It’s a common refrain in photography: “Keep your back to the sun.” You generally want to shoot with the light, so it helps brighten up your image. But shooting against the sun—where the sun is behind your subject, or even visible in the photograph—can lead to great results, too, often with stark shadows and awesome contrast. Here’s a […]
Have you ever felt like nobody cares about your art? That every time you upload a photo to Facebook, the only person to “like” it is your mother? Maybe your cousins? A few friends on Flickr? You’re not alone. So many artists of all sorts—photographers, filmmakers, painters, writers—get discouraged by the lack of immediate interest. The world of […]
One of the most difficult parts of entering an industry is getting to see how the industry actually works. There are internships and apprenticeships, of course—but those don’t pay well, if at all. How else can you see a professional at work, to really comprehend how the system functions? For a (mostly) uncut, thoroughly detailed look at […]
Sometimes in-camera cloud effects can give an image a sense of texture and style that’s unachievable any other way. Here, Isabelle Chapuis and Alexis Pichot team up with Nikon to show us how they create a simple cloud effect in low light: Shooting with a Nikon D7200, Chapuis cranks the ISO up to 2000, opens the aperture as […]
Even though 2016 has barely begun, we’ve already got a candidate for this year’s most beautifully horrific video: a tremendously detailed, high-resolution timelapse of a frightening blaze that erupted in a five-star Dubai hotel on New Year’s Eve. The video is well done, but it also portrays such an abjectly horrible image, that we expect you to have some mixed feelings while watching: […]
There have been visually impaired artists in the past, but few can say they’ve been going slowly blind for two decades—and decided to start creating art in spite of it. You can meet one man facing this challenge in the short video below: The man behind the lens here is Steven Erra, a visually impaired photographer who specializes in […]
What’s life like inside North Korea? Dozens of refugees, journalists, and photographers have tried to tell the outside world. But few photographers are as successful as Eric Lafforgue, whose intimate documentary shots from the Hermit Kingdom are as stunning as they are revealing: Lafforgue is a remarkable travel photojournalist whose collections span Vanuatu, Namibia, Eritrea, Myanmar, and beyond. […]
There are hundreds of photographers who move to New York, and few become super-famous. So what’s life really like for them? For someone who enjoys the simple artistry of photography, and who gets by with enough commercial work to pay the bills? One answer can be seen in this video, which profiles Sam Fan—a.k.a. SamAlive—who moved from his […]
Have you ever wondered how to definitively tell whether your picture is overexposed? If so, you can watch this quick video by Karl Taylor to understand: The gist is simple: a histogram is a chart that depicts how properly your image is exposed. The light tones are charted on the far right, while the darks are on the far left. On your SLR, it […]
Propaganda has long sustained political regimes. We like to think that, today, the only people who fall for it live in faraway countries—Russia, China, North Korea—but American patriotism and politically propagated European xenophobia is just as strong, justifying airstrikes and invasions across the Middle East, along with ongoing indigenous conflicts in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central America. But, as the video […]
