Beginner Tips

How Two Grieving Parents Turned a Photography Challenge Into Something That Can Teach Us All
Video Tutorials

How Two Grieving Parents Turned a Photography Challenge Into Something That Can Teach Us All

There’s a specific kind of photographer paralysis I run into every few months. I have the gear, I have the free weekend, and I still can’t make myself go out and shoot. Not because conditions are bad, but because I have no real reason to be there. No target. No stakes. It took watching a deeply moving video from Thomas Heaton to remind me how transformative a structured photography project can be, not just creatively, but personally.

How Peter McKinnon Reviews His Own Photos (And What It Teaches You About Yours)
Video Tutorials

How Peter McKinnon Reviews His Own Photos (And What It Teaches You About Yours)

Every photographer I know has a graveyard folder. You know the one. Photos you worked hard on, posted quietly, and watched get twelve likes while some blurry sunset you almost didn’t post gets shared three hundred times. For a long time, I treated that graveyard like a failure file. Then I started doing something that changed how I look at my own work: the photo audit. I came across this idea watching Peter McKinnon walk through some of his own favorite Instagram photos, the ones he considers underappreciated, overlooked, or just misunderstood by his audience.

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.

Wide-Angle Lenses Are Harder Than They Look — Here's How to Stop Fighting Yours
Video Tutorials

Wide-Angle Lenses Are Harder Than They Look — Here's How to Stop Fighting Yours

There’s a specific kind of frustration I remember from my early landscape work: standing in front of something genuinely breathtaking, shooting with the widest lens I owned, and still walking away with photos that felt… flat. Crowded. Like I’d tried to describe an entire novel in a single sentence. I owned a 16-35mm zoom, and for an embarrassingly long stretch, I shot everything at 16mm because I thought wider automatically meant better.

Photograph It Like You've Never Seen It Before: Mark Denney's One Rule That Changed How I Shoot
Video Tutorials

Photograph It Like You've Never Seen It Before: Mark Denney's One Rule That Changed How I Shoot

There’s a habit I picked up early in my photography life that quietly held me back for years. I’d find a good location, nail a shot I was happy with, and then mentally file that place away as “done.” Visited. Captured. Move on. It wasn’t until I started paying attention to how working landscape photographers approach their locations that I realized how much I was leaving behind every single time.

How to Shoot Stunning Fall Color Photos (3 Lighting Tricks That Actually Work)
Video Tutorials

How to Shoot Stunning Fall Color Photos (3 Lighting Tricks That Actually Work)

Every October I drag myself out of bed before sunrise for my Sunday photo walk, and every October I’m reminded that fall is both the most forgiving and the most deceptive season to shoot. The colors do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, sure. But point your camera in the wrong direction or stand in the wrong spot, and those gorgeous reds and golds go flat fast. I’ve watched friends come home from leaf-peeping trips with hundreds of photos that look like sad screensavers.

Five Small Edits That Turn a Flat Landscape Photo Into Something Worth Printing
Video Tutorials

Five Small Edits That Turn a Flat Landscape Photo Into Something Worth Printing

There’s a particular kind of frustration I know well: standing at a gorgeous location, nailing the shot in the moment, and then opening Lightroom to find the image looks… flat. The sky is washed out, the horizon tilts just enough to be annoying, and the whole thing lacks the punch you felt when you pressed the shutter. That gap between what you saw and what the file shows is exactly the problem this tutorial addresses head-on.

Stop Leaning on the Rule of Thirds (And What to Do Instead)
Video Tutorials

Stop Leaning on the Rule of Thirds (And What to Do Instead)

Every Sunday morning I take a photo walk around Seattle, and for the first year of doing it, nearly every single frame I came home with had the horizon sitting on the same horizontal third. Flowers in the lower third. Dramatic sky filling the upper two-thirds. It was compositionally “correct” and deeply, relentlessly boring. I didn’t even notice until I laid a grid over a month’s worth of shots and realized I’d essentially taken the same photograph forty times in different locations.

Why Your Imperfect Photos Might Be Your Most Powerful Ones
Video Tutorials

Why Your Imperfect Photos Might Be Your Most Powerful Ones

I deleted a lot of photos in my first two years of shooting. Not because they were bad, exactly, but because they weren’t technically clean. Slightly soft corners. A stray highlight. Motion blur I didn’t intend. I treated my Lightroom culling sessions like a quality control line at a factory, and anything that didn’t pass inspection got trashed without a second look. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I was throwing away some of my most interesting frames.

The Real Reason Landscape Photographers Wake Up Before Dawn (And How to Use It)
Video Tutorials

The Real Reason Landscape Photographers Wake Up Before Dawn (And How to Use It)

I have a Sunday morning tradition that my husband thinks is only slightly less baffling than extreme sports. Every week, I’m out the door before anyone else on the block has their coffee brewing, camera in hand, walking through Seattle neighborhoods while the light is still soft and the streets are quiet. People ask me why I bother. My answer is always the same: you cannot fake that light. You can’t recreate it in post-processing, you can’t wait until noon and find it again, and no filter comes close.

Understanding Camera Battery Charging: Finding Your Perfect Workflow Solution
News

Understanding Camera Battery Charging: Finding Your Perfect Workflow Solution

Understanding Camera Battery Charging: Finding Your Perfect Workflow Solution When I’m out on assignment, my camera battery is as crucial as my lens. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how photographers approach battery management—and I realized there’s no universal “best” solution. Just like different photographers have different needs, different charging methods serve different purposes. The Three Battery Charging Approaches As I’ve observed in the photography community, most of us fall into one of three charging patterns.

One Lens, One Body, One Island: What Sean Tucker's Minimalist Approach Taught Me About Creative Constraints
Video Tutorials

One Lens, One Body, One Island: What Sean Tucker's Minimalist Approach Taught Me About Creative Constraints

Every few months I catch myself doing the same thing before a trip: laying out lenses on the bed, running the mental math on which zoom covers which scenario, and stuffing my bag until the zippers protest. I justify it as being prepared. But what I’m usually doing is using gear as a security blanket instead of trusting my own eye. It took watching someone else deliberately strip everything away for me to recognize the habit for what it was.