Our small blue planet is located on a spiral arm, far out from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. When we look towards the galactic center, we can view one of the most spectacular sites imaginable. Thousands of stars are clustered together, to form a hazy band in the sky, known simply as the Milky

Photographing large, dangerous wildlife can be extremely fun to do, but there are some unique factors to consider when your subjects are wild animals, in their natural habitat. Your adrenaline may be pumping, but you must keep your wits about you at all times, and not get caught up in the excitemen

Nothing catches the eye of a potential home buyer or design client quite like a beautiful set of photos. Whether it’s for real estate agents, designers, or homeowners, expectations are high, and restrictions are often many. It’s not uncommon to have to deal with extremely short notice,

Editing is the bottleneck part of the workflow for many portrait photographers. We can shoot a great picture in mere seconds, but when it comes to editing dozens of images, it often feels like it takes forever. The biggest editing time saver is of course to get it right when shooting. There are

When was the last time you did not primarily light your scene using a large soft source, such as a soft box or umbrella? Large soft sources easily create a beautiful, wrap-around quality of light. Just pop one up and you have instant “good” light. Final image: before and after in Lightro

Final Image: Bear Rock, Dolly Sod Wilderness Area, West Virginia. Sunrise and Sunsets can be extremely contrasting and very challenging to capture the wide exposure range. Here’s a problem I am sure you have encountered, instances where you try to photograph an image that has a

Long, swirling star trail photography is on the bucket list of many photographers. In the film days, this required leaving your shutter open for one continuous exposure on the order of hours and hoping that everything would turn out just right. In the digital era, many photographers rely on a proces

As parents and photographers, we take thousands and thousands of photos of our children every year. Looking at my Lightroom catalogue from last year, I have over 3000 photos of the kids, and that doesn’t include all the pictures I took with my phone camera! In our house, the camera is always

As photographers, you’re all looking to “wow” the people we’re taking pictures of, whether they’re clients or just friends. When you show final images, there’s that sense of anticipation, excitement and nervousness as you gauge reactions. And when you hear the wor

I recently went to Bali for a family holiday. Of course my camera and tripod were never far away. I managed to get a nice range of images that I can share with you today. The images below were shot with a Nikon D800 and Nikon 24-70mm 2.8 AFS. Falling in love We first stayed in Ubud in a villa a litt

Introduction This article has been transposed from the Lightroom 4 Workflow System DVD, designed to teach Lightroom users the entire workflow system that we use to cull/edit at a rate of 1500 images per hour. We will be writing about several of these tips/techniques in this 10 part series to be rele

Over the past year I’ve had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with, and finally meeting in person, a long term world traveler by the name of Gary Arndt. Gary left the USA about three years ago and has been traveling the globe ever since, chronicling his adventures on his wildly popular Eve

No matter which RAW photo editor you use, organizing your photos is probably one of the least enjoyable tasks in your photography workflow. However, setting up your catalogs correctly, or making changes to its structure, can ultimately save you a lot of valuable time. In this article, I’

What is the one thing that all photographers hate? Maybe selfie sticks take the top spot. But close to the top has to be editing. It is the one part of my workflow that I least look forward to. Like most photographers, I would much rather be spending my time taking photos than sitting in front of

Have you heard all about how GIMP is free and open-source, but you’ve struggled to embrace the program? Well, I was like that at first; that’s why I decided to make this guide on installing GIMP plugins from one non-techie to another. My first few attempts to use GIMP were quite off-put

Affinity Photo is a powerful image editing software. It’s both affordable and enjoyable to use. But, as with any program for custom manipulation of photos, there is a reasonably steep learning curve involved. If you’re used to editing your images with Adobe Photoshop, you’ll find

Singing “Home on the Range,“ a cowboy might picture the perfect place where “the skies are not cloudy all day.” A cloudless day might appeal to many people, but not to landscape photographers. The so-called “bluebird day” generally makes for poor landscape photo

ACDSee has just launched its latest software:  Photo Studio Ultimate 2021, which improves upon ACDSee’s Photo Studio Ultimate 2020 and continues to compete with programs such as ON1 Photo RAW and Luminar as one of the best all-in-one photo editors on the market. ACDSee’s software i

When it comes to a photographer’s workflow, there is one stage that might be more important than any other. It is the image selection process, also known as the culling stage. This critical stage is the point where you get your images into Lightroom (or other software) and start choosing which

Working with layers in Affinity Photo is very similar to how you work with layers in Adobe Photoshop. So if you are used to Photoshop, the transition to using layers in Affinity Photo is relatively easy. Are you new to post-processing your photos with software that allows you to use layers? You&rsq