There comes a point in a photographer’s life when publishing a book seems like a logical step. The coffee table book represents a platonic ideal for a photo project that is both long-term and worthy of considerations by others. Yet, even with the advent of high quality on-demand solutions like Blurb, book publishing is still fraught with challenges. Here are three different approaches to book publishing in the 21st century.
We’ve seen it in plenty of thriller/crime solver TV shows and movies: upon reviewing some grainy and very low-resolution surveillance footage, someone inevitably asks the technician, “can you zoom in on that and enhance it?” Then, with the quick press of a few masterfully placed keystrokes and bleepy computer sounds, the image is suddenly enhanced with vastly increased resolution and a key plot device is revealed.
I’m often asked how I am able to take high-quality images of the solar system using my iPhone. In short, the quality of today’s smartphone cameras makes it possible to take very respectable images of the Moon and planets through a telescope with your phone – but it takes some work.
The key to mastering photography is not to follow the rules but to understand them. Understanding the photographic principles that define photography is a barrier that must be broken to truly unlock your full potential as a photographer.
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.
Today, I'm going to show you how to create a dress from scratch out of something that was not a dress... at all. Here are five steps to creating a gown using Photoshop.
As a part of a personal 50/50 project (a photo a day for 50 days with a 50mm lens), I tried my first attempts at levitation photography and had a lot of fun doing it. This tutorial will walk you through the best methods to make a surreal levitation portrait; only a pinch of magic required.
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.
Here's a look at how I use dry ice in my photography. My goal with this article is simply to share my journey with this technique. In the images used as examples, no fog textures were used (unless noted) -- basically, if you see fog, that's how it was captured (minus the color work).
London-based interdisciplinary photographer Sean Tucker has created a helpful three-part video tutorial that teaches the basics of shooting larger products in a studio in front of a white background.
A few days ago I was lucky enough to capture Jupiter’s triple moon transit right from my driveway in Denver.
I recently made myself a DIY Spider Light as a thrifty alternative to the Spiderlite that costs hundreds of dollars. The entire project ended up costing $40 per light and can be built entirely with parts from a local home improvement store.
Last year, lighting company Profoto teamed up with New England-based wedding photographers Justin and Mary Marantz to create a series of behind-the-scenes videos showing how the duo goes about shooting a wedding from start to finish. The Walk Through a Wedding series started in February 2014 and ended in December of that year with 20 short videos.
If you've been itching to try your hand at shooting a hyperlapse video, the short and sweet video tutorial above may be a nice place to start your journey. It was made by Cal Thomson, the same guy who created the popular time-lapse tutorial that we featured earlier this month.
If you've invested any significant amount of money in your camera gear, it's a good idea to make sure it's insured against loss or damage. If you've never really explored this subject before, here's a helpful video that can bring you up to speed. It's a 13-minute overview by the folks over at DSLR Video Shooter on the best services and solutions out there for making sure your gear is insured and recoverable.
So you want to be on a book cover. Perhaps you’ve seen other photographers accomplish this but you’ve never quite known how. Maybe you walk through the stores scrutinizing and studying every book. I know I did.
Here's a tutorial that will teach you how to photograph and process one of the most colorful parts of the night sky, the Orion constellation. It will walk you through all the steps of planning, shooting, and processing a photograph of Orion and the colorful features in it.
The Ice Light is "a portable, dimmable, daylight balanced, continuous LED light source with a built in battery" that costs $450. In this post I will show you how I made a DIY version for less than $30.
Photographer Pascal Kulcsar of Mainz, Germany wanted to add some movements to his time-lapse videos, so he built himself a fancy dolly using LEGO pieces. The tiny vehicle has 6 wheels and is powered by a motor that can run for 8 hours of constant movement with regular AA batteries.
If you're a fellow fashion photographer, you have probably been in that usual situation in which you have to arrange an editorial shoot all by yourself. This can be really empowering, fun and creative... but also extremely difficult.
Looking for a simple weekend project that lets you experiment with photography? Makify created this 4-minute step-by-step tutorial on how you can create a DIY extension tube using some plastic piping to capture macro photos using your regular lens.
UK-based videographer Cal Thomson recently got into astrophotography and creating time-lapses of the starry night sky. After receiving good responses from viewers, Thomson decided to create the short and to-the-point video tutorial above on how you can create a night sky timelapse using your DSLR.
Back in 2013, Adobe began posting a series of short video tutorials on YouTube called the "Photoshop Playbook." The series has since grown to contain fifty how-to videos showing how some of the most popular and fundamental edits are done in the photo editing program.
Due to the rotation of the Earth, it appears as though the stars are moving through the sky in long exposures. Star trails can be a desired effect when done for much longer exposures, but in other cases we want points of light to represent how we see the stars with our eyes. To achieve points of light you can use a simple rule that's often called the "500 Rule".
The shutter on my old Canon 5D Mark II died while on a trip to Fiji earlier this year. It happened quickly; I was shooting a panorama when horizontal black bars started appearing in some of the shots. After about 10 more photos in between turning the camera off and on again, it was dead. The shutter was stuck closed and powering the camera on yielded a helpless sounding soft ‘clunk’ and an “Error 20″ message.
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.
