Inspiration

A Simple Trick for Adding Drama to a Product Photo

Here's a quick tip from talented photographer, filmmaker, and YouTube star Peter McKinnon. In his latest "two-minute Tuesday" video, he showed how adding a simple overlay onto some black foam core can take a basic top-down product shot to the next level.

Photography and Collecting

My father was the archetypal collector. He had dozens of cameras and optical devices. Tens of thousands of LP record albums, and eventually even more CDs and DVDs. There were always books, in particular series of books. And art books. He bordered on being a hoarder, but with great taste.

10 Tips for Photographing Little Mushrooms in the Forest

As I am a professional photographer and known mainly for my images with wide angle lenses, here is something new. It's been raining here for weeks already—not the greatest conditions for landscape photography—so I took out my macro lens to photograph some mushrooms in the forest. The great thing about this is that you can do this with any kind of light at any moment of the day.

Photographing Every National Park in Victoria, Australia

As a weekend photographer and keen explorer of our natural spaces, I recently(ish) set myself a photo project of capturing every land-based national park in my home state of Victoria, located in the south-east corner of Australia. Visiting all 45 of them took two years of regular trips, outside work and other travels.

4 Things I’ve Learnt About Photography in 2020 (so far)

What a strange year this has been, right? Yet, curiously, this has also been a year in which I have probably taken the greatest leaps in my photography for some time. Because when you are doing something new, or have been pushed into a new way of life, you can either freeze and panic... or you can use it as an opportunity to try new things. To innovate.

Akaka Falls by Moonlight: How I Got the Shot

Summer and Fall are wonderful for photographing the Milky Way here in Hawai'i. We have many locations with dark skies and breathtaking scenery too. In October, the brightest part of the Milky Way (galactic core) is near the horizon at sunset; by November it'll be below the horizon when it gets dark.

The Building Blocks of Artistic Portrait Photography

Of the many creative photographic genres, it is perhaps portrait photography where two camps—the representative and the artistic—can be most clearly observed. Whilst the former requires context through captions and backstory to elevate it, in the later, the absence of such requires creative aptitude. Attempting to merge both camps in one photograph can often diminish its effectiveness.

3 Beginner Wide Angle Mistakes to Avoid in Landscape Photography

Landscape photographer Mark Denney has put together a quick tutorial that will be particularly useful for beginners. In it, he covers the most egregious mistakes he made when he first started shooting landscapes with a wide-angle lens, and explains how you can avoid falling into the same traps.

Perfect for 36 Frames: The Scariest Assignment of My Career

Most everyone’s got one. If you’ve been around for a while, you may have some great stories or a few crazy or scary assignments, but this one is not what you might think. Oh, I have had some interesting gigs for sure, but most of my work was in studio and not at all scary (with the exception of melted ice cream). I’ll save those stories for another time. No, this phone call was a different kind of scary.

This Stunning Supermacro Timelapse Captures the Hidden Beauty of Mold

Even the most mundane, unremarkable, or sometimes disgusting phenomena take on a totally new life when viewed at a supermacro scale. Case in point, a new timelapse film dubbed "The Rise of Molds" captures the mesmerizing growth of a subject we've all at one time or another cut out of a slice of bread or scrubbed off our bathroom walls: mold.

Winners of the Minimalist Photography Awards Prove that Less is More

The winners of the 2nd annual Minimalist Photography Awards were announced just last week, and if you're looking for proof that "less is more" when it comes to photography... you've come to the right place. Many of the winners are masterful examples of simplicity in composition.

Photog Breaks Down the 8 ‘Phases’ of Becoming a Photographer

The photographer's "journey" is, generally speaking, a pretty predictable thing. We all go through certain "phases" as we pick up and learn this craft—some more gracefully than others—and so, in the spirit of lighthearted candor, photographer and YouTuber Evan Ranft has decided to share his take on the 8 major phases of being a photographer.

How to Shoot Dramatic Portraits with a Point and Shoot Camera and One Light

Photographer and YouTuber Jiggie Alejandrino loves to show his viewers what's possible when shooting with just one light; but for his most recent tutorial, he took the concept one step further. Not only did he shoot this using a single LED light panel, he used a point-and-shoot camera instead of his more professional gear.