10 Tips and Tricks for Shooting Better Smartphone Photos
We all know how to click the shutter button on our phones and get a basic shot. But how to take it to the next level?
We all know how to click the shutter button on our phones and get a basic shot. But how to take it to the next level?
It begins in a specific place, and on a specific date: a country auction. March 26th. While I’m holding up a camera and looking for my one daily photograph, an Amish man swings the mirror he’s offering up to the highest bidder and briefly —for no more than a second— shows me… myself. And there it was: suddenly, I was Narcissus on the plains.
Skylum Software has added several powerful extensions to the already impressive Luminar Neo application including Upscale AI, Focus Stacking, HDR Merge, Noiseless, and Supersharp AI, bringing the currently available total for the application to seven. These new tools give creatives an impressive amount of control over their images, expanding the current functionality of the photo editing program to a full-blown "suite".
Most photographers shoot digital because of the speed it offers and the very low cost. Travis Cobb photographs with film exactly because it is slow and expensive.
As working professional photographers, most of the images we make are captured using digital cameras, so it is likely that only the absolute tiniest fraction of the images we take ever make it to physical print. This is fine for images of our lunch or of the concert we’re about to go see, but for the important moments we manage to capture, there should be something more.
I have been doing photography for a little over six years, and during and before this time I have hired many photographers for marketing, advertising and events. I have done this as a lead editor of a high-gloss fashion, real estate, and product magazine line, as part of marketing teams, and as a freelance writer throughout my career. I thought I would share some tips on what someone like me looks for when hiring photographers.
Last week, Twitter announced that they were adding view counts to tweets on Twitter. I thought I’d use the announcement to very unscientifically compare the number of views one of my photos received on Twitter vs. Flickr.
Frustrated with limitations on what you can do with your photos? Mylio Photos makes it possible.
I guess I'm the sucker that keeps a lot of the digital photography software companies in business. In order to "stay current" in my recommendations, I have to keep looking at new versions of software products, and that requires a near endless tithing that's getting old.
In April 1995, my uncle secured a lucrative job in Saudi Arabia. He and my aunt left their home in suburban Sydney and relocated to a western compound (a residential gated community for ex-pats) in Jeddah. My aunt shares stories of life under Saudi’s strict laws and how she craved her western freedoms. One such freedom was the celebration of Christmas.
Luminar Neo has a new extension available just in time to add something special to your holiday photos. The Magic Light Extension, may not be as big, flashing, and extensive as some of the others available within the system, but what it does bring is a lot of fun and adds a little (or a lot) extra sparkle to your shots.
If you're primarily a digital photographer with an itch to return to your roots or a film photographer who appreciates the tech as much as the image, Barnack Leica's are a fun way to see what it was like to take photographs almost a century ago with one of the world's most innovative and celebrated camera designs.
This nomadic portrait studio tent was our world for many years. Step inside and I will show you a world of beauty, adventure... and even heartbreak.
Stunning color images recently made available in high resolution by a French museum capture much of the world as it was transformed by technology and geopolitics 100 years ago.
December 7 marked the 50-year anniversary of the Blue Marble photograph. The crew of NASA’s Apollo 17 spacecraft – the last manned mission to the Moon – took a photograph of Earth and changed the way we visualized our planet forever.
Wouldn’t you like to stay focused and calm even when multitasking and shooting in a very demanding situation? How about being able to notice everything without being distracted by anything? Meditation can help and that's why many photographers are getting into it. Intrigued? Read on…
Even though we are firmly ensconced in the digital age when it comes to photography, analog photography has picked up steam in popularity and doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
It’s a beautiful, sunny day. You’re celebrating a special event with a photo session, getting your poses ready. You’ve posed countless times with family and friends, at parties, and for selfies. This should be a piece of cake, right? You say ‘cheese’ in your head and bring out the pearly whites. Then you check the camera to see the result.
Portrait retouching can get overwhelming sometimes with the steps you need to take to make your shots look absolutely perfect. Maybe these steps aren't that hard, but they can definitely be very time-consuming, so finding any way to speed this process up to make better and more efficient use of your time is a high priority for every photographer. Using Luminar Neo to tackle these steps can make retouching a breeze using just a few tools and leveraging some of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) built into the application.
Let’s start with the technical news, Xencelabs, a Portland, Oregon-based company in the field of digital drawing solutions for creative professionals has had some astounding growth this year. This is not some light news, the company has in fact seen the EMEA market double since 2021. They are basing this on online and offline sales, retail and channel expansion. This is a huge development especially in such a low market, this level of success is really something to be congratulated.
Street photography can speak to our souls. Taking images of common, everyday people and transforming them into art—that’s what it’s all about.
Kim Kardashian is refining her personal brand. Right-wing news outlet Fox TV is gaining viewers through attention-grabbing headlines. Photographer Gabriele Galimberti is gaining notoriety. All this is due to a recent advertising campaign from leading global fashion brand Balenciaga that has caused widespread controversy.
Language is an underlying reality in our everyday world, present in our thoughts, our words, and even our haptic gestures. When interacting with someone else we are incorporating language to translate abstract thoughts into communication, communication into meaning, and meaning into understanding.
Oscar Jordan has been named winner of the Believe in What You’re Building Photo Trip Giveaway sponsored by Identity Digital, the folks who promote the adoption of the .photography TLD (Top Level Domain) name dedicated to photographers who believe in the brand they’re building.
