Walkthroughs

I recently photographed the Milky Way over Lion Rock in Piha, New Zealand. Some people were asking how this shot was created, so I thought I'd share some of the steps.

I have been shooting 4x5 color transparencies or commonly known as color slide film for many years but the best that I could enjoy them was to put them on the light table and viewing them through a loupe. Unlike my 35mm and 120 slides, I have never seen them projected big simply it is not easy to locate a 4×5 slide projector.

Street portraiture provides the opportunity to capture so much of the urban textures and patterns that give a city its look. The brick walls provide great leading lines as well as murals and large wall art that set a dramatic tone to any image.

F1 photographer Kym Illman tries to clear up some of that mystery that surrounds his job and covers everything a prospective photographer would need to know to succeed in the racing world.

The first thing I always say to the participants of my photography workshops is to always spend enough time in preparation. I strongly believe that in order to make a good photo, no matter the genre, you have to be prepared as best as you can.

I started learning digital photography in 2016 with an old DSLR. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve taken quite a few pictures and timelapses I’m proud of, but until recently, I’d never considered the analog world.

Here is a little exercise to show how we can do things in this modern world. This is not one of those whacky geo-location stunts, this is just ordinary research, some simple geometry, and some careful guessing.

I am a professional wedding, portrait, and fashion photographer, and have almost three decades of experience photographing couples. I created this video to provide lighting, posing and location tips and tricks in a few different scenarios to give photographers some inspiration on how to photograph couples.

Eurasian red squirrels are diminutive, skulking mammals with an extensive range from Ireland through Siberia to Japan. They are very photogenic and have that cute gene that really shouldn’t be a winner when it comes to evolution.

I'm often told that being a professional concert photographer is the coolest job in the world. In order to dispel some myths surrounding what I do and also support others who want to get into the profession, I’m going to peel back the curtain of the entire process from preparation to editing.

For most photographers, it’s been an interesting past year and my experience is no exception. My regular work shooting for commercial clients and agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area was upended by the Coronavirus pandemic, and keeping busy has meant constantly shifting gears to keep the calendar full.

A few years ago I built an ultra-large-format (ULF) camera that is 24 inches by 24 inches. While it was a pretty huge camera, it was a simple build it was just two square standards, one for the front and one from the back that were connected by a big bellow.

Recently a squirrel noticed our nut box that was waiting to be raided for almost a year now. But as our squirrels here are a bit skittish, I needed to come up with a way to get in close to take nice pictures of them.

It's one thing to hear tips on how to be a better photographer, it's another to actually watch photos come together in real-time. Photographer Michael Shainblum created this 13-minute video where he takes you on a first-person narrated photo outing to show you how he makes his images.

In early spring 1839, Paris was abuzz with excitement in connection with a recently published letter, in which the invention of photography was confirmed by reliable sources. The world was now waiting for the French government to work out a deal with its inventor Louis J.M. Daguerre for details of the daguerreotype process to become public. 

I was listening to my favorite band Sentenced and their album “The Cold White Light”. While listening I started thinking, “Should I make images from the songs in my favorite album?”

Northern Arizona University recently decided to conduct a photography shootout that pitted two of its photography professors against each other. The challenge: to shoot the best graduation portraits they could with toy digital cameras designed for children. You can see how it went down in the 8.5-minute video above.

It’s a rare occasion when I do a team collaboration on a personal shoot. I typically prefer to work directly with the model, having them bring their own wardrobe and arrive with their hair and makeup already done. It not only saves time and is easier to coordinate but I also love the challenge of coming up with a cohesive theme for the shoot, basing my techniques, lighting, and color palette on the items that they brought with them.

A winter wetland has always held a special place in my heart. A unique wildness derived from the winter wildfowl that visit from the remote Arctic landscapes, birds of prey drawn to harry prey during the short, cold days – the nervousness of wildfowl feeding anxiously – ready to take flight as a menacing shadow passes overhead.

This was my first time working with Amber. In preparation for the shoot, I told her the same thing I tell all of my models: bring 4-6 different outfit options and have hair and makeup ready when they arrive.

Having now finalized work on this series, I will attempt to put into words its impetus, as well as how it came to fruition. This will be a lengthy entry, proportional in size to the monumentally significant nature of this work for me, and therefore I shall start from the beginning, as all things have their origins.

