Light painting has been a basic technique in my photography ever since I learned how to really play with it. I started by just doing the usual of writing names and doing swirls but then I learned how to use it for my professional work.
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.
As 2016 gets underway, I'd like to share 8 tips on how to take and make better images. To prove that this has nothing to do with how much fancy gear you have, all these tips can be applied to any camera, and all the example images were shot and edited using only my phone.
Photographer Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens made this helpful 7-minute video tutorial that provides a crash course on the different types of clamps used by photographers during shoots.
"This is not super glamorous stuff to talk about," says Morgan, "but it’s the basics that we use every single day that we’re on set."
Here’s a short 4-minute video in which photography instructor Karl Taylor offers …
Understanding the exposure triangle of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO is one of the first steps in learning photography. To help people wrap their heads around the concept, photographer Tony Catalano has created the Interactive Exposure Tool, an online tool for experimenting with how changing camera settings affects the resulting photo of a scene.
Here's an interesting blast from the past: in 1965, the US Army released the 25-minute film above to teach the basics of photography (for military police purposes).
Want to give your DSLR footage a cinematic look? DSLR filmmaking enthusiast Jake Coppinger made this 11-minute video tutorial to teach you how you can do so.
If you're looking to learn to program, there are free interactive online courses such as Codecademy and CodeSchool you can use. Programmer and photographer Cody Meyer wanted to give the photography world a similar kind of resource, so he created Camera Instructor. It's a new web-based photography school that aims to teach photography skills for free through interactive videos and exercises.
If you're just starting out in Adobe Lightroom and would like some guidance on how you can use the software to improve your photographs, here's a free lesson that may be of interest to you. Photography instructor Tim Grey shares his top 10 tips for optimizing photographs in Lightroom.
The talk runs for nearly 2 hours, so you'll need to carve a chunk out of your day to watch it, but it could be helpful for anyone in need of a primer on some basic tools.
When you drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on a new piece of fast glass, it’s natural to want to shoot it wide-open until the focusing ring falls off. But, the idea that for all portraits you want to be wide open and for all landscapes you want to be stopped down isn’t true. Here to explain in the above video is photographer Matt Granger.
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.
If you've been looking for a basic photography course online, here's something to hold you over until you find the right one for you. This "Photography (Basic)" course was put together by the U.S. Navy in 1993. And thanks to Reddit user clutch70706, you now have access to the full thing in PDF format.
For beginners in the world of photography, getting a good grasp on the types of lenses available and when you might want to use them is an important step. So, given that there's a lot of glass out there, we thought we'd share this basic lens intro from Pentax.
French photographer Serge Ramelli made this short 30-minute tutorial that teaches the basics …
Photography instructor Mike Browne of PhotographyCourses.Biz has a clever way of teaching the basic principles of flash photography. He uses water from an ordinary garden hose as an analogy for light, showing different ways you can go about soaking your portrait subject.
Matthew Gore of Light & Matter created this beginner-friendly video tutorial on the …
Destin of Smarter Every Day made this helpful video in which he and …
Google+ is becoming pretty popular among photographers as a way to share work and connect with others. If you've been thinking about jumping in but don't know where to begin, Scott Kelby and Co. made this helpful (and free) hour-long primer with tips on how to use the service effectively.
Here’s a helpful 22-page guide by National Geographic that explains many of the basic concepts of photography, from lens …
Here’s a beautifully designed cheat sheet by …
