Video Tutorials

What a Behind-the-Scenes Wedding and Fashion Shoot Teaches You About Staying Loose on Set
Video Tutorials

What a Behind-the-Scenes Wedding and Fashion Shoot Teaches You About Staying Loose on Set

There’s a version of photography education that’s all clean lighting diagrams and perfectly articulated camera settings. And then there’s the version that actually prepares you for a real shoot: the chaotic, laughing, spider-on-the-backdrop, someone-just-grabbed-the-expensive-wine version. The second one is usually more useful. That’s why I keep coming back to behind-the-scenes content from working photographers, because the unscripted moments reveal how pros actually think and adapt, not just what they do when everything is going according to plan.

The Right Way to Delete Photos from Your SD Card (and Why It Actually Matters)
Video Tutorials

The Right Way to Delete Photos from Your SD Card (and Why It Actually Matters)

I’ll be honest: I didn’t think much about how I deleted photos until the habit started costing me time. Early on, I’d stand in the field after a shoot and tap through my camera’s delete button one frame at a time, convinced I was being responsible about storage. Spoiler: I was not being responsible. I was just slow. It wasn’t until I started paying closer attention to how working photographers handle their cards between shoots that I realized there’s a real skill buried in this mundane-sounding task, and doing it carelessly can mean corrupted cards, lost files, or a very messy desktop at midnight.

How to Shoot a High-Stakes Portrait Session Like a Working Pro (Lessons from Peter McKinnon and Travis Barker)
Video Tutorials

How to Shoot a High-Stakes Portrait Session Like a Working Pro (Lessons from Peter McKinnon and Travis Barker)

There’s a specific kind of pressure that comes with photographing someone who actually matters to you personally. Not a client you found through a job board, but someone whose work shaped who you are. I felt that pressure the first time I photographed a musician I’d listened to all through college. My hands were steadier on my camera than my nerves deserved. That is exactly the situation Peter McKinnon walked into when he flew to Los Angeles to document a collaboration between jewelry brand Clocks and Colors and drummer Travis Barker.

When Fear Is the Filter: What Thomas Heaton's Iceland Workshop Taught Me About Creative Risk
Video Tutorials

When Fear Is the Filter: What Thomas Heaton's Iceland Workshop Taught Me About Creative Risk

There’s a version of me that would have stayed at the bottom of that hill. I know her well. She’s the one who talks herself out of the harder hike, the uncertain light, the shot that might not work out. I thought about her a lot while watching this tutorial from Thomas Heaton, where he shares footage cut from his Iceland workshop series and gets surprisingly honest about fear, confidence, and what it actually feels like to lead other photographers when you’re still figuring things out yourself.

A Repeatable Lightroom Workflow You Can Use on Every Single Edit
Video Tutorials

A Repeatable Lightroom Workflow You Can Use on Every Single Edit

For a long time, my editing sessions looked like this: open Lightroom, poke at the exposure slider, get distracted by the color grading panel, overcook the saturation, undo everything, stare at the histogram, and eventually export something I felt lukewarm about. I didn’t have a system. I had habits, and most of them were bad. What changed things for me was watching educators who treat editing as a deliberate, repeatable process rather than an improvised scramble across every panel Lightroom has to offer.

Stop Wrecking Your Photos in Post: Common Editing Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)
Video Tutorials

Stop Wrecking Your Photos in Post: Common Editing Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

I still cringe at my edits from about four years ago. We’re talking blown-out highlights, skin tones that looked vaguely radioactive, and a clarity slider that had clearly never met a boundary it respected. The photos weren’t bad to begin with. The editing just buried them. If you’ve ever gone back through an old Lightroom catalog and quietly deleted things you were once proud of, you already know what I mean.

How to Actually Learn Photography Faster: Tony Northrup's Mentoring and Workshop Options Explained
Video Tutorials

How to Actually Learn Photography Faster: Tony Northrup's Mentoring and Workshop Options Explained

One of the questions I get most often from readers is some version of: “I’ve watched hundreds of tutorials, but I still feel stuck. What’s missing?” I know exactly what they mean, because I felt it too. Generic advice gets you only so far. At some point, you need someone to look at your photos, spot your specific habits, and tell you what to fix. That gap between consuming information and actually improving is real, and it’s the reason personalized photography instruction matters more than people give it credit for.

Evoto's New Features Are Changing How I Edit Portraits — Here's What Actually Impressed Me
Video Tutorials

Evoto's New Features Are Changing How I Edit Portraits — Here's What Actually Impressed Me

Portrait editing used to be the part of my job I dreaded most. Not because I don’t care about the final image — I care deeply — but because the gap between a great shot and a deliverable image used to mean hours of tedious skin retouching, shadow cleanup, and trying to reshape a subject without making the fence behind them look like it melted in the sun. If you’ve done any serious portrait work, you know exactly what I mean.

9 Landscape Photography Tips That Actually Held Up (A Breakdown of Mark Denney's Best Beginner Advice)
Video Tutorials

9 Landscape Photography Tips That Actually Held Up (A Breakdown of Mark Denney's Best Beginner Advice)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from driving 45 minutes to a scenic overlook, setting up your tripod in the dark, waiting through the whole sunrise – and then coming home with nothing you’re proud of. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, and for a long time I blamed the light, or the location, or my gear. The real problem, it turns out, was almost always my behavior on location.

Edit Videos Faster in Premiere Pro: The Favorites Folder Method That Changed My Workflow
Video Tutorials

Edit Videos Faster in Premiere Pro: The Favorites Folder Method That Changed My Workflow

There is a particular kind of editing paralysis that hits when you open a new project and realize you have to hunt through the same effects panels, apply the same color grade from memory, and drag over the same transitions you used last week. Every. Single. Time. I used to chalk it up to “just part of the process,” but the more projects I took on, the more I realized I was losing 20 to 30 minutes per video to pure, avoidable repetition.

Breathing Life Into Old Family Photos: How to Colorize Black & White Images in Photoshop
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Breathing Life Into Old Family Photos: How to Colorize Black & White Images in Photoshop

I have a shoebox of my grandmother’s old photographs sitting on a shelf in my Seattle apartment. Black and white, slightly faded, full of people I half-recognize. Every time I look at them I wonder what the colors actually were. The grass, the dresses, the sunlight. For the longest time I assumed bringing that color back required either expensive software or serious artistic skill I didn’t have. Then I came across a technique that changed how I think about the whole problem entirely.

What a Professional Music Video Shoot Can Teach You About Planning, Framing, and Staying Flexible on Set
Video Tutorials

What a Professional Music Video Shoot Can Teach You About Planning, Framing, and Staying Flexible on Set

One of the biggest things I see beginner photographers struggle with is not the technical stuff. It’s the chaos. The moment something doesn’t go according to plan, the shot falls apart because there was never a real plan to begin with. I learned that lesson the hard way on a travel shoot in Iceland where I had no shot list, no schedule, and no backup idea when the light died at 2pm.