This landscape image has most of the ingredients that can make it a great photograph. It has a clear subject and focal point, the lighting is great, and a nice edit and mood, but… don’t you have the feeling that there is something off, and at the same time you can’t really tell what it is?
Negative space in photography, design, sculpture, or any other creative pursuit is equally as important as is positive space in overall composition.
I recently discussed the rule of thirds and leading lines in photography. In this article, I'll cover symmetry and include some of my own symmetry photography examples to illustrate this.
Photography is all about light. To be more precise, photography is all about the quality of the light. This can be a particular challenge for outdoor/landscape photographers.
I am always looking for new and easy ways to light part of an object or create interesting light in an image, and I think I have found the perfect tool for just that and so much more! Pixapro's Optical Snoot has opened up a more efficient way to be able to do this.
If you have a fast and expensive lens, it may feel like a waste to shoot portraits stopped down to f/8, f/11, or f/16. But in this 20-minute video, photographer Miguel Quiles explains why he often opts to shoot stopped down instead of wide open for increased depth of field and finer details and textures.
Last month, the Chinese lighting brand Godox teased an innovative new product called the A1 that serves as both a wireless, off-camera flash/light for smartphones as well as a transmitter for triggering other off-camera flashes. Now new sample photos have emerged to show what this smartphone flash system can actually do.
Ever since I decided to start learning photography, I’ve been looking for a good catalog of composition ideas. Once you figure out the mechanics of how a DSLR works, getting good at the composition of your photos seems to be the 80/20 of rapidly improving at photography.
My name is Alex Brock, and I'm a photo enthusiast living in South Florida. I spent many nights last summer chasing storms through swamps and along the beach attempting to learn to shoot lightning, and I'd like to share some things I learned to help others who are starting out.
Raymond Thi—the creator of the Composition Cam app and ultra-popular Twitter account—is back with another great database for composition-obsessed photographers. It's called Geometric Shots, and it's a searchable collection of great composition from well-known films and TV shows.
Tetyana Dyachenko is a Ukrainian photo retoucher who often does restorations of vintage photos that are extremely damaged -- often seemingly beyond recovery. Yet using her Photoshop skills, Dyachenko is able to recover (and recreate) extremely fine details in the photos.
Here's a video that's going viral on the Web right now: Korean YouTuber MichealHrd shared this short video showing the power of a 200x camera zoom. You can zoom in on an airplane cruising by overhead and read the name of the airline on the side.
The Dutch Angle (or Dutch Tilt) is a technique that involves tilting your camera to one side, resulting in a frame that isn't level. Jacob T. Swinney of Fandor created this 3-minute compilation video showing the technique being used in a large number of movies.
Mastering composition is the best way to get more keepers in your street photography. That makes sense, right? If you know how to make a visually pleasing image, then you can discipline yourself to capture the remarkable photos that tell a story.
As a product photographer, I've always had a problem with finding what to use as a background. Even more so when I need to go to my client to shoot their products.
Before, I was limited to shooting on a black granite tile. Then I added some do-it-yourself wood planks into my props collection, but carrying the wood planks was a big problem, as they were too heavy and I could only limit myself to about 2 wood planks per shoot.
My name is David Weightman, and I do wedding photography as Married to My Camera. As my brand name suggests, I’m rather attached to one camera! Due to the documentary style of wedding photography I practice, I feel it’s more important that I know my camera inside out, rather than upgrade constantly to the latest model on the market.
I put being able to react quickly and “get the shot” above all else. Having said that, last year I decided to add the Sony Alpha a7S to my bag (or should I say hip). I’m still shooting with an SLR, but when I began to research the Sony mirrorless system I found that there were a number of features that would allow me to shoot where I had so far been struggling with the SLR.
Nikon surprised the photo industry yesterday by announcing its very first action camera, the KeyMission 360, which shoots 360° photos and videos in 4K resolution. Now the company has released a set of first 360-degree interactive videos on YouTube to show what the camera can do.
Composition can make or break a photograph. This is why it's important to understand it and know how to effectively and creatively use it. In essence, composition describes the position of relative elements in a photograph. A strong composition will tend to have leading lines that draw attention to your subject: these can be horizontal, vertical or diagonal lines depending on the placement of your subject in the frame.
Street photographers Chuck Jines and Keenan Hastings both uploaded videos this week showing confrontations they had while shooting on the street -- Jines in New Orleans and Hastings in Detroit. They both came across strangers who didn't appreciate their photo being made, but Jines and Hastings had two very different ways of dealing with the situation.
I took a trip to Iceland this past March, but weather wasn't the greatest while I was there. We encountered a few blizzards, and I took some photos to see what I could recover from them. Adobe recently announced a Dehaze tool for Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC, and I wanted to know how well it could recover image data from a blizzard -- which could be considered be an extreme version of haze. After trying the slider on my images, I'm very impressed!
A while back I got my hands on my first tilt-shift lens. Since then I have carried it with me nearly every day, grocery shopping and subway riding – you name it. It’s quite a special and fascinating piece of glass even having aged 43 years.
Here's a great video on photographic composition, created by The Cooperative of Photography using tips and photographs by legendary photojournalist Steve McCurry. Each of the 9 composition tips is illustrated with examples from McCurry's impressive body of work.
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.
Leave it to none other than award-winning wedding photographer Ryan Brenizer to create a wonderful breakdown on how best to approach engagement photography. In this eight and a half minute video created by B&H Photo, Brenizer does an incredible job of running through all of the critical aspects of planning for and going through with an engagement shoot.
You’ve probably heard before that focal lengths between 85mm and 135mm produce the best head shots because …
One of huge benefits of shooting in RAW is that RAW files usually have considerably more dynamic range than a JPG. This means that details in the shadows and highlights of an image that would otherwise be lost if shooting JPG are stored in the RAW file, and able to be recovered if needed during post-processing.
If you’re looking into buying a certain lens, you might be interested in seeing what kind of photography other …
Pentax has just released five full resolution photographs taken with their new medium format DSLR, the Pentax …
My college friends and I used to enjoy taking group portraits in and around the Berkeley campus. Here’s one such …
Here’s a photograph I took today while hiking with friends on the Bailey Cove Trailhead in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest: …