There are now a number of smartphone tripods out there that are designed to fit inside your wallet when not in use. Before you buy one, though, here's a random little tip: if your wallet is thick and sturdy enough, you don't even need a separate accessory -- your wallet itself can do just fine.
If you're just starting out in Lightroom (or haven't explored its features much), perhaps you haven't heard of the powerful "Match Total Exposures" feature. This is a feature that lets you quickly adjust the exposure of multiple photos to match a target photo of your choice.
Here's a really neat little customization trick that Adobe are allowing you to do if you're using Lightroom 5 or newer. You know that splash screen that pops up when you first open up LR, the one with all the developers' names on it? You can now replace that image with one of your own in just a couple of quick steps!
The tutorial was created by Craig McCormick of Destructive Pixels for our good friends at F Stop Lounge, and the process couldn't be any simpler.
We've published a number of posts in the past on how you can recover photos that were accidentally deleted from your computer or memory card. But what about when you delete a photo and expect it to actually be gone forever?
The ease with which deleted files can often be recovered means that you should be careful when selling or tossing hard drives or memory cards -- your photos and files might end up falling into the wrong hands if someone decides to try data recovery.
When it comes to food photography, particularly beverages, one of the most difficult things to capture is steam. Not only do the drinks not stay warm for very long, but the steam is often nearly transparent and hard to catch on camera.
If you have a hard time making sure everyone’s looking at you when capturing a group photo, perhaps you …
If you've ever been on-location for a shoot from sunrise to sunset (and beyond), you know how fatigued your legs can get by the end of the day. Standing up all day can make it feel like your legs are about to fall off.
But if a comfortable pair of shoes aren't quite enough to keep you going, this weird tip might just be the best gift you can give your legs the next time you've got to be on your feet for extended periods of time.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have noticed that the internet is a-flood with time-lapses and hyper-lapses made using Instagram’s new (inventively named) Hyperlapse.
If you're ever in a situation where you need to (or want to) give some constructive criticism to another photographer, here's a simple trick for giving good feedback in a way that will help rather than hinder: use the word "and" instead of "but."
Hand-held macro photography presents a lot of challenges, but three of the most prevalent are: subject movement, camera shake, and harsh shadows. Fortunately, you don't have to carry around a bunch of gear to solve these issues. In fact, a cheap plastic cup will do the trick all by itself!
Here's an interesting cautionary tip and something that we'd honestly never given a second thought to: it turns out that certain chemicals in sunscreen can damage cameras with polycarbonate resin bodies, so you'd better wash your hands the next time you put on sunscreen at the beach and decide to go out shooting afterwards.
Wedding photos are wonderful. But sometimes sitting around the living room looking through a couple hundred, if not thousand, wedding photos isn’t exactly ‘fun’ for the friends you inevitably force into it.
Well, there’s a solution for that. Just do what this couple did and turn the wedding photographs into an animated short film.
COOPH, The Cooperative of Photography, is back in the photo tip game again, this time showing us 7 smartphone photography tips you'll want to be writing down if you ever shoot with the computer in your pocket.
From unique panorama uses to a clever way to easily take partially underwater photos, these tips are quick, easy and will certainly add a little variety to your Instagram arsenal.
DigitalRevTV recently shared a useful video featuring the more mellow Lok that discussed how to photograph Hong Kong if you've only got a few hours to spend shooting. The video itself is interesting and full of great info shared in that low-key style only possible for DRTV when Kai is on vacation, but one tip in particular caught peoples' eye.
That pop-up flash on top of your camera can come in very handy, but if you're a beginner, try giving these alternatives a shot to produce more creative, atmospheric images.
For landscape photographers, getting your entire scene in focus while keeping things as sharp as possible at the same time can be a challenge.
But if you follow the simple technique laid out by photographer Joshua Cripps in the tutorial above, as he puts it, it becomes "as easy as manually removing a corn syrup-based artificially-flavored confectionary product, from the infantile grasp of a newborn Homo sapien."
Consider this a friendly reminder for any wedding photographers who haven't already heard it or maybe even forgot the tip when we shared it almost exactly a year ago.
If you're new to the world of studio portraiture and you've noticed that the skin tones in your photos are often turning out wrong, it's possible you're getting color contamination from the ambient lights in your studio -- be that a bank of windows or overhead lights.
Lindsay Adler and CreativeLive want to help you clear that up, and so they've published this short snippet of their Skin 101 course to explain how best to avoid this issue.
No matter how many hours you spend in Photoshop each day, it’s inevitable there’s a feature or utility within the app you’re yet to use or are completely unaware of. Such was the case for this neat little tip by Digitalchemy that we just stumbled upon, which shows you how to import a collection of photographs into Photoshop, each as a new layer in the same file.
Here's a basic tip that some of you may have overlooked in your DSLR's owner manual: did you know that you can use your TV's remote when reviewing photos on it from your DSLR? It feels much better than holding your connected DSLR in your hands, and as long as you have a compatible TV and DSLR, the process is a breeze.
