Category: Photo Tips

How To Shoot Better Sun Stars

A relatively new trend has emerged in online photography communities over the last few years, which involves shooting into the sun or other bright light sources so that the bright light creates star points around it—also known as sun stars. The Method I run across many tutorials and tips for people explaining how to do it.…
How I’ve Set The ‘Q’ Menu On The Fujifilm X100T

I’ve been shooting for years now with the Fujifilm X100 series of cameras and have come to really love the Q menu. The ability to customize your settings and get to anything you want with a single click is genius. Here is how I’ve changed my Q menu for RAW shooting with the X100 series…
4 Ways to Improve Your HDR Photography Before Tone Mapping

Are you looking for ways to improve your HDR photography? Are you wondering where in your HDR workflow you are making mistakes? Chances are there are a few steps you’re completely overlooking, and they happen before you even start. I’ve compiled a list of four techniques you need to use for every HDR photo before tone…
Save Your Skies With Luminosity Masks

Often times when shooting sunsets you’ll find the area just around the sun gets blown out by the intense light. It’s important to bring down those highlights to help avoid lost colors and pixels in your images which will also help give you a much deeper rendering of both colors in the highlights.
How To Reduce Rolling Shutter With The Sony A7s

If you’ve purchased and been shooting with the Sony A7s, you may have noticed that it has one of the worst rolling shutters ever in a full-frame camera. It’s so bad, in fact, that it really limits you to making landscape travel videos with a twiddly little music bed that you’ll likely only post on…
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…
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…
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…
Cool Lightroom Sharpening Trick You Probably Didn’t Know About

Over the years as Lightroom has evolved, it’s become a tool that can almost do everything you could ask for, aside from serious retouching and artistic design.
Shoot Remotely With The Sony A7 & A7r

As I've been looking more and more into seriously doing drone photography, I've been playing more with the Smart Remote Control App on my Sony A7r and have found that it's really really cool. At first I couldn’t really get it to do everything I wanted, like shooting Raw. But I then discovered you have to actually dig…