Category: Tutorials
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I did a week long light study in my house. You should do one too.
As the leaves fell off our trees earlier than usual this year, the gray November days caught up to me. I chatted with some photographer friends about feeling uninspired. This is alarming since it isn’t really even winter yet. While I often shoot macro throughout the winter, I’ve been feeling restless with it lately, and…
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Top five reasons your photos are blurry
One thing newer photographers seem to have the hardest time with is nailing focus. I love purposely out of focus images, but there is nothing worse than thinking you’ve nailed focus, only to realize too late that many or all are blurry. When I first got back into film photography in the summer of 2021,…
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Basics of Manual Exposure
Want to know the secret between a ho-hum, average image, and a stop you you in your tracks, beautiful image? Well, truth be told, there’s no one real secret, but a great way to set your images apart is to shoot in manual exposure mode. Once you start shooting in manual mode, you take control…
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Out of focus images
One of my favorite creative techniques is to shoot out of focus images. No really! I think there is something so lovely and evocative about an image that is deliberately defocused. To be clear, I’m not talking about an image with missed focus. That is something very different. Focus tells your viewer were to look,…
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Working with the new AI Masking tools in Lightroom Classic (version 14.5)
Lightroom Classic has recently made a sizeable upgrade to the masking tools. We used to have to mask our subjects manually with the brush tool, and while I always found the Lightroom brushes to be much more accurate in edge masking than the brushes in Photoshop, for any subject with less obvious edges it could…
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Why I love side light the most
As a photographer, I think it’s an unwritten rule that we are all supposed to love backlighting. And it’s true, not much can equal that golden rim light and the way it makes our subject glow. But the truth is, I think side light is the best light. I’ll be honest and say my definition…
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How to read a histogram
I’ve been called more than once a very “technical” photographer. Although I do often use blur and other creative techniques in my imagery, I have spent a lot of years perfecting exposure and color in my work. One way I like to “double check” my exposures is by using the histogram when I edit. The…
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Storytelling in a Portfolio Set
This post I thought we could chat about flow a little bit in your sets. What makes good flow? We talk a lot about how a set should tell a story. What kinds of ways can you think of to order your set? My big tip to you is that when you sit down and…
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What makes a good portfolio image or set?
I do a lot of set reviews for people, and I often see similar issues across portfolios that still need a bit of finessing. Here are some of the biggest issues I see. My comments below will be tailored mostly to Hello Storyteller, but they work for almost any portfolio you might be working on.…
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Portfolio Consistency
I think that prepping for a portfolio is one of the best things you can do to grow as an artist. It forces you to look at your work objectively, removing the emotional bias you might have for any given photo. It is also one of the hardest things you will do as an artist.
light & magic | conversations about photography 