Wedding season is nearly upon us and in honor of this wonderful, yet sometimes stressful time, we have asked our friends at SnapKnot to share some of their wedding photography wisdom and what couples should be thinking about when choosing a photographer. Planning a wedding may not be easy but their community of expert wedding photographers will help make planning a piece of cake! (more…)

Seán Duggan is a fine art photographer, author, educator and an Adobe Certified Photoshop Expert with extensive experience in both the traditional and digital darkroom. His Lightroom Viewfinders series provides photographers with the tools they need to effectively take Lightroom on the road with them during their photographic travels. In episode 2, Duggan goes over the basics of finding your missing Lightroom files and why Lightroom loses track of them in the first place. (more…)

Happy Tax Day, everyone!

Okay, so Tax Day isn’t a very celebratory affair but if you are thinking about filing for your photography business in the future, here are 5 great articles to help get you started. (more…)

There are few places on Earth that allow you to use the full feature set of your camera skills and most people don’t think that place would be the grand old American amusement park! In prep for the summer season, Kris Rowberry of Great American Thrills shows you how to get spectacular shots while having fun at the same time in his Top Ten Tips for Amusement Park Photography.

Seán Duggan is a fine art photographer, author, educator and an Adobe Certified Photoshop Expert with extensive experience in both the traditional and digital darkroom. His Lightroom Viewfinders series provides photographers with the tools they need to effectively take Lightroom on the road with them during their photographic travels. In episode 1, Duggan goes over the basics of cataloguing and backing up your files.

Merging a Travel Catalog with your Main Catalog
by Seán Duggan (reprinted here with permission)

Lightroom is an essential tool for the traveling photographer, allowing you to not only work on your images as your trip unfolds, but also to just enjoy them more while you’re still on the trip. Reviewing images at the end of each day, editing them, working on sequences and image pairings, is also a great way to notice visual themes and trends in your own image making during the trip. You may not always be conscious of these as you are taking the photos, but taking note of these potential creative paths during the image review process can suggest new directions, as well as help you clarify existing ideas for the types of images you want to make.

In the Lightroom Viewfinder episode below, I provide an overview of my Lightroom travel catalog setup (including regular backups and keeping the drives safe from loss while on the road). Then I’ll show you how to import the data from the travel catalog into the main Lightroom catalog back home when the trip is over. I also address the all-important practice of moving files within Lightroom so the program always knows where they’re at.

Stay tuned for next week’s Lightroom Viewfinders topic “The Island of Lost Files: Find Those Missing Files and Get Your Lightroom Catalog Back in Order!”
In the meantime, check out Duggan’s other photo tips over on his blog.

Ben on a greyish-blue background.

The image above was not shot on a white background. It has a minimal level of adjustment in Lightroom to it, mostly to clean up the edges, but that’s about it. It was taken in front of the greyish-blue wall in the lobby of the BorrowLenses.com offices in San Carlos.

The thing about a relatively light-colored background is that it lends itself to a surprisingly large number of options for photographers. Though grey backgrounds work best for this, you can with some tweaking, turn just about any light-colored background — grey, blue, beige — completely black, as I demonstrated in this article on how to kill your background completely.

In this article, I’ll show you how to blow out that background completely to make it look like you’re shooting in front of a white backdrop.

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Interested in car photography? Jim Frenak, lead photographer at FPI Studios, recently shot the new 2014 Chevy Impala for Chevy’s West Coast PR blog. Read about how FPI Studios got the shot by pre-planning with a shot list and employing a couple of popular techniques for capturing a sense of motion.