Author: Alik Griffin

New Release: Malibu Gold

This Landscape Photo was taken near the Malibu Pier in Malibu California. It was an extremely high tide so I was able to capture the waves interacting with the foreground rock formation. The lighting and time of day made the rock look almost like gold.
Why You Should Avoid Shooting With Small Apertures

Typically as photographers, we are taught, the smaller the aperture the sharper and crisper your image is going to be. You ever go online and look at an awesome photo’s EXIF data? You ever notice almost all the landscape and hdr photos you see will be shot at f16 or higher? If you’re always shooting high…
Fukuoka Airport HDR Photo

This was from my last moments in Japan at the Fukuoka Airport. The photography gods finally appeared at the end there and gave me one last blessing. We ate dinner in a restaurant when the sun lit the sky. Luckily, my Sony A7r wasn’t packed away with the rest of my gear.
A Better Way To Create Luminosity Masks

I see a lot of techniques floating around the interwebs on how to practice the ancient art of Luminosity Masks for landscape photography in Photoshop. I’m pretty sure most of these techniques date back to the 1990s before layer masks existed. Adobe has recently, in the last ten or twenty years, made a lot of…
Instantly Remove Color Cast In Photoshop

Manually adjusting your color balance in Photoshop is never fun. There are several tricks, some dating back to almost centuries ago. Some more modern.Here is a technique that's fun and super easy to do.
How To Upgrade Your Mac Pro Graphics Card

I’ve recently had to make the switch over to Premiere CC on my home Mac Pro, but my old 2009 tower didn’t cut it. You need a Nvidea GPU with at least 1GB of video ram to use its Mercury Playback Engine. So in order to get more life out of my old Mac Pro I upgraded its graphics card.…
Camera Cleaning Accessories – Here Is What You Need

This is the ultimate guide to camera cleaning, including the best cleaning accessories and some tips and tricks to keep your camera, sensor, and lenses clean.
Batteries You Should Buy For The Sony A7, A7r, A7s

After shooting with the A7r for the last 6 months I’ve decided to do a write-up on batteries and what batteries you should buy for your Sony mirrorless camera.
The Golden Rice Terraces

After my fourth visit to Japan, I finally got the landscape photo I always wanted. It encompasses everything I love about Japan in a single shot: the golden sunset over the island-filled seas with the rice field terraces in the foreground. Everything was perfect for this shot, which rarely happens to me. The weather was…
How I Got The Shot – Above Tokyo

My most popular posts often include a breakdown of how I get some of these shots and my different photography techniques. So, with this night-building shot in Tokyo, I’ve decided to do a detailed write-up sharing a few basic techniques because shots like this are a little more complicated than your normal landscape. Above Tokyo…