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.
Almost every smartphone camera comes with a dedicated panorama mode nowadays. Normally, this mode is used to capture large areas in a single image. However, its true abilities are only limited by your imagination.
A few days ago we shared a handy tutorial on how to properly light and capture a professional product shot of bottle, complete with a few neat 'tricks' that professional product photographers use to get the right look.
Well, if you were craving more tips and tricks like that, then this video by Tony Roslund is the perfect followup.
Looking for a personalized photo-related gag to pull for Halloween this year? Look no further than this head-in-a-jar prank. It's quite easy to pull off and doesn't require too much time or money.
Have you ever wondered how those beautiful beer bottle ads in magazines are shot? Product photography is one of the more complicated genres out there, packed full of neat 'tricks of the trade' and lighting techniques. And if you wanna learn a few of them, this beer bottle product photo tutorial is a great place to start.
Love carving Jack O' Lanterns? Hate the mess? No problem. We are photographers after all, which means we don't need to actually go out and DO things like this... we can just 'fix it in post.' Jokes aside, this short and simple tutorial will show you how to carve a simple Jack O' Lantern entirely inside of Photoshop.
While not all of our photographs end up being printed and framed, it helps to possess the knowledge of what it takes to properly hang them when they are. Here to help is this handy, not-so-little infographic that runs through a number of situations that you might come across when looking to adorn your wall with a photograph.
For part two of Shanks FX’s Back to the Future series, the DIY Special Effects artist decided to show you how to use forced perspective in your photography, using a model version the iconic Delorean from the cult classic films as an example.
Ever since I’ve owned a camera I’ve wanted to take photos of the night sky. When I first got a DSLR camera 5 or so years ago I thought getting decent shots wasn’t very likely with the inexpensive gear I had and it was something best left to the pros. It was only after I became comfortable with the manual mode on my camera that I realized that shooting at night was completely doable.
Have you ever heard of the ‘donut selfie’? Probably not since it was just 'debuted' today, but it's actually pretty neat. A donut selfie is an interesting take on the video selfie that uses a panoramic technique to create a perpetual, seamless selfie across multiple locations.
Most tutorials tend to focus on one small aspect of the photographic process -- be it tweaking a minor adjustment such as white balance or showing you how to properly sharpen an image -- but this Lightroom 4 QuickStart tutorial goes way beyond this.
It, instead, opts for a more comprehensive approach, showing you how to properly edit almost any landscape image from beginning to end.
‘Where to Start Chart’ is an infographic designed to help beginner photographers work their way through the settings on their camera. Produced by Adorama TV, the PDF is reminiscent of the "skill trees" found in various role playing video games, but instead of having spells and skills, the tree offers photographic tutorials.
There are a seemingly infinite number of videos that walk you through retouching a portrait from beginning to end; however, most of them are based in Photoshop, Lightroom and -- once upon a time -- Aperture. This leaves the less-used but robust Capture One Pro out of the game.
While many of us leave it up to the labs to print and mount our photographs, there are those who would like to try their own hand at it. For those more adventurous folks, Tony Roslund has put together a video tutorial that walks you through the process of printing and framing your own photographs from start to finish.
One of the best kept secrets within the fashion and beauty photography is the way to obtain absolutely perfect and flawless skin colors, brightness and texture. That’s an art, absolutely, and often a quite technical challenge.
Reflectors are one of the most affordable pieces of gear a photographer can have in their bag. They’re not only small in size (and usually foldable), they're also versatile and provide benefits when using both natural and artificial light.
Photographer Trevor Dayley has put together a very handy little tutorial to give your photographs that extra ‘pop’ of color in Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW without going overboard.
Karl Taylor has shared a new video highlighting just how important and impactful proper lighting can be no matter what camera you choose to use. In the anecdotal video, shown above, he pits a Canon 5D Mark III against an Olympus OM-D E-M10 in the studio to show you just how similar the results are when the lighting, not the camera, is the focus of the image.
There's no shortage of methods for creating the partially animated photographs we call cinemagraphs; however, if simplicity and minimal effort is what you’re looking for in cinemagraph creation, the above tutorial by Howard Pinsky is just what you’ve been looking for.
When it comes to the quantity of lights that one needs, opinions are often heavily polarized and a hotly contested debate often rages. There are those that are staunch supporters of one light while others claim that a handful of lights are needed before anything meaningful can be done. Ultimately neither group is right as there is no definable minimum or maximum number of lights that one should use.
People often tell me that they find it difficult to take good portrait photos when they travel. Approaching strangers and asking to photograph them, usually with a language barrier, can be a daunting prospect. And how do you take a portrait that is creative and meaningful rather than just a simple snapshot of the person? I have developed approaches and techniques over the years to help become confident as a travel portrait photographer.
“Until the 20th century, 'reality' was everything humans could touch, smell, see and hear. Since the initial publication of the chartered electromagnetic spectrum... humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see and hear is less than one millionth of reality.”
In this tutorial I’ll show you how I use a standard 50mm prime lens to make medium format sized astrophotos with a regular small format camera.
Duct tape can often be a photographer's best friend. Cable management can often be a nightmare. The two don't naturally combine very well though, since duct tape can leave sticky reside on your cords after its removed.
Focus stacking is a fairly common technique used in the world of macro photography, but the process of focus stacking isn’t always a straightforward one. Sure, certain programs can automatically achieve a result for you, but when you’re looking for much more control, getting it done by other means is sometimes a necessity.
