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Limit yourself to get out of a creative rut

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Getting stuck in a creative rut has happened to us all. It’s frustrating and it sometimes looks like it will never end. Fortunately, there are ways to make yourself inspired and start creating and enjoying the process again. Rachel and Daniel from Mango Street propose one of the ways in their latest video: restrain yourself.

It may sound contradictory: you already feel restrained, and now you need to add even more limitations. But, the truth is that this can push your creativity forward and actually make you more creative. Have a look how Daniel and Rachel applied this method.

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Natural light photographers, here is how to start using studio lighting

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When you decide to take the step from natural light and start shooting with artificial lighting, you may not know where to start learning. Daniel and Rachel from Mango Street have teamed up with photographer Daniel DeArco to introduce you to the basics of studio lighting. And when they do it, it seems less scary and it will help you successfully take the first steps.

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Break the rules of your lenses’ main purpose to increase creativity

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Generally speaking, different lenses have different purposes. For example, a 50mm or an 85mm are often used for portraits, while wider lenses like 24mm are best for landscapes, architecture and interiors. However, there are times when you can (and should) break the unwritten rules and rethink the purpose of your lenses. Guys from Mango Street give you some examples and ideas how to do it.

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This one thing will help you make your photos better

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Are your photos technically flawless and aesthetically pleasing? It’s great if they are, but there’s one more thing to make them much better and raise them on a whole new level: storytelling. In this video, Daniel and Rachel from Mango Street will guide you through the steps you need to take to implement successful storytelling in your photography.

When you want to tell a story, there are basically two ways to do it. One is to capture moments around you as they happen. This is usually the way to go at all sorts of events, and this couple usually does it when they photograph weddings.

Another way is to tell a story of your own. Think of a concept and execute it in a photo, or a series of photos. This is precisely what this video talks about, and gives you useful guidelines how to turn your images into visual stories.

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Three tips for posing your non professional friends and family

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Ever tried posing your family or other non-pro friends for a photo. For some, it comes naturally, but for others, it may feel like an excruciating experience.

Mango Street (previously) is here to the rescue. They share three basic (yet powerful) tips to help you pose and direct your friends. As usual, good photography starts with the basic things, so once those are in place you can continue to build to more advanced levels.

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3 more styling tips to take food photos that don’t suck

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After their first set of tips for making your food photos more awesome, Mango Street are back with another quick, but great tutorial on this topic. These are the tips you can use for a variety of purposes – from making your food snapshots on Instagram more appealing, to improving your food photography if you want to get more serious about it. Also, these are techniques you can apply to other types of photography as well, if you’re not really into taking pictures of food. Either way, you will find them useful.

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5 tips for beautiful and natural-looking couple portraits

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If you’re new to couple portraits, you probably know that it could be a bit tricky. It’s not always easy to get them relaxed and feel comfortable in front of the camera. Rachel and Daniel from Mango Street will give you some quick tips how to take and more natural-looking portraits of couples. In their short and sweet video tutorial, they suggest some pretty awesome techniques with just the right amount of quirkiness. But according to the couple shots they took – they seem to work.

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10 beginner tips to up your photo game and improve your work

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No matter how experienced we may get as photographers, there are always ways to improve. Sometimes it’s learning something new. At other times it’s simply seeing something in a new way. Occasionally, it’s just getting reminders to help us lose bad habits that might make us screw up.

The folks at Mango Street have been putting out some quite cool videos recently, with some great advice to help with this. In their new video, they offer up 10 tips to take your photos “from BASIC to BOSS”. They pooled some of their professional photographer friends to see what tips they had to offer. I don’t quite agree with all of them, though.

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3 tips to find portrait locations in the most unlikely of places

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For me, finding portrait locations is fairly easy. But most of my shoots are in rural locations and I am able to pick locations well in advance. But sometimes you don’t have that luxury. I’ve experienced that, too. You find yourself in a town or city with a subject, and no particular location planned.

So, you have to use your wits to find somewhere on the spot, even in what might initially appear to be the least photogenic of places. This video from the folks at Mango Street offers up three tips to help you find locations while you’re out and about.

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3 Instagram styling tips to stop your photos from sucking

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The Instagram struggle is real. Everybody wants more followers, more likes, more comments. People post every day, but see very little response. Why is that? Well, there are many reasons, but one of them could be the images themselves. Many images that work fine on a monitor or printed out often scale down well to our phones. Details get lost, and the impact is gone. What works on Instagram isn’t necessarily what works elsewhere.

But, you can fix it. Despite the title, there’s actually more than three tips in this video from content creation studio, Mango Street. At least, if you include getting your dead house plants out of frame and remembering to dust off your props. Some of these might seem like common sense once somebody actually say it out loud, but they’re not all immediately obvious to everybody.

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