Articles by Steve Paxton6 articles

Shooting urban portraits is a great way to shake things up and break out of the passionless photography rut we sometimes find ourselves in. In this guide, I am going to share how to create high impact urban portraits of perfect strangers. My experience centers on photographing homeless and destitute people; however I encourage you to read with an open mind as you can apply many of the same principles photographing virtually any stranger (homeless or not) in an urban setting.

Many photographers assume that once the sun goes down, so do the opportunities to take spectacular landscape images. Some of my favorite photographs were taken under extremely low light or nearly pitch-black conditions. In fact, I have found that the darker it is the better results I usually get in my images.

Landscape photography should be creative and not mechanical. This is a little bit like going to an important business meeting where you have been selected as group’s main presenter. If you leave for the meeting late and rush into the conference room just as things are getting started, you are much more likely to give a dismal performance.

At some point, most photographers develop a series of routines for capturing, copying, and processing their digital photographs. These routines can be sloppy and unorganized or they can develop into a consistent workflow that speeds up the entire editing process. Consistency in how you handle your images after they are shot is nearly as important as the techniques you employ to compose and shoot your images in the field.

Despite how meticulous and careful I am with my equipment, it always amazes me how quickly dust, fingerprints, and overall grime builds up on and inside my camera bodies and even on lenses. Casual photographers will probably not immediately notice problems with dirt until little specs begin showing up on final images.

In this quick tip, I am going to show you how to extend the dynamic range of a single image by processing the shot several times in Photoshop. Understanding how to extend the dynamic range of an image using layer masks has been the bread and butter of my landscape photography.