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Five tips for shooting macro snow photography to take your snowflake photos to the next level

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For the northern hemisphere (sorry, Australia!), it’s winter right now. That means lots of snow for some of us, a little bit of snow for more of us and sadly, none for a few of us. Every year at this time, though, one of the most popular subjects for photographers becomes the snow itself. Either it’s snow covering a landscape or some local landmark, or for those of us with a macro lens, it’s the snowflakes themselves.

Whatever situation we find ourselves in, though, whether the snow’s in our backyard or we have to travel a little bit to get to it, snow can be a very enticing subject to shoot with a macro lens. And in this video, photographer Micael Widell offers us his five top tips for shooting snowflake macro photography, including a couple you might not have even considered.

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Watch: Three top tips for using C-Stands during a shoot in less than a minute

C-Stands are a staple in many photography studios and on film sets. They’re just a lot more practical, versatile and useful, not to mention sturdy, than your traditional tripod-style light stands. One of the biggest manufacturers of C-Stands is Matthews, and in this video, we learn three great tips for working with them on set to make our lives easier – and a little safer.

You might think that C-Stands are big and bulky and a bit unwieldy, but as this video demonstrates, this couldn’t be further from the truth when used effectively. Their very design lends itself to an efficient workflow on set while taking up relatively little space and being extremely convenient.

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Watch: How to get super clean images when shooting high ISO raw files

The ISO capabilities in DSLRs and mirrorless cameras today is pretty amazing. But it’s not perfect. You’re still going to see an increase in noise as you ramp up the ISO, even if it’s not quite as bad as it used to be. But we all love clean, noiseless images, don’t we? Along with the improvements in ISO performance, we’ve also seen big leaps in noise reduction technology. But many of them still aren’t perfect, often eliminating noise at the expense of detail.

For some images, you really do need to keep that detail and in this video from Scott Walker at Walks on the Wild Side, we learn three different methods of noise reduction. These methods include simple Lightroom Edits, Topaz Denoise AI and a pretty complex method that’s very involved but “fixes everything”. He also covers a “Pre-noise reduction” process you can do before you bring your photo into 3rd party software.

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How to shoot & edit your woodland photos to give them a glowy, dreamlike, painterly look

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The real world, especially the natural real world, is filled with wonderful sights for us to capture with our cameras. The problem is, our cameras rarely capture the world exactly as we see it and particularly not how we feel it to be. That’s where editing comes in. It’s why we have tools like Lightroom and Photoshop to help us get our images where we want them to be. In the case of woodlands, that often means a dreamy painterly style.

Woodlands, particularly, are well suited to this style. It brings out those magical and mystical vibes many of us feel when we think of woodlands and the idyllic images we see in our heads. In this video, Nigel Danson walks us through his editing process in Lightroom Classic to give his woodland photos that soft and dreamy painterly feel. But this isn’t just a basic 5-minute tutorial. It’s almost half an hour long going into a lot of detail on the whole process.

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Green screen doesn’t suck, you just suck at green screen – Here’s why and how to fix it

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Shooting on a green screen has become far more common these days. Green screens are cheap and readily available. Most video editing software, not to mention live streaming software like OBS and hardware like the Yolobox Products, have native support for it built-in. But it’s still something that many people struggle with when it comes to video editing with bad keys, dodgy artifacts and other issues.

A lot of people blame the software tools for a bad key, but is it down to operator error? Well, yeah, it probably is. There are many factors in shooting good green screen footage, and in this video, the team at Syrp Lab go through the process and explain exactly what could be causing your green screen issues and how to resolve them.

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This is how you use a light meter properly – they’re really not that difficult or scary

While they were once a fixture in every studio and photographer’s gear bag, light meters seem to have fallen out of fashion ever since digital photography came along. And while it’s true that we now have a lot more options for exposing our shots, the humble light meter can still play a very valuable role in nailing the shot quickly and consistently.

The cost of messing up the exposure of a shot, twiddling some dials and shooting another isn’t as expensive as it was in the film days, light meters can still save you a lot of time and hassle. And in this great video, Daniel Norton walks us through how to use a light meter, along with some tips and tricks to make your life a little easier when using one.

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This Basics Guide is everything you need to know to get started with light painting

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Light painting has increased massively in popularity over the last few years. It’s not really surprising. Gone are the days of film where you had no idea whether you’d got the shot or not until hours or days later. The instant feedback of digital and zero extra cost of shooting a thousand photos rather than one has made its popularity pretty inevitable as more people have acquired DSLRs and mirrorless cameras.

But if you’ve never done it before, or you’ve had a go but didn’t get results even close to what you hoped for, it can be difficult to figure out exactly what you did wrong and what information you’re missing. Well, this video, the first in a series, from photographer Susan Magnano will help explain it to you. In it, she goes over the terms, techniques and tools you need to get started.

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How to change the colour of anything in Lightroom in just a few seconds

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There was a time when if you wanted to change the colour of an object in a photograph, you had to load up Photoshop in order to do it. But these days, there are a lot more options out there. And now, even Lightroom is getting in on the action, thanks to the recently added AI selection tools that let you target specific subjects within a photograph and do pretty much whatever you want to them.

In this video, Aaron from Phlearn shows us exactly how we can use those AI selection tools to pick out our subject and then isolate the dress they’re wearing to completely change the colour of it, non-destructively, before you’ve even thought about bringing it into Photoshop.

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7 tips for shooting sharper landscape photographs

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No matter what genere we shoot, photographers always seem to be on a quest for sharper images. No matter how sharp they may already be, we’re always trying to squeeze just a little more sharpness performance out of our cameras and lenses. There are a few things we can do though, particularly for landscape photographers, that don’t involve going out and buying more expensive lenses.

In this video, landscape photographer Mike Smith walks us through seven of his top tips for getting sharper images when shooting landscapes. Some of them you may already know and apply to your own photography, but there are probably at least one or two that you might not have tried.

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How to use a ring light with colourful backdrops for amazing portraits

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I share a lot of lighting setups on here and every time I do, not only am I trying to share something unique, but I’m also trying to share something that’s practical and easy to implement for as many people as possible.

For the most part, I think I achieve that and although not everybody has access to all the kit I do, I still believe that certain elements of every setup I share are accessible by all. This is me trying to soften the blow of this week’s setup, as although not everybody will own all of this kit, cheap alternatives are viable and failing that, at least the DIY background and basic lighting principles involved are very much achievable by all. As always, if you have any questions about any of it, don’t hesitate to drop them down below.

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