If you're thinking about adding a video component to your portfolio, one of the most important-but-confusing things you'll have to wrap your head around is codecs -- the different video compression/decompression formats available to you. These not only determine the quality retained by the camera, but also affect how you will approach the post-processing of the footage.
Really want to get the most out of your new GoPro? You're in luck, because GoPro recently turned to their own in-house production team and asked them to create a series of tutorials called the GoPro Field Guide.
Author’s note: The below video contains no explicit nudity, but may still be considered NSFW by some -- proceed with caution.
We’ve shared some pretty awesome DIY cameras with you in the past, and today we've run across one of the most impressive to date.
If you've been toying around with time-lapse photography and want try the next logical evolution, or if you simply want a fun photography project for the weekend, this quick hyperlapse how-to from the fun folks over at DigitalRevTV has you covered. (Warning: Some strong language)
Here is a photograph of a Sydney funnel-web spider, Atrax robustus.
Facebook may not be your main photo storage solution (at least we hope it's not), but knowing how to download a backup of all the photos and videos you've uploaded to and shared through the service is still a useful skill to keep tucked away in your Internet toolbox.
A common technique used in still astrophotography is the creation of startrails, a method by which a photographer overlays multiple long-exposure shots of the stars to create a weaving of constellations. But, as time-lapse photograph and astrophotography have merged in a fairly recent trend, a number of artists have been bringing the idea of startrails to motion-picture, creating what many refer to as ‘vortex startrails.’
There are times when capturing portraits that you’ll notice the skin tone of the subject varies between their face and their body. It’s a rather common occurrence and by no means out of the ordinary. Caused by a number of factors, including makeup, tan, skin quality, lighting quality, etc.
The video above is not for the faint of heart. Heck, even the not-so-faint of heart will probably have trouble with it. A FAKE (not sure how much more we could emphasize this) tutorial, it shows you 'how to clean your 5D Mark II and lens' ... and by clean we mean destroy.
As timelapses become more and more ubiquitous throughout the photography and filmmaking community, people are continuously looking for unique ways to stand out and separate their work from that of others. One such trick that many use in their creation is a little effect often referred to as dolly zoom or vertigo effect.
The guys over at HouseholdHacker have come up with and shared a cheap product photography trick that's incredibly simple but yields awesome results. And all you need to take advantage of it is some sort of reflective surface (they used a glossy black trashcan...), a computer monitor, and a smartphone camera!
Noise reduction, much like sharpening, is one of those post-processing tools that is often overused or used improperly, yielding terrible results. But as Bryan O'Neill Hughes shows you in the video above, tackling noise in Photoshop can be both easy and effective just as long as you know what you're doing.
A couple of days ago, we republished a short tutorial by talented photographer Justin Ng that explained how he uses the Expose To The Right (ETTR) method to capture milky way photos in the heavy light pollution of Singapore.
When it comes to photographing the elusive Milky Way in one of the most light-polluted major cities like Singapore, timing is critical. Most of the faint details will be washed out by the extreme light pollution and if we were to shoot the Milky Way under unfavorable atmospheric conditions, our attempt would be futile.
Landscape photographer Tim Cooper is a name we just recently shared with you. Today, we’re sharing his work with you again, this time in the form of a presentation he shared at a B&H event earlier this year. In it, he gives a detailed look at the world of macro photography.
It’s not news that RAW files have a far greater latitude than the same JPEG photographs. However, many beginners only understand this difference on a theoretical level.
Do you suck at Photoshop? No? Well, Donnie Hoyle seems to think so, which is why he put together this wonderful resource detailing how to properly use the clone stamp and manual cloning tools in Photoshop. (Warning: There is some strong language in the video)
One of the rising stars in the world of photography media is the show The Art of Photography, a podcast on iTunes and a channel on YouTube. It was launched by photographer Ted Forbes back in October 2008, and has been growing in popularity quite a bit as of late -- so much so that the channel has become a full-time gig for Forbes.
When it comes to macro photography, knowing how to properly focus stack your images can make a massive difference. To that end, the walkthrough above and Photoshop tutorial below offer a fantastic explanation of what focus stacking is, why and when you should be using it, and how to do it using software most of us already have installed and ready to go.
While double-exposure photography all started in-camera – most likely by accident – it’s since become an actual style and genre of photography all its own. And while it can still be done in-camera through film or a number of DSLRs that offer the capabilities, it can also be done in Photoshop. Here to show us how is wedding photographer Andrew Klokow, with a quick and efficient workflow for nailing double-exposures in post-production.
For landscape photographers, getting your entire scene in focus while keeping things as sharp as possible at the same time can be a challenge.
Over the years, Adobe has made image editing programs like Photoshop and Camera Raw much more intuitive and easy to use so that it's not quite so intimidating for beginners to dive in, but one of the adjustments that still scares many first timers is Curves.
Last week, the BBC College of Journalism opened up their training website to the public. Full of educational resources created by and for the internal BBC team, these professional videos and guides run through a number of circumstances and suggestions for approaching visual journalism.
The team over at COOPH today shared an insightful video that describes 7 DIY photography tips that use nothing more than items you have lying around the house. From can koozies to tights, a number of unusual household products make a cameo and help you add a unique, homemade element to your photo game.
