trick

Here's a neat, simple, and cheap little trick that'll help you get smooth footage when shooting video or a hyperlapse with your DSLR. If you don't have the money or the need to pony up for a serious stabilization system, try using a shopping bag instead!

Suppose you come home from a trip in which you shot many rolls of film. You want to develop your film chronologically, but found that you forgot to label them with their order. What do you do? I have a solution... a chemical solution (photography joke): smell your film.

Here's a simple tip that could come in handy: put a metal washer on your keychain for the purpose of tightening your tripod quick release plate.

In this post I'll be sharing the best one light portrait setup I've ever used. I'll come clean right off the bat here and say that I stumbled across this little super easy lighting technique more by luck than skill.

This is the cheapest yet most effective photography hack I can think of. Step one: get disc reflector. Step two: cut lens-sized hole in said reflector. Step three: profit.

Here’s a short and sweet 2-minute-tip by New York-based photographer sports and music photographer …

Photoshop and Lightroom both have built-in tools for dealing with chromatic aberration (AKA color fringing), but in some cases the features don't work as well as you'd hope. In the 8-minute video tutorial above, photographer Steve Perry of Backcountry Gallery shares a quick and easy trick he uses in Photoshop to manually remove fringing from his shots.

Here's a simple trick for landscape photos: when shooting a landscape photo that needs a hard edge graduated ND filter, you can use your hand. Yes your hand! It's a technique I've been using in my own work recently.

Shooting two or more cameras generally means you need to ensure the cameras are all synchronized to the same clock time. Unfortunately, my Canon 5D Mark III drifts horrendously when it comes to keeping good time -- perhaps even 20 seconds in a week. I found myself continuously having to set each of my cameras before each wedding shoot to ensure images are timestamped in the right order.

After giving it a think, I came up with this handy way to sync my two DSLR cameras using Lightroom and a "Timestamp" trick.

If you're a casual photographer, you probably don't have so many tripods that you have a hard time storing and organizing them. But if that is a problem that you or your studio struggle with, here's a clever solution: you can use a snowboard rack as a tripod storage solution.

The New York-based Lixi Studios shares this finding in the 3-minute video above.

New Zealand-based photographer Chris Cameron has a nice little kit he put together to mount his off-camera flash to any tree or pole. The setup centers around a plastic "dog bone" that you can make for yourself with a 3D printer.

Here’s a sweet and simple photo organization tip for those of you using iPhones and iPads: in the Photos …

Here’s a short and simple 45-second video tutorial by UK glamour photographer Markp, …

If you're a Mac user and are annoyed that OS X automatically launches Apple Photos every time you connect a device or insert a memory card, there's good news for you: you can disable the program from launching for all devices with a single command.

As my startup gear brand Eupidere grows, we face more and more photographic challenges in shooting thrifty product photos. Recently, I had just minutes to come up with an image that is a) eye catching, and b) Christmas related. There are lots of Christmas decorations around right now and the little guy above, wearing striped pajamas, is one of them. We decided to put him into a winter scenery and wish everyone Merry Christmas.

What happens if your portrait clients request golden hour lighting... outside of golden hour? That's the situation photographer Pye Jirsa of Lin & Jirsa Photography found himself in recently while shooting a wedding. As you can see in the 4.5-minute video above, Jirsa was able to deliver by using creative lighting, a powerful flash, and a couple of colored gels.

If you want to play around with shadows and add depth to your lighting, this simple technique is perfect for you. And you only need minimal gear to do it.

Polish photographer Rafał Krasa recently launched Eupidere, a new brand of high-end leather camera straps. He wanted some product photos with a seamless white background but didn't have the proper studio setup, so he decided to go with what he did have: his bathtub.

New York portrait photographer Peter Hurley is back again with yet another pro portrait trick he uses for shooting better headshots of people. This one is called "Hold Your Sub," and it lets you shave 10 pounds off your subject with a super simple move of their arms.

Before the introduction of color film, Many photographers experimented with ways to record color images using black and white mediums. One of the more famous examples comes from Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky and his photos of Russia from the early 1900s.

Here's a little tip for those of you who shoot with Fuji Instax film while out and about: once you're done exposing a pack of film, you can use the empty plastic pack as a container to hold your Instax photos.

When shooting in colder environments, one of the things that can plague your photography is condensation forming on your gear. Photographer Mark Peter Thorpe has a cheap and simple hack for avoiding this problem: heated hand warming packs.

If you want to view the color spectrum of a light source in your studio, there's actually a super cheap and easy way to do so: an ordinary CD or DVD can do the trick. Simply allow the light to reflect from the surface of the disc into your eye -- it acts as a diffraction grating, allowing you to see the different color bands in the light.

If you ever find yourself needing or wanting to use a newer Nikon G lens on an older Nikon film SLR camera, a little piece of string can help you do so. Since Nikon G lenses lack an aperture ring for manually adjusting aperture, the string is used to do the adjustment mechanically.

Back in May, we featured a clever hack by photographer Paul Adshead that involved using an IKEA storage box as a $6 laptop sun shade for outdoor shoots. Now he's back again with another nifty photo trick: using a smartphone and a car phone mount for photographic lighting.

YouTube woodworking guru Matthias Wandel just posted this video about how he recently discovered that he can use his tripod as a simple DIY camera stabilizer for some casual filming. After doing some experiments with a DIY glidecam system, Wandel found that he actually got the smoothest shots by simply pointing the legs of his big and heavy Manfrotto tripod out and running around with his camera attached to it.

In this post, I'll share a trick I use to get some adjustments "beyond" +100 or -100 in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw.

In the screenshot above, I like how most of the image looks -- the bird and the branches are well exposed, at least. But the blue sky got blown out to almost pure white. I already moved the Highlights slider down to -100 and it's still pretty white. I want to go past -100.

Travel photographer Jimmy McIntyre created this short 3-minute video tutorial to share a trick for adjusting the brightness of specific colors in your shot without affecting their saturation.

A few years ago, we wrote about how phones can be used as negative film strip viewers by simply inverting the screens. Swedish photographer Adam af Ekenstam took the idea a step further by using an iPad and iPhone together as a simple yet powerful negative viewing station.

Children’s book author Josh Gottsegen says he taught his 3-year-old labrador Olive to …

I often shoot time-lapse photos in harsh outdoor environments, and over the years I have discovered a number of odd items that are useful for my work. One of them is sanitary napkins (AKA sanitary pads).

Retoucher Matt Kloskowski offers this quick and easy Lightroom tip for your mental library: if you ever find yourself with a drastically underexposed photograph, you can use a "secret shadow slider" in Lightroom to try and recover an extreme amount of detail.

Want to remove the glow in your model's ears when photographing them in front of a bright background? Instead of dealing with the problem in Photoshop, you can fix it during the shoot itself with just a bit of gaffer tape.

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.

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.

If you need a reason to crack a smile today, or you and your significant other just found out you're having a baby and you'd like to announce it in a fun and creative way, San Francisco couple Kat and Kris can help.

Instead of just delivering the news directly, the couple pretended they were taking a group photo of their friends and shot video instead. When the time came for the standard "say cheese" moment at the end of the countdown, they instead told everyone to say "Kat's pregnant" and waited for the lightbulb to go off.

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.

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!