Even if you rarely change your lenses, you’ll end up with some dust on your sensor. Naturally, it will be visible in your photos, and let’s face it, we normally see the sensor dust only when we’re already done shooting. Thankfully, this can be resolved in post. Although it sounds like a tedious job to remove all those little specks of dust, there’s a neat trick that will speed it up immensely....

Floor dollies are fantastic tools for giving your camera some motion when shooting video. The problem with them, though, is that you need a perfectly flat stable surface on which to use them. The slightest imperfection or bump becomes obvious and easily noticeable in your footage. This is why so many photographers and filmmakers user sliders instead. But, what if you could get that same smooth motion with a tripod?...

Advertisements In this picture, the main source of light was a suspended and “boom-armed” octabox. (You can read more about these in Chapter 2 of the Light series.) The slightly larger softbox softens the light, but also means that it does not reach that far down towards your model’s feet. However, that’s not a problem here. The background is (also) a softbox (150cm diameter) placed so that the visible, dark corners can be painted over easily in Photoshop....

We all know that digital images are made up of red, green and blue “pixels”. Often, to capture this, sensors are in some kind of side-by-side pixel array, like with Bayer and X-Trans or layered, like Foveon. But that’s not the only way to create a full colour image. Many video cameras do it with the use of a prism splitter and three separate sensors capturing red, green and blue signals which are then merged together....

The ‘90s are way behind us and thank god, so are the ‘90s super-thin eyebrows. For the past couple of years, full and well-shaped eyebrows are a beauty trend, and Aaron Nace from Phlearn will teach you how to make them look just like that in Photoshop. Aaron’s tutorial consists of three main steps: the first is drawing the shape of the eyebrows. The second step is to fill in the shape with darker color....

Making mistakes is a process of learning, and when you are new at something, you’re gonna make a lot of them. But why not avoid them if you can? In this video, Michael Sasser points to eight most common mistakes of beginner boudoir photographers. But, he also gives suggestions on how to fix them and raise your photos to a higher level. 1. Shooting on a perfect mattress You may want to photograph the model on a bed that looks all nice and tight....

Shooting with real film is the dream of many filmmakers. Often, they actually get their chance, and fall in love with it. But these days, even more so than in the past, film is very expensive. Unless one is independently wealthy or wins the lottery, it’s just not viable for every project. Simon Cade at DSLRguide has discovered this, too. Having recently started to try out Super 16 film, he knows he can’t justify the expense to use it for all his projects and ideas....

With drone cameras improving on an almost weekly basis, shooting photos with drones has become very popular. Possibly even more so than shooting video with drones. They allow us to reach vantage points that are otherwise impossible to attain. In this video, photographer Michael Shainblum goes through his process for processing photos from his DJI Phantom 4. As you can see, raw photos come out of most drones looking pretty flat....

Shooting directly into the sun whether it is sunrise or sunset often results in that some areas around the sun are clipped and we get these rather harsh edges in our sky. Even when shooting bracketed or underexposing for the highlights we may not achieve a pleasing result around the strongest light in a scene. This is the image we will use as an example: Some frost smoke and clouds diffused the light from the setting sun....

“You’re too expensive.” “My budget is not that big, can you lower the price?” “But the [random other photographer] is cheaper than you!” Sounds familiar? I believe we’ve all been there. No matter how much you charge, there will always be someone who will tell you that you’re too expensive, who will compare you to other (cheaper) photographers, and who will want to pay what they have, not what you charge....

Many photographers love using natural window light, and I must admit I’m one of them. But when the weather just isn’t cooperating, you have to rely on artificial lighting. Still, you can recreate that window light that you like, and in this video, Barry Mountford shows you how. In the video, Barry recreates a food photo that he shot in natural window light. And to get a similar result, he observes the shadows in the original image....

Photographing black products on a black background can give you elegant and dramatic shots. However, it can be tricky to separate your product from the background. In this video, Karl Taylor walks you through his process and shows you how he photographs dark products on a dark background. For his setup, it’s important to have the product separated from the background so it doesn’t blend in and create a dull shot....

You have a night off and want to spend some time at home being creative? Gab Loste has an interesting idea for shooting night neon-themed portraits, but without leaving home. All you need is some free time and the stuff you most likely already have at home. It goes without saying that you will need a camera, preferably with a fast lens. As for your light source, you will need a TV....

It’s been a while since I’ve received “The E-Mail,” so I guess it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise when it came today. I must have been living a charmed life, because it hadn’t reared its ugly head in quite a while. Yet there it was. Staring me in the face. Cursor blinking in the “reply” box as I contemplated my impending level of sarcasm. Sometimes it’s actually a phone call....

I re-invented a new photographing technique. The technique is new in the digital domain but, in fact, the phenomenon itself was known since the early era of digital photography. I don’t remember the name of the camera but I heard that digital cameras could not capture colours before the Bayer filter was invented so you had to take three shots—one for red, one for green and one for blue—and then they were merged into one photograph....

Blend If is a very useful Photoshop tool. Jesús Ramirez of Photoshop Training Channel calls it “the unsung hero,” and he wants to teach you how to use this handy feature. In his video tutorial, you’ll learn some theory about “Blend If” and how to use it to replace the sky, create special effects and apply textures in Photoshop. Introduction Jesús starts with the theoretical part, to demonstrate how the “Blend If” works....

There are a lot of ways to colour tone and grade your photos in Photoshop and although I primarily use Curves to colour tone my shots, a powerful tool that I’m starting to use more and more is the somewhat under-utilised Channel Mixer. Every couple of weeks I Live Stream via my Facebook Page and there I colour tone images submitted by my community. During the streams we often discuss techniques and lighting for a couple of hours and it’s a great place to get some free feedback and critique on your shots....

Last week, James Webb Space Telescope treated us with a magical “hourglass” of a new star formation. But good ol’ Hubble beats a new record, capturing the birth of a new star at its very earliest stage. This dreamy, ethereal image shows a small and dense cloud of gas and dust in the constellation Serpens, called CB 130-3. Such dense cores are the birthplaces of stars, so we’re definitely looking at something extraordinary here....

With the recent rise in popularity of text-to-image image generation engines, our friend Pratik Naik had a chat with one of the most popular A.I. chatbots, Open A.I. In his words, the conversation title is “I asked A.I. if humans have anything to fear when it comes to text to image A.I. generators? Here is what it said.” It was an interesting conversation, although with a somber conclusion. We are bringing this interview as is and would love to hear if you are concerned about AI or consider it as an opportunity....

Note: As of August 26, 2019, the most incredible home-built camera rig award goes tomingul’s 8-Degree-Of-Freedom robot! It takes up an entire room and can be given gcode to perform some amazing camera effects. My rig isn’t as cool, but much more mobile and simpler to build. Camera sliders are fun tools to use for making dynamic timelapse videos, and they come with some cool features. This is a clever little gadget that moves like a camera slider but folds much smaller....