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Change Up Your Photography Genre to Unlock New Creativity

As a photographer, it's easy to fall into a rut of shooting the same types of photos over and over again. Sometimes it is easy to slip into a routine once we have a good grasp of exposure and composition.

Why You Should Invest in Unique Props to Shoot Portraits That Stand Out

We live in a world where everyone has access to a camera in some form or another, and the content we create is often viewed through a phone screen. So it's no surprise that so many people have learned how to take and edit cool photos that will get them likes on Instagram.

Rule of Thirds in Photography: A Complete Guide

The rule of thirds is widely considered to be one of the most important first techniques you can learn to create better compositions and help you progress from “taking pictures” to “making photographs.”

Don’t Use iCloud for Long-Term Photo Backup

My friend Bill just returned from a family vacation in Costa Rica and shot lots of photos and videos on his iPhone, including some killer shots of breakfasts with local monkeys.

Lens Hoods Can Ruin Photos Taken in Cold Weather

Photographer Steve Perry was out photographing snowy owls with his wife when they both realized that something seemed off about their photos: they were soft. After some testing, he realized that the culprit might be his lens hood.

Look Beyond the Softbox to Spice Up Your Portrait Lighting

What kind of lighting do you use as a portrait photographer? Softboxes are great and popular, but that also makes them potentially overused and boring. If you want to spice up your portrait lighting, you can look into expanding your toolbox beyond the softbox and into other kinds of lighting.

A Bright Idea for Subject Placement in Portrait Photos

With careful composition and editing techniques, you can take your portrait game to the next level. In this video, I'll show how you can level up your portraits with this one simple tip.

A Simple Trick for Adding Drama to a Product Photo

Here's a quick tip from talented photographer, filmmaker, and YouTube star Peter McKinnon. In his latest "two-minute Tuesday" video, he showed how adding a simple overlay onto some black foam core can take a basic top-down product shot to the next level.

Creating a ‘Time-Blend’ to Enhance the Drama in Your Landscape Photography

In my last article, I wrote in depth about my emotional connection to the subjects that I photograph and my artistic process in creating imagery. As I said before, to me photography is much more than capturing a single moment in time. I want to portray the sensory experiences that I have when I am immersed in nature or wilderness and pour that into an image that tells a story related to those experiences.

3 Basic Lightroom Editing Shortcuts for Cropping Photos

Cropping is the one editing function that we pretty much apply to almost every photograph that passes through Lightroom. Effective cropping is critically important for composition, setting the mood, and even optimizing photos for sharing on social media.

How to Use Your Phone as a Tiny LED Panel for Light Painting and Portraits

Here's a simple, maybe even obvious, run-and-gun lighting tip for beginners from the YouTube Channel Run N Gun. If you find yourself using your smartphone for portrait lighting in a pinch, don't turn it around and use the flashlight—download an app or solid color image instead, and use your phone's display as a small LED panel.

How to Rebuild Lightroom Previews to Optimize Speed, Space, and Integrity

Over time, Lightroom may become slow to render thumbnails and scroll through images. Rebuilding all previews may significantly improve performance. It may also significantly reduce the size of your Lightroom catalog. Rebuilding previews also serves as a file integrity check. So what are you waiting for?

Lightroom Tip: How to ‘Stack’ as Many Spot Removal Points as You Want

The spot removal tool in Lightroom is a fast and simple method to touch up a photo and cleanup imperfections. While not as accurate or full-featured as the various touchup tools in Photoshop, sometimes you only need a simple and fast way to perform a touchup directly from Lightroom.

Old Fashioned Marketing Still Works in Wedding Photography

The Internet has been brilliant for building a platform, but it is only one pillar... Did you know that ninety percent of small businesses fail within the first two years? With very few exceptions, having one way of marketing is the quickest way to join the 90%.

Tweak Your Curves for Another Way to Save Your Highlights

Lightroom has many adjustments and in general, they work reasonably well. I bet the most widely used sliders are the Highlights and the Shadows sliders. There seems to be a general tendency to make sure that the highlights are not blown and the shadows are not blocked.

Photographers, Here’s a Quick and Free Way to Improve Your SEO

Backlinks are a pillar of SEO. As photographers, we have a unique niche in to getting backlinks. Websites need images for their pages, we have images, and some of these websites might be using your images and mentioning your business, but not linking to your website. These are called unlinked mentions, and they are some of the simplest backlinks you can get.

Simple Lightroom Trick Helps You Find Sensor Spots (or Anything Else) in Your Photos

Using Lightroom to remove spots caused by sensor dust is a pretty straight forward process: just click "Visualize Spots" and use the Spot Removal tool, right? Well, photographer Anthony Morganti thinks that he's discovered a better way, and in the video above he shows you a "hidden" Lightroom trick that makes it easy to systematically search your images for sensor spots... or anything else for that matter.

Macro Photography Trick: Create ‘Rainbow Flares’ with a CD

The glorious colors of summer are fading away, and the windy weather makes outdoor macro photography difficult. In other words, it’s the perfect time to take photography inside and stage creative photos with things around the house.

How to Double the Resolution of Your Smartphone Photos

"Super-resolution" and "pixel-shift" photography isn't just possible if you have a fancy camera that can move the sensor 1 pixel between shots. As Usman Dawood of Sonder Creative demonstrates in this video, you can even do it with your run-of-the-mill smartphone, shooting hand-held.

How to Trick Instagram’s Algorithm for Higher Engagement (Maybe)

In mid-2016, Instagram started using an algorithm to order the photos you're shown, which was a big change from the simple chronological feed that had been used since the beginning. If you're not happy with the reach and engagement your photos on getting on Instagram, there's a rumored trick you may want to try.

Do NOT Use this ‘Hack’ to Change Lenses on Your Nikon Z6 and Z7

A video has been making the rounds this week that shows a "hack" for locking down the shutter mechanism while changing lenses on Nikon's full-frame mirrorless Z6 and Z7 cameras. Basically, you remove the battery while the camera is on, causing an error, and change lenses after that. Do NOT do this.

In Street Photography, Shoot, Shoot, Shoot — Better a Fast Shot Than None

I mess up most of my street photography shots: too far away, background cluttered, subjects not well aligned, subject matter not interesting enough, or simply technically flawed. The Murphy’s Law of street photography: “If you can mess up a street shot, chances are you will.”

Portrait Mode: The End of Compact Cameras?

It seems like having dual cameras on your phone has become almost the norm nowadays, but many people don’t even know that they are there, let alone why. However, I believe that Portrait Mode is an incredible tool for the modern photographer to promote themselves -- particularly on Instagram.