Posts

How to Direct Maternity Portrait Sessions Like Ana Brandt: A Step-by-Step Posing Breakdown
Video Tutorials

How to Direct Maternity Portrait Sessions Like Ana Brandt: A Step-by-Step Posing Breakdown

Maternity sessions used to trip me up more than almost any other genre. The pressure is real: you have one window of time, an emotional subject, and a body that doesn’t respond to generic posing cues the way a typical portrait subject does. For a long time, I relied too heavily on poses I’d pinned and not enough on reading what was actually happening in front of my camera. What changed that for me was watching working pros direct in real time, not just seeing the final images.

How to Salvage a Terrible Photo: Breaking Down Peter McKinnon's Lightroom and Photoshop Workflow
Video Tutorials

How to Salvage a Terrible Photo: Breaking Down Peter McKinnon's Lightroom and Photoshop Workflow

I have a folder on my hard drive called “maybe someday.” It’s full of shots I couldn’t bring myself to delete but couldn’t figure out how to fix. Overexposed skies, flat midday light, frames that had a feeling I loved and a histogram I hated. If you have a folder like that too, this workflow is going to feel like finding a key you forgot you were looking for. In this Peter McKinnon tutorial, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube, he walks through the complete edit of a Niagara Falls RAW file that he openly admits looks awful straight out of camera.

What Shooting in Patagonia Teaches You About Landscape Photography Anywhere
Video Tutorials

What Shooting in Patagonia Teaches You About Landscape Photography Anywhere

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from arriving at a beautiful location and walking away with nothing usable. You saw the light. You were standing right there. But something about the image just didn’t land. I’ve had that happen more times than I’d like to admit, usually because I skipped the slower, more deliberate steps that separate a good frame from a forgettable one. What helped me rethink some of those habits was watching a Patagonia field shoot by landscape photographer Thomas Heaton.

How to Make Your Wildlife Subject Pop: The Flip the Scene Editing Trick
Video Tutorials

How to Make Your Wildlife Subject Pop: The Flip the Scene Editing Trick

Every Sunday morning I take a photo walk around whatever corner of Seattle I land in, and if there’s one problem I’ve carried with me from shoot to shoot over the years, it’s this: I come home with a wildlife shot where the bird or animal looks muddy and flat against a background that’s somehow brighter and busier than the subject itself. It’s frustrating because you know the moment was good.

When Your Photography Feels Stale, This Mindset Shift Changes Everything
Video Tutorials

When Your Photography Feels Stale, This Mindset Shift Changes Everything

There’s a specific kind of restlessness that hits photographers who have been at it for a while. You know how to use your gear. You know what makes a good shot. And somehow, that knowledge starts to feel like a ceiling instead of a foundation. I hit that wall about two years into shooting professionally, right around the time I could nail a technically correct exposure in my sleep but couldn’t remember the last time I was genuinely excited to pick up my camera.

Streamlining Your Album Workflow: How Automation Can Save Photography Businesses Hours
News

Streamlining Your Album Workflow: How Automation Can Save Photography Businesses Hours

Streamlining Your Album Workflow: How Automation Can Save Photography Businesses Hours I’ve noticed something interesting happening in professional photography lately: many talented photographers find themselves spending more time on post-delivery tasks than they’d like. After you’ve captured beautiful images and delivered the gallery, the real work often just begins. If you’ve been a photographer for any length of time, you know exactly what I mean. The Album Creation Challenge Let me be honest about what photographers typically face.

How to Shoot Dance with Both Motion Blur and Sharp Detail (Using Two Light Sources)
Video Tutorials

How to Shoot Dance with Both Motion Blur and Sharp Detail (Using Two Light Sources)

There’s a particular kind of dance photo that stops you mid-scroll. The subject is pin-sharp, every strand of hair frozen in place, but the frame still feels like movement. You can almost hear the music. I’ve tried faking that quality in post, and it never looks quite right. The magic is in how the shot is captured, not how it’s edited. When I came across this Visual Education tutorial featuring Broncolor consultant Otto Dobler and photographer KL Taylor, I finally understood the two-light approach that makes it possible.

How I Finally Stopped Dragging My Laptop Into the Field (And What I Use Instead)
Video Tutorials

How I Finally Stopped Dragging My Laptop Into the Field (And What I Use Instead)

Every time I pack for a photo trip, I play the same exhausting game of bag Tetris. Camera body, check. Lenses, check. Tripod, check. And then, because apparently I love suffering, I wedge in my laptop, which is easily the heaviest single item I own, just so I can move files from one small device to another small device. The laptop is nothing more than an expensive, power-hungry middleman. In this Mark Denney tutorial, he puts that exact frustration into words and then introduces a solution that genuinely changes the field workflow for travel and landscape photographers.

What Shooting a Single Roll of Film in Paris Taught Me About Taking Better Photos
Video Tutorials

What Shooting a Single Roll of Film in Paris Taught Me About Taking Better Photos

Every Sunday morning I take a photo walk around Seattle with whatever camera I feel like carrying. Sometimes it’s my mirrorless. Sometimes, and I know this will make some of you cringe, it’s just my phone. The point has never really been the gear. It’s the practice of showing up and being deliberate. So when I came across a recent Peter McKinnon tutorial where he shoots a single roll of 35mm black-and-white film through the streets of Paris, I felt that same philosophy land with real force.

How to Actually Choose the Right Camera System (A Working Photographer's Breakdown)
Video Tutorials

How to Actually Choose the Right Camera System (A Working Photographer's Breakdown)

Every few months, someone finds me on a Sunday photo walk and asks some version of the same question: “Which camera should I buy?” I used to fumble through an answer. Now I send them to do their homework first, because the honest truth is that the best camera system for you depends on a handful of very specific factors, and skipping even one of them can lead to an expensive mistake.

What Photographers Actually Need to Know Before Starting a YouTube Channel (Advice From a 10-Year Veteran)
Video Tutorials

What Photographers Actually Need to Know Before Starting a YouTube Channel (Advice From a 10-Year Veteran)

I’ve had the “should I start a YouTube channel?” conversation more times than I can count, usually over coffee with someone who already has a strong eye for photography but zero idea how to translate that into video. The hesitation is always the same: I’m too late, I’m too old, I don’t know what I’m doing on camera. What nobody tells these photographers is that the barrier is almost never what they think it is.

How to Edit Urban Photos for Drama: Exposure, Shadows, and Color Toning Techniques from Peter McKinnon
Video Tutorials

How to Edit Urban Photos for Drama: Exposure, Shadows, and Color Toning Techniques from Peter McKinnon

Every Sunday morning I’m out on a photo walk around Seattle, and I probably shoot more city scenes than anything else. Rainy streets, glass towers, the blue-gray light that rolls in off the sound. But for the longest time, my edits felt flat. I’d nail the composition and then sit in front of Lightroom wondering why the photo looked nothing like what I’d felt standing there. The problem wasn’t the shot.