Jared Middleton (AKA Sirdork) is a toy photographer who brings miniature scenes to life using practical effects. His photos are created by carefully setting up scenes with action figures and then adding in things like water, snow, dirt, and sparklers to complete the look.

Patrick Sullivan is a woodworker with over 50 years of experience under his belt. In this 15-minute video, Sullivan shares how he spent the last couple of months building a traditional large format camera -- a project that kept him "absolutely fascinated."

Despite what some people think about LIDAR for cars, in the near future it is foreseeable that this technology will take its rightful place in our daily lives. Not just for cars but with almost anything and everything. We have already seen Apple’s new iPad and iPhone utilizing this technology. I wanted to see if I could use a LIDAR, in its most fundamental function, on a film carrier that is printed on a 3D printer.

Brzz, bzzzrrr. The rollers on the vintage Polaroid developer start to suck in the 8×10 Polaroid. Dan Bosman, a Mars Cafe barista of 14 years, and I are chatting just like we always do.

This trip has been waiting in the wings ever since I made my first successful daguerreotype in the redwoods two years ago. I actually planned on going as early as August this year, but one project after another kept getting in the way, and for months I kept pushing it back by a couple of weeks.

Toward the end of November, I went back to one of my favorite places in the desert. A spot out in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest significant human population well over an hour drive away.

If there’s a challenge in selecting the best images from a day’s shoot, then that challenge is amplified when it comes to actively curating a huge body of work into something coherent and presentable.

I've always found northern harriers to be a raptor species that stood out from most others. Their hunting method provides ample opportunity for creative photography as they glide over gorgeous marshes and grasslands searching for food. On this particular evening, I visited a new grassland in the middle of New Jersey that I had not visited previously to see if I could capture some photos of these beautiful birds.

It’s a bit like arriving on the set of a nature documentary; watching whales swim around distant icebergs and fresh blueberries underfoot. The key to this passion project was to show the extreme seasonal variations on the incredible island of Greenland. Juxtaposing the summer warmth with the extreme winter cold.

I'm photographer Armando Martinez, and I recently shot what I believe is the first-ever drone hyperlapse taken during an entire "day" from sunrise to sunset. You can see the result above.

Maximilian Heinrich of Analog Insights recently inherited an 85-year-old Leica camera and handed it off to his friend Jules for repair and restoration. This 15-minute video is about the camera's journey from nearly being passed on to a camera store to being brought back to form.

I first came to the hospital back in June, having decided that the stories and experiences of the front line staff shouldn’t be forgotten. We’d all seen inside the Italian hospitals, but when the virus hit the UK, there was nothing coming out of the UK, so I made it my mission to gain access and document the life and death struggles going on behind closed doors.

Photographer Mathieu Stern recently got his hands on a handful of cheap expired film rolls to see what results he could get out of them. You can see his experiment in this 5-minute video.

With the current state of affairs, photographers have been coming up with unique ways to exercise their craft remotely. Photographer Markus Hofstaetter decided he wanted to make a portrait with a friend and came up with a way to do it despite the vast distance between them.

Photographer Alper Yesiltas has shared a detailed breakdown of how he came up with and executed a photo idea that embodied the idea of both "to read" and "to write." While "to read" came to him quickly, "to write" took considerably more time and effort.

The School of Photography has shared a detailed 19-minute video breakdown that explains how to color grade in both Adobe Photoshop and the latest version of Lightroom, details the differences between the two systems, and talks why you might want to use one or the other.

PiXimperfect is an excellent resource for learning Photoshop techniques and in this 10-minute video, host Unmesh Dinda shows you how to add believable-looking snow to any image using Adobe Photoshop.

In a video series that takes an unusual perspective, photographer Isaac Alvarez lets his model – in this case, Vanderpump Rules star Tom Sandoval – do the talking. For photographers who often talk about their process, this video lets you hear what it's like on the other side of the lens.

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.

When I started freelancing as a professional photographer, I knew I had to put together a printed portfolio. Unfortunately, I found it very hard to find useful resources on the Internet on how to actually do this. As I had some experience in bookbinding I managed to bind my first book by myself, but after three books I realized that in this stage of my career, I needed to have something a little more flexible.

Image stacking is a technique used in astrophotography to reduce noise and recover signal. It means taking multiple shots of object (usually long exposures) and combining them to create a cleaner image.

If you're curious about what changes to expect in the menu between the Nikon Z7 and Z7 II or Z6 and Z6 II cameras, Youtuber Ricci goes over everything that he's noticed in this 17-minute video.