Camera Settings

Stop Letting Your Camera's Blinky Warnings Run Your Exposures
Video Tutorials

Stop Letting Your Camera's Blinky Warnings Run Your Exposures

I used to stop dead in my tracks the moment those little blinking zebra stripes showed up on my LCD. Highlights blinking? Back off the exposure immediately. It felt disciplined, even responsible. What I didn’t realize was that I was consistently underexposing my raw files because I was trusting a JPEG-based preview to make decisions for a raw workflow. The result was shadow noise I had to work around in Lightroom and images that took twice as long to edit than they needed to.

How to Photograph the Northern Lights: A Settings Guide That Actually Works in the Field
Video Tutorials

How to Photograph the Northern Lights: A Settings Guide That Actually Works in the Field

Every so often I watch a tutorial and think, “okay, this is the one I wish existed before I embarrassed myself.” Aurora photography has been on my bucket list for years, and the mental image I had of it was simple: point camera at sky, get green swirls, go home happy. What nobody told me is that the green swirls are the easy part. Finding a composition in the dark, in Arctic temperatures, while the lights are doing whatever they want on their own schedule - that’s the actual challenge.

How to Shoot and Edit a Bird Photo From Start to Finish (What I Learned From a Real-Time Walkthrough)
Video Tutorials

How to Shoot and Edit a Bird Photo From Start to Finish (What I Learned From a Real-Time Walkthrough)

Bird photography has a way of humbling you fast. You set up, you wait, the bird does something incredible, and you come home with a card full of motion blur and missed focus. For a long time I thought I was just unlucky. Turns out, I was underprepared. What helped me most wasn’t another article about focal lengths. It was watching a working photographer actually shoot in real time, with their screen visible and their decision-making narrated out loud.

How to Actually Get Sharp, Clean Photos in Low Light (A Step-by-Step Breakdown)
Video Tutorials

How to Actually Get Sharp, Clean Photos in Low Light (A Step-by-Step Breakdown)

Low-light photography is the situation that separates the photographers who understand their camera from the ones who are still guessing. I know this because I spent an embarrassing amount of time guessing. Sunday morning photo walks in Seattle will teach you humility fast - the light before 7am is gorgeous and completely unforgiving, and if you don’t know your settings, you’ll come home with a memory card full of blurry, muddy disappointments.

Shutter Speed Is the Only Camera Setting That Shows You Something Your Eyes Never Can
Video Tutorials

Shutter Speed Is the Only Camera Setting That Shows You Something Your Eyes Never Can

I have a complicated history with waterfalls. I once spent four straight evenings on a trip to Oregon chasing the same shot of a cascade at golden hour, missing dinner each time, until my husband started leaving snacks on the trail for me like I was a feral photographer. What I was chasing, though I couldn’t have articulated it then, was what shutter speed actually does: it lets you show something real that no human eye has ever seen.

Stop Guessing Your Exposure: 4 Field Decisions That Actually Work
Video Tutorials

Stop Guessing Your Exposure: 4 Field Decisions That Actually Work

There’s a specific kind of frustration I know well: arriving at a beautiful location, feeling the light, sensing the shot - and then blowing it because you didn’t adapt your settings fast enough for the conditions. Wind. Fading light. A subject that won’t cooperate. I used to lose shots constantly to this. Not because I didn’t understand exposure in theory, but because I hadn’t practiced making quick, confident decisions under real pressure.

Aurora Photography in New Zealand: A Complete Field Guide to Settings, Forecasting, and Capturing the Southern Lights
Video Tutorials

Aurora Photography in New Zealand: A Complete Field Guide to Settings, Forecasting, and Capturing the Southern Lights

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from standing under a sky full of stars with your camera pointed in the right direction — and getting back nothing but a blurry, noisy mess. Night sky photography has a steep learning curve, and aurora photography adds another layer on top of that: you have to be in the right place, at the right time, with conditions that cooperate. Most of us don’t get many chances to practice.

Why Your Digital Camera Still Speaks the Language of Film
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Why Your Digital Camera Still Speaks the Language of Film

Why Your Digital Camera Still Speaks the Language of Film Have you ever wondered why your camera’s shutter speed dial shows 1/125 instead of a rounder number like 1/100 or 1/150? I recently realized that many of the controls we use every day on modern mirrorless cameras are actually digital echoes of mechanical film-era designs—and understanding this connection can deepen your appreciation for your gear. The Mechanical Mathematics Behind Modern Controls When I started digging into this topic, I discovered something fascinating: that 1/125 marking isn’t arbitrary at all.

How to Light and Shoot Large Furniture Products (Without a Full Studio Setup)
Video Tutorials

How to Light and Shoot Large Furniture Products (Without a Full Studio Setup)

Every time someone in one of my workshops asks about product photography, the conversation lands in the same place: tabletop setups, white seamless paper, and a couple of speedlights pointed at a coffee mug. That’s genuinely useful to know. But what happens when the product is a sofa? A dining table? A chair that’s taller than your lighting stand? I ran into this exact wall a few years back when a small furniture brand reached out asking if I could shoot their line for a product catalog.

Why Your Outdoor Videos Still Look Amateurish (And the $30 Fix That Changes Everything)
Video Tutorials

Why Your Outdoor Videos Still Look Amateurish (And the $30 Fix That Changes Everything)

Every Sunday morning I take a photo walk around my neighborhood in Seattle. Rain, shine, the occasional hailstorm — I’m out there. And for years, the footage I shot on those walks had this weird, jittery quality I couldn’t shake. My photos looked fine. My videos looked like I filmed them through a nervous system. I adjusted exposure, I fiddled with ISO, I blamed the camera. Turns out I was fighting the wrong problem entirely.

Aperture and Depth of Field, Finally Explained in a Way That Actually Sticks
Video Tutorials

Aperture and Depth of Field, Finally Explained in a Way That Actually Sticks

Every Sunday morning I’m out walking with my camera, and I still run into beginners who are shooting in full auto because aperture confuses them. Not bores them. Confuses them. The numbers go the wrong direction, the results feel unpredictable, and nobody ever explains what’s actually happening inside the lens. I get it. It tripped me up too. That’s exactly why I appreciated stumbling onto this William Patino tutorial on aperture and depth of field.

How to Photograph a Hidden Waterfall: Depth, Framing, and the Art of Slowing Down
Video Tutorials

How to Photograph a Hidden Waterfall: Depth, Framing, and the Art of Slowing Down

I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time standing at the base of a waterfall convinced that being right there was the best position. Closer is better, right? More impact? It took me years, a ruined vacation, and a lot of mediocre shots before I understood that proximity is usually the enemy of a great landscape frame. The foreground, midground, and background all have to earn their place in the image, and waterfall photography is where that lesson hits hardest.