Photography tips & techniques for every skill level

Video Tutorials

One Backdrop, Infinite Looks: How to Add Texture and Color to Portrait Backgrounds in Photoshop

Most of us aren’t running a studio with a wall of seamless paper rolls in every color. I shoot out of a converted spare bedroom in Seattle, and for the longest time I felt limited by the single gray backdrop I owned. Every portrait session started to look like it came from the same universe, which is fine, but it’s not exactly inspiring for clients or for me. What changed things for me was watching Sean Tucker work through this exact problem.

August 10, 2026

Video Tutorials

What Two Photographers' Best Shots Teach Us About Letting Go of Perfect Conditions

There’s a version of photography advice that sounds like this: use the right gear, plan the shot, control every variable. And then there’s the version that actually reflects how great photos get made. I’ve been doing Sunday morning photo walks for years now, and the shots I’m most proud of rarely came from a perfect plan. They came from a weird moment, a broken piece of gear, or a phone I grabbed because nothing else was close enough.

August 10, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Actually See the Forest (And Stop Forcing Shots That Aren't There)

Forest photography has a way of humbling you fast. I’ve walked into beautiful woodland scenes with a full bag of gear and walked out with nothing I wanted to keep. The problem was never the forest. It was me, rushing, forcing compositions that looked good in my head but fell flat on the sensor. I’d frame up a shot, decide it wasn’t working, move twenty feet, try again, and repeat until the light was gone.

August 10, 2026

Video Tutorials

Why a Golf Ball Might Be the Best Lighting Teacher You've Never Used

I’ve been photographing products on and off for years, mostly to supplement travel work during slow seasons. And the thing that tripped me up the longest wasn’t gear or editing. It was learning to read light before I set anything up. I’d arrange my softbox, place the subject, take a test shot, and then spend twenty minutes moving things two inches at a time wondering why it still looked flat. What I was missing was a simple, unforgiving subject that would show me exactly what the light was doing.

August 10, 2026

News

Why the Nikon Z 28-135mm f/4 PZ Lens Deserves Your Attention

Why the Nikon Z 28-135mm f/4 PZ Lens Deserves Your Attention When you’re building a camera system, one of the biggest decisions is figuring out which lenses will actually get used versus which will sit on a shelf. As someone who works regularly with video and still photography, I’m always evaluating gear through the lens of practicality. Recently, I spent considerable time testing the Nikon NIKKOR Z 28-135mm f/4 PZ lens, and I want to share what I discovered about this intriguing option.

August 10, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Use Flash Triggers and Sound Sensors to Finally Capture Split-Second Moments

There’s a specific kind of frustration that lives in action photography. You press the shutter at exactly the right moment - or so you thought - and the image either shows nothing happening yet or the moment has already passed. I’ve been there more times than I want to count. The problem isn’t your reflexes, necessarily. It’s that human reaction time has a ceiling, and physics doesn’t care about your creative vision.

August 9, 2026

Video Tutorials

Why Changing Your Location Might Be the Best Photography Lesson You Never Planned

There’s a version of me from a few years ago who had Seattle completely figured out, photographically speaking. I knew which corners of Pike Place caught the best morning light, which rainy-day reflections looked best on Broadway, and exactly what time the ferries created that perfect silhouette against the sound. It felt like mastery. Looking back, it was actually a trap. I stumbled onto this exact idea while watching a recent tutorial from Sean Tucker, a photographer whose thoughtful, reflective approach to the craft I genuinely admire.

August 9, 2026

Video Tutorials

10 Film Photographers You Should Be Following Right Now (And What They Taught Me About Shooting Film)

I’ve been shooting digital for years, and somewhere along the way I convinced myself that film was this intimidating, gatekept world I wasn’t ready for. Too many settings I didn’t understand. Too much money wasted on bad exposures. Too many things I couldn’t just fix in Lightroom later. What finally cracked that wall open for me wasn’t a manual or a course. It was watching other photographers who were further down the road share exactly who had taught them and why.

August 9, 2026

Video Tutorials

How the Distance Between Your Light and Subject Changes Everything (And Not Just Brightness)

I’ve been shooting long enough to know that most lighting problems aren’t actually exposure problems. But I had to relearn that lesson recently when I was working on some indoor lifestyle shots and couldn’t figure out why two setups that looked identical on my histogram felt completely different in the final image. Same subject, same aperture, same shutter speed. One had this beautiful, sculpted quality to the shadows. The other looked flat in a way I couldn’t immediately explain.

August 9, 2026

Video Tutorials

The Light Size Rule That Changed How I Think About Every Single Shot

Last week I was shooting a friend’s brand launch outdoors, and the light was doing that infuriating thing where it looked gorgeous to my eye but flat and clinical on the back of my camera. I had a speedlight in my bag, I had a small diffusion panel, and I still couldn’t figure out why the images felt lifeless. I knew the answer was somewhere in my understanding of light quality, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on the mechanical reason.

August 9, 2026

Video Tutorials

How Street Photography Became My Mental Health Practice (And How It Can Become Yours)

Every Sunday morning I do a photo walk. Rain, shine, or the classic Seattle grey drizzle that falls somewhere between both. I started this tradition partly for the creative practice, but I kept it going because of how I feel when I come home. Clearer. Quieter. Like something that was coiled up has been allowed to unwind. I didn’t have a good framework for explaining why that happened until I watched this interview.

August 8, 2026

Video Tutorials

Your iPhone Is Too Good at Photography (And That's the Problem)

Every few months I catch myself defaulting back to my phone. Not because my mirrorless is too heavy to carry, but because the iPhone just works. It’s fast, it’s always in my pocket, and honestly, the results look good enough to post without touching them in Lightroom. That convenience, I’ve come to realize, is exactly the trap. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube In this Peter McKinnon video, he sits down with a fellow photographer and drops what he calls a hot take: the iPhone isn’t a real camera, and we should stop treating it like one.

August 8, 2026