If you care about endangered animals that are hunted for their parts, here's something important you should keep in mind: make sure you scrub the GPS data on the images prior to sharing them online. Poachers have reportedly been turning to geotagged photos on social networks in order to find out where they can make their next kill.
Here's a video from back in 2012 that shows a basic GoPro video stabilization tip you might not have heard of yet. Put together by Mitch Bergsma of MicBergsma Productions, it shows you how holding your GoPro against your face will lead to more stable footage.
Still autofocusing by pressing halfway down on your shutter release? Well, suppose I told you there’s another way that you might even like better? Sound interesting? Read on.
So, for a while now I’ve shared photography techniques I’d worked on throughout my career. Every wedding season I try to share something new with everyone and I love seeing what other photographers have done with prisming, freelensing, and brenizer methods (aka. bokeh panoramas).
Now it’s time for my latest technique: I call it lens chimping.
The photograph above seems fairly straight forward: pretty model photographed in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. But that's not actually the case at all. The photograph was actually taken in a basement in Ohio.
Back in February of 2012, portraitist Peter Hurley shared an awesome tutorial that showed how to accentuate your subject's jawline in portraits and instantly make them look much more photogenic. That video went insanely viral amongst photographers, and now, Hurley has finally released a followup in which he shares what he calls "his most incredible tip for looking photogenic."
Nothing makes a bowl of soup, a cup of coffee, or in this case, a baked potato, look more warm and appetizing than a beautiful cloud of steam. Immediately, your taste buds think of a hot, comforting meal, and your nose can almost sniff the fresh-from-the-oven smell.
While working on a feature film called The Grind, filmmaker Vashi Nedomansky had to come up with a way to shoot a flashback scene, complete with Humvee, in the desert of Iraq. The only problem? He had neither Iraq, nor a Humvee to work with.
Fortunately, he did have the sand dunes outside of Los Angeles and a 1:18 scale model of a Humvee purchased at Walmart for $23. Combine those things with a bit of creativity and you get some low-budget, professional-looking visual effects.
Have an afternoon to kill at a public library and want to go directly to the photography section? Just remember the magical number 770.
That's the division number for "Photography & computer art" in the Dewey Decimal System, used in hundreds of thousands of public libraries in 135+ countries around the world.
With the ability to shoot video now nearly ubiquitous among DSLRs, many photographers take advantage and switch into video mode on occasion. But because video isn't a photographer's first priority, camera sliders and cranes that many videographers find necessary for beautiful, smooth tracking shots don't always make the budget.
Thankfully, if you're not in the market for a slider or crane, but you still want to shoot the occasional tracking shot, the folks at DSLR filmmaking tutorial site Fenchel & Janisch shared this simple trick for getting similar results using the tripod already at your disposal.
Here's a cool product that could help the car photographers out there leave a memorable impression and turn first-time clients into repeat customers. Made by Flashrods, these car-shaped hard drives and flash drives are the perfect way to deliver the final photos to your clients in style.
Photographer Glyn Dewis shared this cool little technique that lets you work with a black background even if you don't have an actual backdrop with you. It's a fairly common trick that he refers to as "the invisible black background," and it's a nifty little tip that many photographers may want to keep up their sleeve.
Over 100 million people around the world snap photos with Instagram on their phones now. If you like the look of Instagram filters but would rather not broadcast the photographs to the world every time you snap a picture, there's actually a (semi-old) trick you can use to save the pics without sharing them (for iPhone users, at least): all you have to do is turn on "Airplane Mode."
Have you ever wanted to get pics of cute sea lion or seal pups up close? Well, your best bet may be to grab your kayak or surf board and paddle out -- camera in hand. Scuba diver Rick Coleman discovered this on a recent dive trip off the coast of Southern California.
Photographer Nick Fancher tells us that he recently came up with an interesting way of customizing the catch light in subjects' eyes. If, in your portraiture, you place white or black foam boards to control the amount and direction of bounce light, you can also use white and black gaffers tape to control what goes on in your subjects' eyeballs!
Did you know that YouTube isn't just for uploading videos? Google's popular video hosting service also has a special feature designed just for photo slideshows. If you've never considered using YouTube for photos, you may have never noticed the option, but it's right there on the Upload page.
David Hobby over at Strobist shares a fantastic idea for photographers who would …
Last week, we wrote on how you can use LEGO pieces to keep your lens caps on your camera strap when they're not protecting your lenses. A reader named Fearn quickly pointed us to a similar tip published over at Sugru at the end of last year. Instead of using camera straps, however, they suggest tripods as a sturdy way of keeping track of the caps.
Here's an interesting idea to try: if you ever find yourself shooting fireworks and it starts to lightly drizzle, keep on shooting instead of putting your camera away. The tiny drops of rain that fall on your lens can add some bokeh to your shot!
The megapixel war is heating up again in the high-end DSLR market, with the 36MP Nikon D800 leading the …