Photography tips & techniques for every skill level

Video Tutorials

Adobe Camera Raw Just Got a Major Upgrade — Here's What Changed in the October 2024 Update

If you’ve been using Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw interchangeably, assuming they’re always in sync, October 2024 is the month that assumption finally breaks down. Adobe pushed a significant update to Camera Raw that did not land in Lightroom Classic or Lightroom Desktop at the same time, which means if you’re doing your raw editing in Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin, you have access to tools your Lightroom-only friends don’t have yet.

July 14, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Edit Raw Photos with Intention: Lessons from Peter McKinnon's Community Edit Series

Every Sunday morning I take a photo walk around Seattle. Rain, sun, fog, it doesn’t matter. I come home with a card full of raw files, and here’s the thing I’ve noticed after years of doing this: taking the photo is only half the work. The edit is where you decide what the image actually says. That’s the part most beginners skip over or rush through, and it’s the part that separates a forgettable snapshot from something worth sharing.

July 14, 2026

Video Tutorials

How High-Speed Sync Finally Let Me Shoot Wide-Open Outdoors (And Why You Should Care)

For a long time, outdoor portrait sessions in bright light meant making a choice I hated: get the dramatic, blurry background I wanted, or use flash to light my subject properly. Doing both at the same time felt impossible. The moment I cranked my strobe up to compete with the sun, my camera forced me into a small aperture to stay within sync speed, and suddenly my subject looked like they were standing in a parking lot instead of floating in a dreamy scene.

July 14, 2026

Video Tutorials

Why I Stopped Obsessing Over Metering Modes (And What I Do Instead)

Every Sunday morning I take myself on a photo walk around Seattle. No agenda, no client brief, just me and whatever camera I grab off the shelf. For a long time, I’d find myself standing in a backlit scene or a high-contrast alley, fiddling through menus trying to remember which metering mode was “correct” for the situation. It felt like I was consulting a rulebook instead of just making a picture.

July 13, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Read a Moody Landscape and Shoot It Anyway: Lessons from a Winter Scotland Road Trip

There’s a specific kind of frustration I know well: you’ve driven hours to a location, the light is flat, the foreground is uninspiring, and your wide-angle lens is basically useless. I’ve stood at the edge of a beautiful lake in the Pacific Northwest and felt completely stuck, watching gorgeous mountains sit behind a shoreline that gave me absolutely nothing to work with. That feeling used to send me back to the car empty-handed.

July 13, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Hunt Reflected Light for Stronger Street Photos (Lessons from Sean Tucker)

Every Sunday morning I do a photo walk through Seattle. It doesn’t matter if it’s drizzling (it usually is). What I’m always looking for, more than a good subject or an interesting corner, is light that’s doing something unexpected. For a long time I couldn’t explain why some mornings felt electric and others felt flat, even when the subjects and locations were basically the same. The answer, almost every time, came down to reflected light, and whether I’d trained my eye to see it before I raised the camera.

July 13, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Reverse-Engineer Famous Portrait Lighting (And Actually Shoot It Yourself)

Portrait lighting analysis is one of those skills that separates photographers who keep getting better from ones who plateau. I spent years looking at images I admired and feeling vaguely inspired but having no idea how to translate what I was seeing into something I could actually set up in front of a subject. That changed when I started forcing myself to reverse-engineer lighting setups the way a mechanic would pull apart an engine.

July 12, 2026

Video Tutorials

Stop Making These Beginner Photography Mistakes (A Breakdown of Peter McKinnon's Best Advice)

Every Sunday morning I do a photo walk through my neighborhood in Seattle. No agenda, no client, no pressure. Just me and whatever camera I feel like grabbing. And even after years of doing this professionally, I still catch myself making some of the same lazy habits I had when I first started. That’s why when I sat down with Watch the full tutorial on YouTube from Peter McKinnon, I found myself nodding along more than I expected.

July 12, 2026

Video Tutorials

Why Persistence Beats Portfolio: A Working Photographer's Breakdown of Joel Grimes' Career Advice

I used to think that if I just got good enough, the work would come. Shoot more, edit better, post consistently, and clients would eventually find me. It took an embarrassingly long time, and more than a few months of tumbleweeds in my inbox, before I started questioning that assumption. The technical side of photography is learnable. The business side is where most of us quietly struggle and rarely talk about it.

July 12, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Build a Signature Color Style (And Actually Stick to It)

Every Sunday morning I do a photo walk around Seattle. Rain, shine, fog off the water — doesn’t matter. And for years, when I’d come home and open Lightroom, I’d edit each session like it was its own little world. Warm and golden one week, cool and moody the next, high contrast the week after that. Individually, the images looked fine. Together, they looked like four different photographers had taken them.

July 11, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Find Your Photography's Story (What Jeff Bridges' Photo Book Taught Me)

I have a confession: I spent about three years chasing the same kind of shot I kept seeing on Instagram. Same compositions, same color grades, same light. I thought I was developing a style. I was actually just borrowing everyone else’s. It wasn’t until I started pulling photography books off shelves, the physical kind, that something shifted in how I thought about making images. That’s exactly why this Peter McKinnon tutorial stopped me mid-scroll and made me want to write about it.

July 11, 2026

Video Tutorials

What Irving Penn Can Teach You About Breaking Your Own Photography Rules

Every few months I’ll look back at a batch of portraits and feel like something is technically correct but emotionally flat. The exposure is good, the focus is sharp, the background is clean. And yet. There’s a version of this problem I spent years trying to name before I finally landed on it: I was making photographs the way I was taught to make photographs, not the way I actually saw things.

July 11, 2026