It’s the holiday season and I have a few cool tips to help you upgrade your portraits of family and friends this year. I am going to show you how you can make some glorious DIY portrait backgrounds, complete with bokeh balls, from your Christmas decorations. And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, no worries, you can hit up the Dollar Store and make them from scratch for about 10 bucks....

Prisms have started to become quite a popular photography accessory in the last couple of years. Their very nature of bending and splitting light makes them ideal for getting creative with your photography. Typically, though, most photographers who’ve adopted a prism as part of their kit, use the same type. Long, triangular prisms, more commonly seen in the science classroom. But, there are lots of types of prisms, and other glass, crystal & plastic shapes that can do similar things to light....

Still photographers are officially fed up with Instagram. Every new feature that Meta introduces seems to take the app further and further away from its original premise. It was a haven for discovering other photographers and beautiful still images. However, the rise of influencer culture, advertisements, stories and video reels has led to a general dissatisfaction among users, particularly photographers. Visual artists instead are turning to alternatives, which could eventually rival Instagram if people continue to flock towards them....

As the world starts to come out of strict lockdown, people are out enjoying themselves again. For some people, enjoyment means finally heading back outside with their cameras. For others, it means harassing random people trying to shoot photos with expensive camera gear and pushing them into lakes. A video has just surfaced of an event that happened in Verulamium Park in Hertfordshire, England. An unknown man approached a female photographer while she was shooting on the edge of the lake at Verulamium Park and then pushed her right into the water along with her expensive kit, damaging it and causing bruising to her arm....

How many times have you heard, how hard can it be, all you do is press a button! I truly wish that was the case because my life would be so much easier. People think life as a creative is all fun and games. Sitting at a desk doodling, listening to music as you edit….or jet-setting around the world to conventions, networking and partying with friends. That may be true for 1% of the industry, but for the other 99% its a game of hard work and determination....

Understanding color is one of the crucial things to understand, no matter if you’re a photographer or a video creator. Understanding color theory and psychology will help you add more meaning and impact to your work. So, if you’d like to master the use of color, Joanna Kustra has an amazing video for you. Joanna is a fashion and commercial photographer whose work is largely inspired by the color and light of classical paintings....

I’m sure you’ve seen El Risitas in one of many iterations of his 2007 interview, filled with his recognizable laughter. This video turned into a meme in 2015, and a bunch of “subtitled” videos popped up on YouTube. Well, here’s finally one for photographers and other artists. In this one, El Risitas is subtitled as Picasso telling a story about the Rule of Thirds and why it sucks. The video was uploaded and subtitled by photographer Tavis Leaf Glover....

Diffraction is a topic that pops up regularly in photography and filmmaking. “Oh, you don’t want to stop your lens down all the way, you’ll get diffraction!”. But what is diffraction, how does it affect your shot, can anything be done about it and should you really even care? Macro photography expert Don Komarechka has just put out a great video for DPReview TV going into quite some depth to explain the cause of diffraction – in a very easy-to-digest way with lots of practical demonstrations – and why it makes your images softer the more you stop down your aperture....

With big chunks of the world seeing snow right now, and not being able to get out much, it’s a great time to learn how to photograph snowflakes! This video from Jens at Another Perspective walks us through the process, which you can do with even an entry-level camera. You will also need either a macro lens or some extension tubes, too. And a close-up filter like the Raynox DCR-250 shown in the video might help, too....

Buying your first camera is a big step, so if you’ve decided to take it: congrats! There is a lot of information you’ll stumble upon and it sure can be overwhelming if you’re new to photography. But this video from Jeff Rojas will give you some guidelines and ultimately help you to make up your mind about your very first camera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L02nKl36DsQ&ab_channel=JeffRojas As a professional photographer, Jeff has been getting a lot of questions from people looking into buying their first camera....

When I was in electronics class in high school, our teacher made some capacitors explode and it was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen as an excitable 14-year-old with a great interest in electronics. What really amazed me about it was just how loud some of them were given their pretty tiny size. What didn’t impress me so much was the visual aspect, given that everything was offer in an instant....

There’s been a term I’ve been hearing more and more creatives in the spaces we run in use to describe themselves: “content creator”. Even from people who work we admire and have learned from. To us, they’re people who inspire, educate, and entertain us. Both in photography and cosplay. As I kept seeing that term come up my mind kept coming back to one question: why those words exactly?...

An NFT is a Non-Fungible Token. The token refers to a digital token or certificate that is stored on a secure distributed database referred to as the blockchain. NFTs are therefore unique digital assets that can be bought and sold, with every transaction being permanently recorded in the blockchain. One way to think about NFTs is that they are like a certificate of authenticity that is permanently embedded into a database, along with any future transactions that transfer ownership....

We can argue whether it’s easier or harder for the young cinematographers today to display their work to the wide audience. No matter which point of view each of us takes, we can agree over one thing – it’s definitely very different today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. In a video by Cooke OpticsTV, some of the world’s most renowned cinematographers discuss the advantages and disadvantages of being a young cinematographer today....

The topic of “pro gear” comes up quite often. What is it? Does it make a difference? Will clients and other photographers look at you differently if you’re not using it? The short answer is “probably not”. It really just depends on whether the gear you’re using delivers the results you need. In this video, Matt Granger talks about what “pro gear” means to him, and what he believes it should mean to you....

Well, it can happen to everyone – you love the photos you took, but your client isn’t entirely pleased. What should you do when this happens? In this video, Daniel Norton discusses how to deal with this tricky situation, focusing on taking headshots in the studio and resolving the problem on the spot. Daniel talks about two different types of dislike, so to say. The first one is merely “technical,” when your client doesn’t like how the photos look....

Along with polarizers, Neutral Density (ND) filters are pretty much the only filters most people really need these days. But what are ND filters? How do they work and why might you want to use one for your photography? Put simply, though, ND filters are sort of like sunglasses for your camera to darken down the view coming through your lens. But how can they really be useful? After all, aren’t we typically looking for more light when we shoot and not less?...

If you haven’t heard anything about Artificial Intelligence (AI) recently, then you must be living off-grid somewhere in a nuclear bunker. AI has been making headlines regularly in all areas. Huge leaps in technology have been made in a relatively short space of time. The development has been staggering in just how rapid and accelerated it has been. The future is firmly looking towards AI having increased involvement in our lives, much of which will be for the better....

Nobody likes seeing dislikes on their videos, especially for smaller YouTubers just starting out. It can be very disheartening and put you off creating any more content at all. Some videos, naturally, deserve all the dislikes they receive, but many are simply the victim of trolls and haters. Well, YouTube’s been experimenting recently and they’ve decided that they’re going to start hiding the dislike count. Their theory is that more trolls will be less likely to click the dislike button if they can’t see how many have come before them, thus reducing the harassment many YouTubers receive....

To Adobe or not to Adobe. That is the question many photographers are asking with the spate of new image processing programs vying to “kill Photoshop.” I tested more than ten contenders as alternatives to Adobe’s image processing software, evaluating them for the specialized task of editing demanding nightscape images taken under the Milky Way, both for single still images and for time-lapses of the moving sky. This review expands upon and updates mini-reviews I included in my Nightscapes and Time-Lapses eBook....