Walkthroughs

I recently converted my friend's Durst Laborator 1200 enlarger to use LED lights. In this article I'll share how I did it.

MAYA is a darkroom timer project that was born out of necessity when my old darkroom timer had started to malfunction. It has become a pretty successful crowdfunding campaign so far, exceeding 300% of its initial goal with a few days left to go.

I am a fan of light (honestly what photographer isn’t?). Hard light; reflected light; dappled light; low-key light; colored light -- I love it all. Light makes or breaks not only my images but my mood. I’d venture to say that light is sandwiched between “belonging” and “safety” on my hierarchical pyramid of needs.

Can an ordinary person made a camera lens from scratch? Here's a 22-minute video in which Andy George of How To Make Everything answers that question by producing clear glass and metal and combining them to create a camera lens.

If you don't watch entertainment industry awards shows, perhaps you've never heard of E!'s Glambot, which has been hitting the red carpets at major shows (e.g. Oscars, Grammys, Emmys) to shoot stunning 1000fps slow-motion portraits of celebrities.

I was often disappointed by my Canon 5D Mark II not having a flipping or better yet a detachable monitor. Instances of this happened when I placed the camera on a fully extended tripod and had the camera pointed downwards to make a photograph of something on the floor. Getting one’s eye above the view screen was sometimes impossible.

If you've followed Tennessee basketball, chances are you've seen one of those really cool overhead photos. That top-down, bird's eye view is something you don't see every day, and only very few have access to capturing this unique angle.

Seeing spots in your photos? Your camera's sensor might need a cleaning. If you'd like to go a do-it-yourself route and beyond a simple bulb blower, Michael The Maven made this 13-minute video walkthrough on how you can go about cleaning a mirrorless camera sensor.

Photography. It’s expensive. And who really has the money to buy all the name brand photo gear? I certainly don’t. With that said, expensive equipment does NOT make the photograph -- the photographer does, which is why I am exploring various non-photography-specific gear and using it for my photography.

It has been said that meat consumption should decrease by 90% in the West if we want to avoid dangerous climate warming. And because all of us should be involved to achieve this goal, I of course decided to invite zombies to join in the effort of combating climate change.

After I saw an ad on Facebook about an upcoming Best Buy photography workshop, I got the idea to attend it, and I thought other photographers would be interested in the experience, too. I signed up, paid the $50 to attend the workshop, and got an email confirming my registration.

Long-term projects can be one of the most frustrating creative pursuits for a number of reasons. There is a large investment of time, obviously, but there can also be the uncertainty of where a story goes as you watch it unfold over years, while constantly adjusting and readjusting the scope of the issues you want to deal with in your stories.

Apple recently released a new series of ads for the iPad Pro that shows how the tablet computer opens the doors to new ways of doing things. What's neat is that Apple is "eating its own dog food": as the 2-minute behind-the-scenes video above reveals, the ads were shot, edited, animated, designed, and composed entirely on the iPad Pro.

I got my first 3D printer recently, but it sits in a dark corner of my room, so I thought I'd design a light for it. Then I realized I could kill two birds with one stone and design it to be useful for photography as well.

I’m always looking to find new ways to incorporate larger goals into my photography. I find it focuses my approach to the way I treat it as a career and a hobby. By dedicating myself to projects outside of things relevant to my life, I am able to explore potential new ways of seeing and interacting the world through my camera. Something I’ve always been interested in is the idea of photography collectives; a group of visual artists with shared philosophies, spaces, and resources.

“Do you have 9 lights?” The account manager at Oakland University asked me. Somewhat inspired by a Queen album cover, he was looking to create an image where 9 award-winning students stood out in a dramatized version of a newly renovated space on campus. While I understood the goal of the session, I immediately knew rigging 9 lights up would be nearly impossible while showing such a vast space. I told him that it may take some time, but I could get it done with just 2 lights.

In this article, I am going to dissect how I took an image from both a technical and narrative standpoint. I hope this gives you some ideas for your own photography.

The Auckland, New Zealand police department posted this interesting 9-minute behind-the-scenes video that shows a day in the life of a Kiwi Police Photographer.

Want to see how Leica does its official digital camera sensor cleanings? Here's a 20-minute video that steps through the process.

How do you go about shooting one of the rarest sports cars in the world? Here's a 17-minute tutorial in which automotive photographer Mike D'Ambrosio shares the 5 steps of his "night flare" style while shooting a $2.75 million Maserati MC12.

In our hallway, we have some family portraits of our kids, but the portraits were taken some years ago -- time for some new ones! But we would also like to hang the portraits of their partners. The previous portraits were color portraits, and this time I would like to do some black and whites. So the challenge is taking seven portraits, each with the same look and feel. This is how I did it.

This past month, a student showed me an Instagram post with floating scrabble letters and asked me how it was done. After a few moments of reflection, I decided there was a number of ways to photograph floating letters and it would be a great idea for a student lab. To explore different techniques would be a great lab. The students evaluated the techniques to see which was best for creating floating letters.

After our flight to NYC got canceled last summer, we got stuck in Chicago for one night with no light painting tubes, no dress, no tripods, and no battery chargers. During the shuttle ride to the hotel, we started joking about using a bed sheet to fake a dress and to use whatever we could find in the hotel room as a light-painting tool.

One of the earliest ways of creating color photos was by combining black-and-white photos shot using red, green, and blue filters. Matt Gray recently decided to use this technique to shoot color photos using his Game Boy Camera.

In this article, I'll share how I created a photo art piece titled, "Flying Whales." The idea was to create surreal artwork using only toys and some handcraft and make it as real as possible.

What do you get when you combine a pixelstick with a drone? Makers Ivan Miranda and Tom Stanton recently decided to show all of us by creating a custom light stick drone that can be used to shoot light-painting photos in the sky.

How do you go about creating photos of a person on fire without actually setting someone on fire? Through creative planning, photography, and retouching -- and sacrificing the well-being of some mannequins.

I've been using some version of "street" photography as practice and exercise for all areas of my photography since I started taking it seriously in 2015, but I've never been as focused and regimented about honing my approach to street photography every day as I have been since the start of 2018, when I decided to give myself an entire year to "make it" as a photographer.

I recently tested the Nikon D850 with some of the world’s rare and exotic plants at the world-famous Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens outside Los Angeles.