I pretty sure most of us have an old DVD player lying around and collecting dust. I know I do. Well, if you want to repurpose the outdated, broken or unused DVD player, photographer Raj Khepar will show you how to use one of its parts and make a DIY macro lens for your smartphone. The project is pretty simple and dirt cheap. You’ll need the DVD player, some adhesive putty, and a screwdriver....

There’s a lot of DIY solutions out there for big diffusers, and such. Most of them with either wooden or PVC pipe frame. While PVC pipe is certainly lighter than wood, it’s rather flexible, and are still kinda bulky if you need several of them. In the studio, this isn’t usually a problem. But, if you need to get them out on location, you often need them to be as light as possible and take up little room....

Last year I read a book that alarmingly told me that if I lived to an average age of around 80 years, I probably only had around 2000 weeks left. Cue panic: 2000 weeks doesn’t sound like a lot to achieve my goals and live my best life. One of those goals, of course, is to have a thriving photography business and let’s say that it is anything but thriving at the moment....

Creating custom bokeh for lenses is something many of us try at some point. Even if it’s not something we’re ever going to do again, it’s fun to have a go at least once. We’ve mentioned the technique on the site a few times before. But, different lenses will render out of focus areas differently. The balls of blur will be difference sizes. So, how do you know what size hole to cut?...

Film’s resurgence in the last few years has left many analogue photographers with something of a problem, particularly if they want to shoot medium format film. That’s the lack of scanners on the market capable of scanning film compared to 20 or even 10 years ago. Sure, there are some out there that can do medium and even large format but they’re often prohibitively expensive. So, photographer Christian Chapman decided to have a go at modifying his Plustek 8100 – a scanner designed for 35mm film – to make it scan medium format 120 roll film....

Truth be told, practice — not purchase — makes perfect. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, said it best: The more you know, the less you need. Brand after brand, I bought into the cycle of consumerism, with my camera kit growing steadily. I had it all. My burgeoning arsenal sure made me look the part but paralysed by choice, my shooting experience actually started to suffer. The more you have, the more choices you have, and this is the fundamental flaw in the cycle of more, and more....

There’s only a couple of days left now until Halloween, but there’s still time to do a spooky horror photo shoot. And, why does it have to be during Halloween anyway? Any time is good for a bit of horror! In this video, Gavin Hoey shows us some great tips and techniques to light and shoot horror in a small home studio. Gavin’s name isn’t one you’d typically associate with creepy or spooky photo shoots....

Lightroom, Photoshop and many other editing programs come with many color enhancing tools. In this brief article, we will have a look at the color enhancing techniques I apply frequently and which can be carried out very swiftly in Lightroom. The HSL section in Lightroom may cause transition lines between colors (a.k.a. banding). This technique, however, won’t leave any harsh transition lines. My favorite time to shoot is during the golden hour....

More often than not, you’ll find yourself in a location that’s far from ideal for taking photos. But you should embrace the challenge and turn that challenging location into a great shooting spot. In his latest video, Taylor Jackson shares some inspiration and tips for doing this. Taylor teamed up with Clarissa Diokno to take some shots at a pizza place. They changed three locations around that same place, each of them being more challenging than the other....

If you want to draw more attention to the subject in your photo, proper post-processing is certainly one of the ways. Blake Rudis of f64 Academy shows you a pretty useful trick to achieve this in Photoshop. You can use radial gradients to create a kind of a “spotlight” and draw your viewers’ attention exactly where you want it to go. You can use it on all kinds of photos, no matter if your subject is a person or an object....

So there are a couple of different ways to use drones to light paint. Some people will attach Lumecubes to their drone and paint an environment with them or will fly a drone around the sky or an object and have the drones lights creating images in the sky. However, there is another way to use them that isn’t widely used yet. That is using the drone’s camera to capture light painting from above....

Shooting on location with flash is one of the fun parts of portrait photography for me. But, depending on the lighting conditions where you’re shooting, your flash may not be putting out the same colour as the ambient light. This means that while your subject may appear perfect, the environment can appear very cool or warm. In this video, photographer Robert Hall explains the problem how it happens. It’s an easy problem to fix, all you need is a few gels, and Robert shows us how....

“Everyone’s a photographer nowadays.” How many times have you heard this phrase? This video from Erik Wahlstrom addresses it, and deals with one question I’ve been thinking a lot – in this era when photography’s so available, what makes a photographer? If “everyone is a photographer,” is anyone? This question has been on my mind a lot, and I never came up with a straightforward answer. I’m sure I’m a person some photographers would scoff at and say the phrase above....

Insta360 has updated its line of affordable phone-friendly 360 cameras with the new Insta360 Nano S. It sees some rather significant upgrades over the original Nano that all look pretty exciting for iPhone owners. The Nano S is the same form factor as the original but beefs up that 3K video & 4.6MP stills to 4K 360° video and a massive 20 megapixel photos. Announced at CES 2018, the new Nano S offers some very cool new features including 360 facetime style video chat, as well as picture-in-picture & multiview modes to shoot flat 2D video clips comprised of multiple angles....

Now that Instagram has transformed into a short-form video platform geared towards creators and influencers looking to go viral, where do we hobbyists and enthusiasts share our photos and find other photographers? It’s not Flickr: the user base isn’t mainstream enough. It’s not Twitter either: that’s mostly topical posts like news and opinion. Discord isn’t really a social network, but a group chat. And Facebook is a joke. It’s Tumblr....

Instagram has just launched Threads, a new standalone messaging app. Just like sharing Stories and messages only with the people on your Close Friends list, it allows you to focus only on those you really care about. But it’s made to help you communicate with your friends more throughout the day. Perhaps a bit too much. Threads is a messaging app designed to share photos, videos, messages, Stories, and more only with your Close Friends list from Instagram....

After testing a new “Recommended for You” feature, Instagram is now rolling it out globally. From now on, Instagram’s algorithm will pick the posts you might like, and they’ll be in your feed even though you don’t follow these accounts. As Tech Crunch writes, this feature is similar to the Explore Feed feature on Facebook. Well, at least to Explore Feed in some countries, as it works differently in the others....

It’s not really a secret that Facebook wants Snapchat. They offered to buy them, and Snapchat refused. So, now Facebook seem to be working as hard as they can to introduce Snapchat-like features into all of their platforms. It started with Instagram adding basic stories, which then spread to Facebook and WhatsApp. Every new version seems to add a little something extra that Snapchat users will be familiar with. Now, no surprise, facial filters have finally come to Instagram....

After announcing “Usage Insights,” Instagram is now testing yet another feature that can potentially be a wake-up call for those spending too much time on the app. As you browse through the feed, the app will notify you when you’re all caught up with new posts. This way you’ll know that there’s nothing new left to see, so you can stop scrolling and go do something meaningful. Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s currently testing the latest feature....

When I first came across this, it sounded a little far fetched. And it’s not a dig at how good or bad the iPhone 7 Plus waterproofing is. Apple don’t claim that it is waterproof. Simply splash proof, and that it can survive immersion in water up to one meter for short periods. So, it shouldn’t die if you drop it in a puddle or down the toilet. Tests on YouTube have revealed that it actually seems to handle things fairly well, all things considered....