backtobasics

7 Tips for Creating a Sense of Depth in Your Landscape Photos

Landscape photographer and YouTuber Mads Peter Iversen is back with another helpful tips video. This time, he's covering a very important subject that many beginners fail to properly appreciate when they're just starting out: how to create depth in your landscape imagery.

Using Water to Explain the Properties of Light and the Exposure Triangle

Photographer Robert Hall recently released a simple-yet-brilliant explainer that uses water to illustrate the properties of light and explain a few concepts that frequently confuse beginners, including: what is a "stop" of light, how do you use the exposure triangle, and how do various flashes and flash modifiers affect your image.

Sock Puppet Teaches You How to Use Your Camera’s Manual Settings

If you've been looking for a fresh, entertaining take on the standard beginner's guide to
getting out of Auto Mode, look no further. The YouTube channel TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin has released the strangest (and yet still very informative) tutorial we've seen in this genre.

10 Tips for Taking Better Photos of Your Dog

If you’re lucky enough to have a wonderful dog around while you're stuck in lockdown, this is the perfect opportunity to hone your pet photography skills and try to get some beautiful portraits of your furry friend.

Back-to-Basics: 7 Street Photography Tips for Beginners

Photographer Evan Raft recently published a list of 7 helpful, back-to-basics tips for anybody who is interested in getting started with street photography. If you're a beginner, this video is a great place to start before going out and trying to capture your first few street shots.

Back to Basics: A Beginner’s Guide to Capturing ‘Moody’ Portraits

Rachel and Daniel of Mango Street—one of the most popular photography channels on YouTube—have put together a great, straight-to-the-point guide to capturing that "moody" style of portrait that's become a popular counter-point to the "dreamy" overexposed look that often dominates lifestyle imagery.

Understanding the Basic Laws of Light, Part 2

It's so easy to get caught up in the minutia of photography. Sure, megapixels, microcontrast, MTF charts, and the like are all important, but only after you understand how to work with the most important piece of the photographic puzzle: light.

Basic Tutorial Clears Up a Fundamental Confusion About Lightroom

This short little tutorial by photographer and educator Phil Steele might be too basic for most advanced and even intermediate photographers, but you might find it useful all the same. That's because it tackles what Steele calls "the biggest confusion about Lightroom."

The Power of Shutter Speed In Two Photographs

Shutter speed is one of the first elements of photography that you learn as a beginner. Learning how to control your camera’s shutter speed to make sure your images are sharp and well exposed is Photography 101. Learning how to use shutter speed creatively to manipulate the look and feel of an image is something else entirely, and something that I continue to experiment with a lot.

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.

Back to Basics: Useful Tutorial Shows You How to Properly Assess & Clean Your Gear

Most camera gear is built with longevity and strenuous activity in mind, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the best possible care of your gear. To that end, Canon’s service and support team recently put out this video showing the best practices for making sure that you properly and thoroughly clean and check your gear so it can keep working for as long as possible.

Ten Basic Tips To Help You Grow as a Photographer

In this short conclusion to his instructional DVD, Norwegian photographer Erik Almas gives 10 basic "steps" to becoming a photographer that caught our eye. It's not that they're groundbreaking; in fact, you've probably heard most of these at least once before.

But put all together, and following on the heels of the humorous Onion article on pursuing your dreams, they make for a great set of inspirational steps to follow if you're trying to go from hobbyist to professional.