Home Studio Photography compiles an invaluable collection of tutorials, quick tips and step by step instructions to building your own home studio on a shoestring budget. Not only is this book a goldmine for the starving student, the skills it teaches are valuable for any photographer who wants to spend their money wisely, or needs to modify the light when they haven’t got exactly the gear they need with them at the time....

Photographers of all genres face many challenges and misconceptions about their job. In this video, Pye Jirsa of SLR Lounge shares seven common challenges you may have faced during your career, as well as some misconceptions people usually connect with wedding photography. Have you faced them too? 1.Using watermarks Watermarks are good and you should use them. However, don’t use giant watermarks to prevent people from stealing your photos. First of all, wedding photos are not the type of images people would want to steal....

Back in June I covered Fortarock, a fantastic metal festival in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I had the opportunity to shoot bands like Dragonforce, Watain, Týr, Alestorm and Arch Enemy, all of whom are not only really fun to photograph, but also extremely talented musicians. [This article was originally published on Metal Blast.] This being the Netherlands, shooting the festival also meant dealing with quite a bit of rain, particularly during the first day....

A lot of us analog film photographers love to shoot film but new film stocks can be pricey. A 100ft roll (30meters) of fresh Tmax is about $80 US these days. Deals can be had on “vintage” (expired) film but many purists will disregard this as results are inconsistent and sometimes just awful. I teach on the side and I am always looking to save student monies but give them a positive experience so there is no discouragement....

Advertisements Camera Gear List Camera: Canon Eos 6DLens: Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 EX DG Lighting Gear List Main Light: One Octabox 120cm with a Phottix Indra500 TTL Lamphead insideRim Light: Two Bare Phottix Mitros PlusePhottix Odin TTL Flash Trigger I’m a big fan of getting things right in camera- this is not something I want to add in post later, so each element was carefully fabricated to achieve a sort of visual cohesion throughout each layer of the photo....

Now and again we get to play around with cool equipment that we wouldn’t normally use. I got my hands on the spiffy Lightblaster and managed to create a cool neon 80s sci-fi image which wasn’t as hard as it may sound.Advertisements As you can see from the video above on my Youtube (feel free to subscribe for more walkthroughs and tutorials) that most of the work was done beforehand in camera, using one light blaster and one gelled octa box....

This isn’t a project for the little home studio in your spare bedroom, but if you’re looking to build out a new studio space, this might be just the video for you. When the folks at Syrp moved into new offices a couple of years ago, they wanted to build out a new studio. High on the list for the studio was a cyc wall (also known as a cyclorama, infinity wall, or various other names)....

If you’ve been in this for a while, now may be a good time to consider upgrading to a professional monitor. In the end, a better monitor will get you more accurate results, a more convenient workflow, and less eye fatigue. But, like any piece of pro gear, diving into all the features and buzzwords of a pro monitor can be pretty confusing. We asked Kevin Cheng, the marketing director of ViewSonic UK, what we should look for in a pro monitor....

Colour grading tends to specifically refer to the colouring of video and in photography, we often refer to this as colour toning, but whatever you’re happier calling it, this process of making a conscious decision to apply a specific colour-look to an image in post-production is an incredibly powerful tool. But although not particularly tricky to do, colour toning and grading is complex simply due to its incredibly subjective nature....

I feel one of the best ways to stay inspired and motivated with your photography is to focus on a project. To take lots of random photos of anything and everything often leads to a body of work that is cluttered, un-focused, and uninteresting. In this article I will share some of my personal thoughts on how you can create your own photography project idea. Why a “personal” project? There are billions of photographs out there and millions of photographers....

Whether you’ve been shooting for five minutes or five years, there will come a time when you’ll have to book a shoot with another person. Maybe it will be a friend or coworker and maybe it will be a full-time professional model. Whoever you’re contacting though, they’ll need to know some fundamental facts about what’s involved in your shoot before they agree to be involved. In this article I discuss some of the key things you should include when contacting and booking a model....

Tripod threads in the bottom of cameras and other devices are usually pretty solid. I’ve got cameras that are decades old that still have perfectly functional ones. But, I’ve also had a couple of adapters and gadgets where they haven’t survived so well. Quality control isn’t what it once was, and the number of devices containing 1/4-20″ sockets has soared compared to only a few years ago. So, failures are far more likely these days....

In his previous tutorial, Malaysian photographer Andrew Boey showed you why a white wall is the only backdrop you’ll ever need. After turning white to black, in his latest tutorial, he teaches you to get all kinds of vibrant colors from a plain white wall. You don’t need a backdrop or Photoshop, but some speedlights, light modifiers and color gels. Andrew and his model Nadeen demonstrate the turning of a white wall in a background that can take any color you like....

Advertisements So, on with the tutorial. Make sure you have done any skin retouching needed first. Next create 3 channel mixer adjustment layers. Now on each channel mixer adjustment layer click the monochrome box. Once that is done. Click on the bottom channel mixer layer. Leave its blend mode on normal, but lower the opacity to 35%. Select the middel Channel mixer layer, and change the blend mode to screen....

Street photography is one of the more chaotic yet fun genres of photography that many people choose to pursue. Even if it’s not something that people do regularly, it’s something that many of us do anyway when we go on vacation as just a regular part of documenting our trip. But how do we optimise our camera for this sort of shooting if we’re used to doing something more controlled, like portraits or product photography?...

Straightening your photos sounds like a simple task. But if you’ve ever tried doing it, you know that it isn’t always the case to get it done perfectly. I know it’s something I’ve struggled with when editing some of my images. If you’re anything like me, here’s a super-useful video from Demas Rusli. He’ll show you two simple methods for straightening your photos and nailing it every time. Method #1: Lightroom When you open your image in Lightroom, first remove any distortion that your lens may be creating....

Using flash on location is one of the best things you can to really push your outdoor portraits. Often, the natural light might give you exactly what you want, but often it does not. The sun might be in slightly the wrong position to give you the background you want. Or a lack of cloud cover might make it not as soft as you’d like. Too much cloud cover could make it too soft....

Have you ever felt stressed, shitty, and overwhelmed with life — and went out with a walk with your camera, and instantly felt much better? For me, photography is all about self-therapy. I’ve used the camera as a tool to overcome my stress, my social anxiety, and as a way of creative self-expression. Photography isn’t about making pretty photos I think as photographers, we often make the mistake of thinking that photography is about making good photos....

On 13 June 2021, the Hubble Space Telescope’s payload computer unexpectedly came to a halt. After more than a month of hard work to bring it back, the team has succeeded and our “window to the universe” is back in business. It even took its first two photos since the repair, and NASA shared them with the world to celebrate Hubble’s great comeback. Hubble’s payload computer controls and coordinates the observatory’s onboard science instruments....

The Hubble Space Telescope is an incredible thing. Launched 30 years ago, it flies around the earth travelling at around 17,000 miles per hour snapping pictures deep into space. How deep? Well, at least 67 million light-years – or 393,867,900,000,000,000,000 miles. Yup, that’s a whole lot of zeros. But that’s how far away the NGC 2275 galaxy is from Earth. And the Hubble just shot and sent back its portrait....