It’s been a bit of an emotional weekend for us Canadians – our “national rock band” The Tragically Hip performed their final concert on Saturday night in a performance that was half mourning and half celebration. Earlier this year, lead singer Gord Downie was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer – but instead of fading away, Gord and the band decided to rage against the dying of the light and put on a 15 show tour across the country (after Gord underwent radiation treatment, chemotherapy and brain surgery)....

Shooting multi-frame panorama photographs can be fun, and the resulting images can be striking. But once you get past a panorama that is, say, four or five frames wide, it becomes difficult to do without a tripod. And if you want a panorama that is more than one frame in height, then hand-held is nigh impossible. There are manual panorama heads you can mount on your tripod, but using one can become a bit tedious, especially shooting a dozen or so frames....

I wanted to shoot a conceptual photo using long exposure to show the SD card flying out of my camera and into the Gnarbox*. I used the cool Spiffy Gear Lumee RGB light to achieve this. Here is a quick breakthrough on how the show was made including the BTS, lighting, and gear used. Gear Well, aside from the Gnarbox, the Lexar card and the camera in the frame, I used the following gear to actually shoot the photo:...

The new iPhone 13 Pro has some pretty cool new specs, including a macro lens. Sure, it can be of great help for us photographers, but have you ever thought that it could help a doctor in his job? An ophthalmologist Dr. Tommy Korn has recently demonstrated how the iPhone 13 Pro’s macro eye photography helps him and his patients, and it’s really fun to see (no pun intended) how phone photography can be repurposed....

Landscape photography comes with a wide range of its joys, but it also faces you with a lot of challenges. Regardless of the difficulties you may encounter, landscape photography is a beautiful art form that can improve your life. In this video, Adam Karnacz of First Man Photography explores some of the joys, rewards, and challenges of landscape photography, and reminds you why it’s all worth the effort. In the world where we’re surrounded by technology, landscape photography is a fantastic way to take a break from it....

Commercial product lighting is very challenging. Whether you’re shooting stills or video, you never know what type of product you might need to shoot from day to day. It often presents unique challenges for you to overcome, too. Not least of which is satisfying your client’s personal tastes. In this video, Aputure’s Valentina Vee talks with cinematographer Brent Barbano about how to light products to make them look amazing. And how to make you look amazing to your client....

Photographing moving vehicles is both fun and challenging. You want to get the car perfectly sharp, while the environment becomes a blur of motion. Often such images are created with a specialised, rig. These rigs attach to the vehicle at one end, and allow you to mount your camera on the other. Such rigs can be very expensive, though. If you just want to experiment, there’s no point spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on such a system....

A very effective way to color-tone an image, is to use the RGB curves in Lightroom. This allows you to manipulate colors effectively, and you face no risk of adding any banding or harsh transition lines between colors. My goal is not to try to write an exhaustive tutorial, but I hope I can give you a few ideas so you can experiment on your own. Colors Before we start, let’s examine “opposite” colors and how they interact in Lightroom....

Have you ever found yourself looking at your children’s toys and thought to yourself man that would look great in an image? Well I have, I do and I love creating images this way, trying to create a realistic/surreal image which tells a story from using nothing more than a piece of plastic. A portrait of a figure reveals the character you see in this inanimate object and brings it to life....

Being stuck at home when you don’t want to be locked indoors just sucks. For photographers who can no longer head out to photograph their usual subjects, with not much to shoot at home (or is there?), boredom kicks in real fast. And for creatives, boredom can be the worst thing of all to have to live with. But it can be beaten! Photo1x1 wants to help in the fight against boredom during these times, with a new video series – the goal of which, besides fighting boredom, is to allow as many people as possible to participate....

Anybody who’s ever used strong neutral density filters knows about colour casts. Whether it’s the B+W 10 Stop or the Lee Big Stopper, they’re just inevitable. Each filter presents a different colour cast. The same filter can also offer a different colour cast on different camera bodies. The typical way to deal with it is to play around with your white balance to try and correct for it. Without a good reference, though, shifting the white balance to fix it in post can be a bit of a crap shoot....

Perhaps not a goal, but a desire for many photographers is to see their work published in print. Even if they’re a hobbyist and have no wish to become a professional photographer, it’s a nice validation of one’s efforts. And, no, paying for a feature doesn’t count. You weren’t published, you bought advertising. In this video, Craig Roberts of e6 Vlogs explains what you can do to help increase your odds of being published....

In a previous post, I shared how I converted my Afghan Box Camera into a slide projector. The principle of the slide projector involves putting a light source at the back whose light passes through some condenser lens. The light then goes through the slide and finally pass the projector lens and be projected big on the projector screen. I thought that would be about the same principle as a photo enlarger in the darkroom....

Since we posted about Manny Ortiz’s use of the Parrot 2 Teleprompter a few weeks ago, I’ve been developing my own that I can 3D print (more on that in a future post), but I’ve also been keeping an eye out on YouTube to see what others have done with their own DIY teleprompter solutions. Then, this morning, I spotted this video from Electronoobs on my feed, where he builds his own teleprompter from scratch....

If you shoot models on location against a blue sky, you may wish to enhance the sky brightness and tones. If you do it by darkening the sky using Luminosity, it can result in the appearance of a white outline around your model. Emma Grigoryan from Fstoppers shared with us a simple way to get rid of it. This Photoshop tutorial that will show you how to remove this white outline quickly and easily, in only a few steps....

This little procedure just saved me over 20 gigs (yes, this is right, gigs!!) of space on my hard drive. It has to do with how Lightroom updates. Read on or watch the video. Here is something I was quite surprised to realize. With each catalog, you can set how long it would keep 1:1 previews. I usually set this for a month. Keeping 1:1 previews is quite useful as it really speeds up using the develop module....

Long exposures, particularly of water, are something that almost all of us either have tried at some point or will try and some point in the future. Sometimes we might get lucky and nail it on our very first attempt but often we’ll find ourselves struggling to get the image we see in our head. The image we’d like to create. This is because it’s not usually as simple as just sticking an ND over your lens and increasing your shutter speed....

Recently we showed you a tutorial from Unmesh at PiXImperfect on using the Irix Blur tool in Photoshop to simulate a shallow depth of field in the studio. That technique can also be applied to headshots on location, too, but when you’ve got varying degrees of depth throughout your scene, with multiple planes at different levels of depth, it’s not the easiest to work with. In this video, Colin Smith at photoshopCAFE shows us a different technique for simulating depth of field effects in Photoshop CC that solves that very problem....

Do you know those classic fitness magazine cover shots? White background, clean and flattering lighting, recognizable poses and really fit and happy-looking subject? In this video, Joe Edelman shares some tips for taking these kinds of fitness shots. He covers everything, from choosing the right model, to preparation, shooting and even choosing the outfits. These shots are not difficult to make if you have the right gear and invest some time into planning the shots....

Using coloured gels with speedlights has become pretty common. Many people who shoot with speedlights have given it a go at least a couple of times. But speedlights are quite easy to gel. All you need is a small strip of gel which you then gaffer tape over the front of the head. Studio strobes, though, are a different matter entirely. They’re not flat on the front like speedlights, and they project light in all directions....