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Finding the Right Portfolio Platform: Which Web Builder Actually Works for Photographers?
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Finding the Right Portfolio Platform: Which Web Builder Actually Works for Photographers?

Finding the Right Portfolio Platform: Which Web Builder Actually Works for Photographers? Building a photography portfolio website can feel overwhelming. There are countless platforms out there, each promising to be the perfect solution for showcasing your work. I recently spent considerable time testing various web builders to see which ones actually live up to the hype for photographers—and which ones fall short. The challenge is real. Your portfolio isn’t just a website; it’s often your primary marketing tool and sometimes your entire business storefront.

When Editing Becomes Cheating: What Disqualified Photos Teach Us About Competition Rules
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When Editing Becomes Cheating: What Disqualified Photos Teach Us About Competition Rules

Photography competitions are one of those topics I find genuinely fascinating, partly because they matter so much to people’s careers and partly because the rules around them reveal a lot about how we collectively define “truth” in an image. A single win in the right competition can shift everything: editorial assignments, gallery interest, licensing deals. The stakes are real. And where there are high stakes, there are people who push boundaries, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not.

How Peter McKinnon Packs His Camera Bag (And What It Taught Me About My Own Kit)
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How Peter McKinnon Packs His Camera Bag (And What It Taught Me About My Own Kit)

Every Sunday morning I do a photo walk around Seattle. Rain, shine, occasionally a very dramatic fog situation. And for years, I wasted the first fifteen minutes of every single one just digging around in my bag for a lens cap or a spare battery I was sure I’d packed. My bag was a disaster. Good gear, chaotic organization, and I was losing the best light standing on a sidewalk muttering to myself.

How Joel Grimes Shoots Giant Landscape Panoramas at the Edge of the Grand Canyon (And What You Can Actually Learn From It)
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How Joel Grimes Shoots Giant Landscape Panoramas at the Edge of the Grand Canyon (And What You Can Actually Learn From It)

There’s a particular kind of torture that comes with standing in front of a breathtaking landscape and knowing your camera can’t hold what your eyes are seeing. The sky is blowing out, the shadows are a muddy mess, and a single frame just doesn’t capture the scale of what you’re standing in front of. I’ve been there more times than I want to admit, including one memorable trip where I spent three days trying to photograph a waterfall and kept walking away with images that felt flat and small compared to the real thing.

Why Built-In ND Filters Matter for Modern Cinema Cameras
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Why Built-In ND Filters Matter for Modern Cinema Cameras

The Evolution of Exposure Control in Cinema I’ve been watching the cinema camera market closely, and I’m genuinely excited about the direction manufacturers are taking. Fujifilm recently announced a significant firmware update for their Eterna 55 cinema camera that introduces automatic electronic neutral density (ND) support. This might sound like a minor technical detail, but it actually represents something important for both seasoned filmmakers and those just starting their journey into cinema production.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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