phototips

Popping a gel in front of your rim light is a quick, easy way to change the feel of your portraits.

Photography is a presentation medium. At its most basic, a photograph is simply a means to communicate an idea to an audience. Sometimes the idea is a memory or a moment, other times it‘s an expression of a feeling or intention.

If you're looking for a simple lighting setup for dramatic portraits, look no further. Photographer Aaron Anderson has put together a lighting tutorial that will show you how he uses one light, a black flag, and a white card to capture beautiful, dramatic headshots.

It's your job as the photographer to make your subjects look their best, and one of the first steps to making this happen consistently is knowing how to find a person's "good side" for portraits. It is possible, and photographer Joe Edelman explains how in this short video.

I attended the Palm Springs Photo Festival last week for the first time. I have heard for years what a great event it is but never could get my schedule to work so that I could participate. Well, this year worked out and I was so happy that it did.

July 4th, 2014 was the day I got my first camera. Since then, I’ve been shooting local fireworks every year. After shooting the same firework show, the same way, for two years in a row, I decided this year it was time to do something different.

When I was a little boy my mother taught me the first and most important rule of photography: always keep your back turned to the sun. It’s a funny thing I’d grow up to develop a romantic relationship with backlight. These are the confessions of a backlight lover, and how you can start your own amorous episode with it.

World-renowned photographer Chase Jarvis has a major piece of advice to share, something he's calling "the dirtiest secret in photography." It goes like this: find inspiration outside of the photography world.

I have always been interested in protest and civil disobedience. What first caught my eye was an episode of Whale Wars on Discovery Channel some years ago where activists were going to Antarctica and using direct action techniques to intervene in illegal whaling. Several series on, and last year I decided to go and photograph a protest against Japan’s hunting of whales and dolphins.

Get to know people, forget the rules, don't read books on composition, embrace imperfection, print your photos, and more... Here are 43 amateurish tips for capturing better images.

Travel photography master Bob Holmes is back in the studio with the folks at Advance Your Photography talking about how to shoot that 'National Geographic style'. In the last interview he was talking about composition, this time he dives into the intricacies of lighting.

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.

I love capturing one light photos for my studio shoots, and I recently bought a 120cm octobox to add to my set of diffusers. I’ll be sharing with you a simple but elegant lighting setup only using one light and some interesting stuff found around the house.

If something seems too good to be true, that's probably because it is. A great example of this was sent to us by a reader earlier this week when he found one of his photos had been purchased for use by an Austrian publication. Great news, right? Well, not entirely.

The photo is being used at the top of an article on shooting photos without expensive equipment, the caption implying that it was a smartphone camera that yielded these epic results. But of course, that's not the case.

Choosing the right camera settings for concert photography can be a daunting task, even for experienced music photographers. Here’s a breakdown of every major camera setting that I recommend for shooting live music.

There’s no such thing as too many resources when it comes to learning how to take a good photograph. And here to prove this statement is a neat little pseudo-interactive web guide put together by Shutterfly for those among us who are just starting out.

CJ Kale and Nick Selway long ago fell in love with Hawaii and founded Lava Light, a photography gallery focused on capturing the ever-changing landscape created by an active volcano and crashing waves -- and sometimes both together when the conditions are just right. And if swimming with fire and dodging lava bombs weren’t challenging enough, these photographers believe in creating their images completely in-camera.

Balancing exposures between sky, water and lava can be incredibly tricky. Luckily, Lava Light has shared some tips to help you get the shot without combining exposures or using HDR.

During the 2014 Burton US Open Snowboard Pipe Finals, photographer Brett Wilhelm gives …

First, I'd like to start this article off with a little bit of a warning. This post is primarily aimed at people just starting to get into photography or people just beginning to make the jump from hobbyist to professional. That said, hopefully there's something below that can be appreciated by photographers of all levels.

Now, lets talk about style a little bit.

We've shared a few pretty cool life hacks over the years -- for example, check out this super-simple drop test that'll let you know if your AA batteries are juiced and ready to go -- but the video above brings together some of the most useful.

Put together by DigitalRev, these ten photo-related life hacks have the potential to make your photographic life that much easier, while saving you some money as well.

Getting your photography removed from an offending website or Facebook page can be a hassle, and if you've never done it before, learning the proper process for any given situation can be a downright pain. Fortunately, there are awesome people out there who don't mind helping out their fellow photogs.

That's where James Beltz from PhotoTips and his new blog PictureDefense come in. What he's done is set up a free website where you can go and get step-by-step instructions on how to get your copyrighted photos removed from almost any type of website.