and where will it lead me on my next adventure under the stars?

Upon taking my first photo of the stars, I came to realize it wasn’t even close to replicating what was in the skies above me. Nothing man-made will ever be perfect. There are always improvements to be made in the never-ending journey to replicate what nature has been producing for billions of years.

With practice, however, I was able to break down the physics behind capturing high quality star shots and start to produce some nice results. Over time, I’ve been able to perfect this recipe with actions and inputs in my camera; and, with words and knowledge, teaching others to capture this beauty on their own. With that in mind, here is my tutorial that will teach you how to take some awesome shots of the Milky Way and night sky.

Photoshop Tutorial: Retouching Shiny Skin

Without a makeup artist at your disposal, even a great portrait can be ruined by shiny skin. So if you're looking through the results of your most recent portrait shoot and there's a lot of shine there, here's a fantastic tutorial that shows you how to get rid of it without making the photo look like it's been doctored.

Photographing Actors From 60ft Above a Broadway Stage with the CamRanger

When I first heard of the CamRanger in October of 2012 in New York City at PhotoPlus Expo I was immediately intrigued.

I don’t actually own a laptop, so tethering to an iPad tablet has been a long awaited process with trial and error. My first experience was with the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card; a memory card you place in your camera, the card transmits a wireless signal and supposedly you connect to that signal source, boom, you're tethered. Except it didn’t really work.

Tutorial: Creating a Surreal, Conceptual Photo Using ‘Zone Lighting’

In this tutorial I’d like to demonstrate that you don’t need expensive studio flashes to create a complex scene with subtle lighting. I haven’t yet seen anyone else do this quite the same way and there doesn’t seem to be a name for it, so I named the process “zone lighting”, a form of exposure blending by dividing the scene in different zones. But let’s start with a little bit of background about the project and its concept.

How I Shot a Photo of Johnny Manziel for the Cover of ESPN The Magazine

With the college football season winding down, I had the assignment of covering the last Texas A&M home game. The last game I was available to shoot was the second to last home game against Sam Houston State University. This game was just a week after A&M upset the Alabama Roll Tide in Alabama, and Johnny Manziel was instantly catapulted into the rare position of becoming a freshman Heisman finalist.