How do you build a quality DIY camera slider on the cheap? Who better to ask than the founder of a slider company? In the video above, Rhino Camera Gear founder Kyle Hart shows how you can build a cheaper alternative to their pricier sliders using parts from the hardware store.
My name is Michael Pistono, and I'm a 28-year-old photo enthusiast living in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was recently playing around with a reflection photo when I had the idea of creating another one out of a puddle -- one that featured both tall buildings and an airplane.
If you have 30-minutes to spare for a tutorial, check out this one by photographer and retoucher Michael Woloszynowicz on the techniques of dodging and burning. It's an in-depth video in which he discusses 4 different approaches that photographers can take and which ones to use in which situations -- things like layer blend modes, curves adjustments, frequency separation, and layer blend-if.
If you've never picked up a rangefinder camera before and have always wondered how it differs from single-lens reflex cameras, here's a short video that may be of interest to you. In it, photographer Craig Semetko discusses the basics of rangefinder photography -- in this case he's using a Leica M -- and its advantages compared to SLRs.
Here's an interesting weekend photography project of moderate technical difficulty: the video above is a tutorial on how you can make a DIY coffee cup spy camera. The camera sees out of the cup's base and has a shutter that's triggered whenever you lift the cup and pretend to drink from it.
Did you know that your ordinary DSLR camera has the power to detect planets orbiting other stars? You don't need a high-powered telescope to look through either. All that's required is a DSLR, a telephoto lens, and a special contraption that helps your camera track stars.
Want to make a photography gift this holiday season instead of buying one? The video above offers 6 fun ideas for easy DIY photo gifts you can try your hand at. Each product is a different way to share your photography with someone.
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.
Travel photographers get to traverse the world in search of one-of-a-kind photo ops, so finding interesting things to capture usually isn't a problem for them. But what if you're limited in terms of mobility and find yourself shooting in the same locations, day after day? Things can quickly start to feel dry and "boring." …
Using an 8x10 camera requires patience, attention to detail and a whole lot of steps in between. But don't worry if you've never done it before: here to walk you, step-by-step, through the entire rewarding workflow is Tim Layton of Black and White Fine Art.
In honor of the holiday season, Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens decided it would be a wonderful idea to show the world how to photograph Christmas lights. Breaking down the task into an easy-to-follow process, this four-minute video will get you ready to go Christmas light hunting as December wears on.
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! …
I recently captured this picture of Jupiter, the 5th planet from the Sun. It was well received and many liked it. Lots of people wanted to know how to take a picture like this and what it would cost, and surprisingly I did this on a relatively low budget for astrophotography.
In astrophotography, a star tracker is a piece of gear that compensates for the Earth’s rotation so you can take sharp long exposure photographs of the night sky.
Unfortunately, not everyone can get their hands on one of these, and so we've dug up this awesome tutorial by astrophotographer Forrest Tanaka on how to capture impressive astrophotography images without a star tracker.
Product photography -- even when done with cheap gear like this awesome tutorial using an iPhone, an IKEA lamp and some flashlights -- usually involves multiple light sources. But there is a way around that, as Laya Gerlock over on DIY Photography demonstrates in this awesome tutorial titled "How to Shoot a Perfect Watch with Nothing but an iPad."
Time-lapse photography seems pretty straightforward, right? You just capture a stream of images over a designated time frame and put them together in post-production to create your video. But as simple as that may sound, there are a few basic elements to the post-processing of your images that can greatly alter what the final product will look like.
With the release of the D750, much has been made of its ability to recover shadow detail. Given the range of talents that the D750 has it is strange that this has been singled out given that the D800 and D4, released in 2012, outperform it in this regard, and the cheaper D600 (also from 2012) is able to match it at base ISO. And the old guard, the D700, D3 and D3s, weren’t too shabby at recovery either! …
Two years ago we dubbed photographer Thomas Shahan ‘the Bob Ross of bug photography.’ Today, we’re back with a video from the macro master in which he dives into his workflow in the field, dropping bits and pieces of useful knowledge as he goes through a daily shoot.
One pesky issue you may have run into with your DSLR is front-focusing or back-focusing, a problem that, in the past, required that you send your camera into a service center along with any troublesome lenses.
Although they often get overlooked in the Photoshop workflow, clipping masks can make for some very interesting effects in images. A perfect example is the work of Roderique Arisiaman, whose portraiture includes intricately overlaid designs to make for intricate, unique images.
Ian Norman, the astrophotographer behind Lonely Speck, is a good friend of the blog and an incredibly generous photographers when it comes to sharing his years worth of expertise with the world.
When it comes to correcting the distortion on fisheye lenses, most of us use the fairly standard rectilinear methods built into Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. And while that gets the job done decently well, there’s a way to go about it that will leave you with a lot less noticeable distortion and more of your image still intact.
They say the devil's in the details, and one of the most crucial details of any portrait is the eyes. You want to make sure that the eyes in your portraits are always looking the absolute best without somehow coming off as fake or enhanced.
The basic rules of composition apply to almost every visual art there is, be it photography, painting or graphic design. Whether it’s the rule of thirds or the rule of triangles, the principles overlap, leaving the educational resources for each respective art form useful across the board, not tied down to one specific field.