As a photographer, there are many things that we feel may be holding us back. For some, it’s gear. For many, it might be limited free time. For others, there might be a lack of interesting locations to shoot.
Steam vents, suited businesspeople, the neon glow of the night, umbrellas on windy days, stray glances through bus windows, beachgoers in a boardwalk scene, or silhouetted figures dancing in the sunlight: as photographers, we want to capture things that give life and vivacity to the subjects of the streets. We capture their spirit and do it in a visually interesting way.
The recently launched client gallery and photo proofing service, Picflow, was developed with the purpose of making it easier for photographers to communicate and deliver to their clients. While the service may look rather straightforward and simplistic, there are a lot of useful and powerful advanced tools hiding behind the scenes that are sure to improve the workflow for any working photographer.
My wife and kids have standardized joking about how long it takes dad to get through airport and other security checks when traveling and visiting museums. No, I'm not a supervillain with an evil laugh, I'm just a film photographer!
We live in a world where everyone has access to a camera in some form or another, and the content we create is often viewed through a phone screen. So it's no surprise that so many people have learned how to take and edit cool photos that will get them likes on Instagram.
Having been a wedding photographer for the past fifteen years, I’ve seen my fair share of white wedding dresses, but before focusing on weddings, I was fortunate enough to gain a little experience in the fashion industry, shooting for magazines, working backstage at fashion shows, and covering both London and Paris Fashion Weeks.
Pulicat lake of Tamil Nadu, India is a safe haven for thousands of flamingos every year during the spring and autumn migration seasons.
Ten years ago, if you heard the word elopement, your thoughts might first go to images of a shotgun wedding in Las Vegas (or Gretna Green if you’re from the UK). These elopements would be typically short and sweet, no fuss, and over within an hour.
Color Grading in Lightroom is a lot of fun, but for beginners, it can be a bit overwhelming. This often leads to people thinking you need to adjust all the sliders there are, but often this just leads to a strange-looking photo.
Most digital cameras from the 2000s and 2010s are equipped with an optical element called an optical low-pass filter (OLPF), also known as an anti-aliasing (AA) or blur filter. As the name "filter" suggests, this optical element filters out some information coming from the imaged scene.
There’s still time to save big on all photo and video enhancement apps during Topaz Labs Black Friday / Cyber Monday Sale, but you have to act fast. Save 25% across the board on all individual apps and SAVE UP TO 60% when you buy a bundle. Act now! These money-saving offers end on December 2.
I think photography educators teach and talk about photography to beginners in an overly complicated way. It’s all concepts, jargon, theories, and numbers. It should be focused on composition and how to take ‘better’ photographs as this is what most beginners join courses to learn.
In this detailed technical article, I compare six AI-based noise reduction programs for the demands of astrophotography. Some can work wonders. Others can ruin your image.
Xencelabs are slashing prices on their world-leading digital drawing solutions for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Discounts of up to 30 percent can be had right now on Xencelabs products, including the fantastic new Pen Tablet Medium Bundle SE.
In the process of chasing that magical number one on social media, artists are unfortunately losing the ability to do their craft and no longer focusing on the only thing that will actually shape the next generation of artists.
Video processing workflow will never be the same. With Topaz Video AI you can easily upscale up to 4K or 8K, enhance, sharpen, eliminate noise, stabilize, and adjust frame rate. And that’s just one of the many image-enhancing apps from Topaz Labs that are on sale NOW.
Want to easily remove the background from a photo using the power of artificial intelligence? There's a powerful new tool that can help you do just that. It's a new extension of Skylum's Luminar Neo called Background Removal AI, and in this article we will show you both what it is and how you can use it.
Maybe snow hasn’t drifted down to your window sill yet but no doubt the tingly sensation of the holidays is quickly creeping up on us. Adding a little eggnog to your coffee in the morning might give you the right amount of fuel for wrapping presents and cooking hams. As we rev up for this warming and giving season, we are here to make the shopping part of this as easy as possible for you.
Back in the days of film photography, things weren’t quite as advanced as they are in our modern digital era. Photographers struggled to manipulate available light or had to work a lot harder to capture simple in-camera effects. That was the reason for the invention of photographic lens filters.
Peak Design bags are award-winning. The Travel Tripod is groundbreaking. When it comes to camera accessories, one of their products is usually a top choice. And now with the introduction of the Mobile ecosystem of products for your phone they have that camera in your pocket covered too.
These holidays, capture the season with OM SYSTEM and save on a huge range of cameras and lenses!
It happened again in San Francisco. A wedding photographer was attacked while shooting portraits at the beautiful …
Over the last two years, I’ve been working to improve my habits of backing up my photos. I started first by creating a RAID backup on my computer, then adding a large external HDD for a local backup, and eventually getting a subscription cloud backup from Backblaze.
Now is the time to save big on all photo and video enhancement apps from Topaz Labs. Save 25% across the board on all individual apps and SAVE EVEN MORE when you buy a bundle. Don’t wait because these money-saving offers end on December 2.
Shooting from a photo pit or area is an important part of photography niches such as concert and sports photography, but how do you get access in the first place? This is not an easy task but with a little work and dedication, you can position yourself to be allowed in this coveted area.
Looking to expand your lens collection for your crop-sensor Sony mirrorless camera or a perfect holiday gift for a Sony shooter in your life? The Japanese lens manufacturer Tokina has an instant savings deal just for you. For a limited time, get $100 off the new Tokina atx-m 11-18mm f/2.8.