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Develop these four habits to help take your landscape photography to the next level

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There are a lot of tips and advice out there for all kinds of different genres of photography. Most of them involve technique or buying more gear. Very little is about our behaviour and mindset. This video from Mark Denney, though, is a little different. In it, he presents four habits he’s developed over the last few years that have helped him with his workflow to improve his landscape photography.

While Mark freely admits that everybody’s workflow is different and not every tip is going to help everybody, these are some great suggestions. I follow a couple of these myself and they’ve made a big difference to my photography over the years. Maybe they’ll help yours, too.

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10 tips to help you get sharp photos when shooting handheld

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Getting sharp photos when shooting handheld is probably the biggest struggle for new photographers – especially if they haven’t figured out how exposure and shutter speed works yet. Even if you know what you’re doing with exposure, though, it can still be a little tricky sometimes. And with as tiny as camera LCDs are, it can be difficult to spot until you get back home and look at them full-screen on your computer.

So, how can you help to guarantee you get sharper photos? Well, photographer James Popsys is here with a bunch of tips to help you figure that out. Not all of them may apply to you – particularly the first one if you don’t drink coffee – but between them, with a little practise, you should be able to start seeing sharper images in no time.

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How to get a good natural light look when using flash outdoors

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I’m always asked why I use flash outdoors and the answer is quite simple. The natural light doesn’t always give me what I want. Sometimes I want to complement or augment it and sometimes I want to override it completely. There’s nothing wrong with natural light and I use that too when it looks good, but yeah… It just doesn’t always look the way I want it to.

But how can you work with flash outdoors and still have it look natural when shooting things like weddings or portraits? Well, in this video from Vanessa Joy, we look at several different ways you can light a subject with flash, balancing it with the natural light to create a natural look. And, yes, there’s more to it than simply adjusting the power level to even out the brightness.

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Eight of the most common macro photography mistakes and how to avoid them

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Macro can be a tricky subject, especially if you want to be able to do it well. Chances are, most of us who’ve tried to have a go at macro have made some or all of mistakes at some point. Some of us spot them as soon as we’ve made them and figure out how to work around them. But those mistakes are not always so obvious.

I’ve certainly made a few macro mistakes over the years, where images haven’t turned out exactly the way I wanted, but wasn’t sure why. In this video, macro photographer Micael Widell shows us the eight most common beginner mistakes he sees in macro photography and how you can avoid them.

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10 astrophotography tips to raise your nighttime photography game

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Astrophotography is arguably one of the more technically challenging genres of photography out there. And even if you do know what you’re doing, it can be tricky if you can’t easily see what you’re doing. And if you’re new to it all, it’s especially difficult.

In this video, Trevor Jones at AstroBackyard gives us his top 10 tips for shooting astrophotography and answers a lot of questions you may have about gear and technique. Trevor also covers some of the logistical aspects of astrophotography, too, including powering your cameras for long periods of time in the cold dark night.

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How to fake that gelled split lighting look in Photoshop

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Using multiple differently coloured gels to light your subject and their environment has become a very popular subject over the last few years – and I’m totally not blaming Jake Hicks – but it’s not always possible to easily do in the studio. Perhaps you don’t have the colours of gel that you need. Or maybe there’s just too much colour spill to effectively get what you’re after.

It is possible to simulate the look of using coloured gels in post, though, thanks to Photoshop. And in this video, Unmesh at PiXimperfect shows us how. There are several ways you can do this, but the method Unmesh shows in the video is very effective and covers a bunch of different techniques that you can apply to a lot of other tasks, too.

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It turns out that yes, you can edit HD video on the $99 Raspberry Pi 400

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Every day I see questions in Raspberry Pi groups on Facebook asking if it can do this or that and can it really replace a desktop? One of the more common tasks I often see requested of it is video editing. Can the Raspberry Pi 400 let you edit videos? Well, it turns out that yes, it can. At least, in 1080p. And there are some caveats, but yes.

This video from Jason Evangelho at Linux For Everyone actually came out a little while ago, but it just popped up in my suggested videos and I thought it was interesting. Mostly because despite the often optimistic Raspberry Pi marketing, for most people, it’s really not a desktop replacement. Could it be a cheap option for video editing, though?

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Which exposure mode should you be using with your camera?

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It’s the age-old perpetual question. And it’s one seen daily in photography forums and groups on social media. What camera mode should I use? And, well, it’s not really an easy question to answer. There are those who are of the “manual, always or you’re not a real photographer” persuasion, but there are times when the other modes work extremely well.

In this video, Mike Smith takes a look at the different shooting modes offered by cameras and offers up some tips as to when might be the right time to use each. And while the names might be slightly different for some brands, these modes are consistent throughout pretty much all brands and types of interchangeable lens camera from 35mm SLRs, through DSLRs to mirrorless.

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How to blend multiple exposures together in Photoshop the easy way

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Photographing landscapes is always a popular topic, but it seems to have become even more so over the last year as much of the world has been told to avoid other people and seen events cancelled. And, well, if we can’t point our cameras at other people, what else are we to do if we want to keep shooting and hone our skills?

But landscapes require a number of techniques that we don’t typically see in most other genres of photography. One such technique is that of blending multiple shots together, for various reasons, but often for things like HDR or focus stacking. In this video, Adam Gibbs shows us how we can blend multiple images together in Photoshop.

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Five portrait lighting patterns you need to learn

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It seems that there are always things we “need” to learn when it comes to shooting certain genres of photography. And while many of them for a lot of genres do boil down to personal taste, when it comes to portraits, there are some things that you need to know and understand, like lighting techniques – even if you don’t use all of them all of the time.

In this video, photographer Hannah Couzens shows us five different popular portrait lighting styles that every portrait photographer should really know and understand. She also demonstrates them using both hard and soft light, so that you can see how the light actually hits the subject and how to make it more visually pleasing.

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