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How dog toys and toilet paper can improve your portrait photography

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Coming up with new and interesting ways to improve your portraits in the studio can sometimes be challenging. You feel like you’re just going through the motions session after session. Photographer, Joe Edelman, recently posted a video about the Light Blaster and how it can help you get more creative in the studio, to project shapes and even entire scenes onto your backdrop or subject.

In Joe’s newest video, he takes things a little more three dimensional. As well as providing tips on how to make and use cardboard or foamcore gobos, Joe also shows how we can use household objects to add unique interest to the background. Dog chew toys, a toddler’s toy wheelbarrow, house plants, and even toilet paper. Nothing is off limits.

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5 top tips to improve your food photography

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Food photography is something we’ve pretty much all tried. Even if our gastronomical efforts are only limited to Instagram, it helps to be able to get a nice shot. In this video from Adobe, photographer Andrew Scrivani shares his top five tips to improving your own food photography.

You might look a little odd bringing chopping boards and cooling racks into your local Starbucks, but the suggestions are still beneficial. Whether you’re in the studio with a DSLR or the local coffee shop with your phone, there’s always things you can do to help take your food photography up a notch or two.

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How a bucket can help to improve your Seascape photography

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Seascape photography isn’t something that’s really been high on my list. I’ve lived near beaches almost all of my life, but they’ve been a bit too featureless for my photographic tastes.

If you are lucky enough to live near a picturesque coastline, photographer Karl Taylor offers some great tips in his new video. Some of the tricks also work around lakes, rivers and other freshwater locations, too.

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Use These Quick Tips From Tamara Lackey To Improve Your Portrait Photography

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As you know, taking a compelling portrait is more difficult than just aiming your camera at someone and asking them to smile. There a lot of tiny details that are easy to overlook unless you are purposely keeping tabs on them. That being said, if you’re looking to get into portrait photography or just improve your craft a little more, award winning photographer Tamara Lackey delivers a handful of good tips you can use to do just that.

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Essential Tips To Improve Your Bird Photography Skills

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Photographing wildlife takes a lot of patience coupled with a decent amount skill, and photographing birds is no exception. If you’ve been thinking about giving bird photography a try, or are just looking for ways to improve your shots, this quick fire video posted on Paulo Carvalho’s YouTube page  is full of tips to help you out. The clip is just under three minutes long and is packed full of useful tips from start to finish. [Read More…]

How Reading Comics Will Improve Your Photography

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In June 1938 ‘action comics’ were published and Superman was introduced to the world. Not only was the character of Superman was born that day, but also comics as we know it. Today, 76 years later, comics is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Over the years comics became less cartoonish and more realistic, to the degree where today many refer to it as “graphic novel” rather than “comics”. Comic artists are great story tellers and by inspecting their art we can extrapolate and get inspiration for our own art. As an art form, comic books have a lot to teach us about photography.

Before we start, it is important for me to explain that I didn’t focus on a specific character or series, I tried to find examples from all around the comic universe, both male and female characters, well known and anonymous characters, DC and Marvel, old and new. With the main premise that Photographers can benefit from comics in a similar way that comics artist have benefited from photography.

Let’s start with something we all relate to comics, the superheroes!

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Using Less Gear Will Actually Improve Your Photography

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If you think that getting the next lens, body or strobe will instantly improve your photography, photographer Haoyuan Ren suggests a different point of view (no pun intended).

Ren has been shooting for about seven years and is landing jobs with the big magazines and shooting celebrities (Tilda Swinton, Dean Norris shown above and Taylor Schilling stood in front of his lens). Interestingly, Ren’s advice for photographers is to use less gear.

In an interview with InMyBag Ren’s suggests to throw away as many pieces of gear as you can (or actually not to buy them in the first place). Ren advices that:[Read More…]

Poll: I Would Improve My Photography If…

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As photographers we strive on taking good photographs. Moreover we want to take consistently good photographs. While it is true that inspiration, ideas and magic powder all help in making a good photo, the truth with photography, like so many other crafts – is that the more you “practice”, the better your images are.

The premise of this poll is that if you need to do two things in order to constantly improve: 1 take lots of photographs. And 2. invest the time and effort to learn after each session. You must have both.

If you “spray around” and do not take the time to edit, review, self criticize and expose your images, you will have lots of pictures, but quality will not change.

If you shoot very little it will be hard to exercise the points learned in the previous round.

(Statistically speaking, if you do take the spray route your chances of taking one good image do increase, I mean even monkeys can write a Shakespearean play, but this is not what I am talking about here).

In this poll, I would like to hear what is stopping you from improving and refining your photography skills. What is stopping you from continuously improving and honing your skills?

I’ll go first: I would improve my portraiture skills if I shot more personal projects. And I would do more personal projects if I was not so shy about asking people for participation.

How about you? Share in the comments.

(If you are reading this via RSS, you may want to click through to read/share your thoughts) [(cc) image credit Cayusa][Read More…]

Five Great Flash Techniques To Improve Your Photography Light

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So, you moved your light off camera (very good) and looking for some new ways to explore more lighting options. Some of the most interesting light can come from doing the unexpected with your flash.

Here are five great techniques to boost your off camera lighting.

After exploring those five you’ll have a great toolbox for shooting pictures with off camera flash.

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