One process that plagues many photographers is setting pricing. Whether you’re just starting out or re-evaluating your business, having a deliberate process for determining your pricing is key. One of the common complaints among photo buyers, whether they’re professional art buyers or consumers, is that pricing seems to simply be arbitrary. To a certain extent they’re correct, but being able to justify how you’ve arrived at your pricing goes a long way towards blunting some of that criticism. (more…)
Autoloader for Photoshop has completely changed my workflow and saves me hours of time every session I edit. This video will teach you how I use this Photoshop script…
Let me start off by saying that I don’t necessarily condone this sort of behavior–being the good Catholic boy that I am, I was riddled with guilt afterward, but I need to set up my scenario so hopefully you’ll see my point. Here’s what happened. I had a shoot in North Carolina to cover something that I have always wanted to experience: a soldier’s return home from deployment. I was asked to cover a squadron of Marines returning home after spending nine months in Iraq and I immediately said yes. I flew into Raleigh-Durham the day before and then proceeded to drive almost three hours to my hotel (which was NOT a Days Inn) just wanted to clarify that. When you’ve been flying and driving all day the hotel is always a welcome sight “¦ sometimes.
I received a question the other day from a fledgling photographer. The question, a variation on one I get pretty regularly, was whether is was necessary to assist other photographers before putting yourself out there as a shooter yourself. Some of the variations on the theme are, “Is is necessary to go to college,” “Do I need to have a degree or will a certificate suffice,” or the classic: “How do I get a job as a photographer?” The answers to these, and similar, questions will be as varied as the individuals who ask them of course. With that said, there are some standard concepts that hold true. Please note that my area of expertise is in the commercial arena, many of the issues here will work across other photographic specialties though. (more…)
The edges of your image (the borders, not the edges within your image), play several important roles in composition.
Puffin and Distraction. Iceland. Don't do this! (Or at least, crop the distracting bit of bird, right.)
If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.
First, it’s easy for distractions along the border of an image to pull the eye “out’ of the image, and thus, they are usually undesirable. Highlights near the edges can be a particular problem. Edge distractions are best noticed and corrected for in-camera. One of the firm habits I have when doing landscape photography is taking a moment before shooting to glance around the edges of a photograph looking for distractions. If I find them, often only a very minor adjustment in camera angle or position is necessary to move the distractions off-stage. (more…)
I’m just starting a third revamp of my own nature photography website, (the first two dating from 2002 and 2004), and I wanted to share my thoughts on creative, effective photography websites. While it’s tempting (at least for geeks like myself!) to drop immediately into the nitty-gritty of implementation details, it’s far more important to first plan out what your web site is going to be for and how it will function as a part of your photography business (or even hobby.)
First, consider how your website will fit into your sales cycle. What is the site supposed to do for you and your clients? The most common mistake I see from aspiring nature and fine art photographers is (more…)
It seems that lately I am beginning to see more wedding photographers who are “photojournalist only” or “natural light.” I don’t want to get into a debate about the merits of these specialties as I’m a big believer that whatever works for you and your clients is great. Everyone doesn’t have to do it the same way. In fact, it’s a good thing we don’t because then wedding photographers would be like gas stations: Whoever has the lowest price gets the business.
That being said, it still seems like we are starting to move towards a complete elimination of the “formal” wedding portrait. I know for a fact that many photographers hate to shoot them and some flat refuse to. I don’t understand that mentality. (more…)
Shafts, Zabriskie Point. Death Valley National Park, California. Usually I think of Zabriskie as a morning shot, but afternoon works here.
In this last installment of my introduction to Death Valley, I’ll touch on a few more locations for first-time visitors to Death Valley.
(If you haven’t seen them yet, check out part one and part two.)
Zabriskie Point
One of the classic photographic locations of Death Valley is Zabriskie Point, located just up the road from Furnace Creek. Erosion has carved up these layered, multicolored hills into strangely folded patterns. The main viewpoint overlooks this folded landscape and marks the beginning of trails which descend down into it. I’ve most often photographed Zabriskie in the early morning, the area does not get first light until a half-hour or more after nominal sunrise, but there are things to shoot here all day. (more…)
Many times I’ve heard the understandable complaint that, after a good bit of working an image to get just the right color, that those colors are sapped by Photoshop or Lightroom when the image is exported to JPEG and then viewed on the web. There are all sorts of explanations on the web about this, and a lot of posturing about the “right way to handle things,” and there are all sorts of issues with the wealth of uncalibrated monitors out there, web browsers that don’t support color management at all (IE, Chrome, older Firefox) vs. those that do support it (Safari, more recent Firefox).
Over the years, I’ve become enamored of wide zooms–the wider the better. One of my faves is a Tokina fisheye zoom that I practically take everywhere. But there’s only so much barrel distortion one person can take, and only so far that distortion correction can take an image–when you want to employ it, that is. Sometimes you just want to start out with straight lines wherever you can get them. So, when I heard that Nikon had a new 10-24mm lens, I was on it like an egret on a fish (hey, it’s the first metaphor that popped into my head).
I’d worked with Canon’s EF-S 10-22 mm lens–and simply loved it. At the time, I still had an APS-C Canon, but I was fast moving toward full-frame and knew the lens would not be long for this world if I bought it. So I tested it, and sadly said goodbye. Now that I’m back in the APS-C camp with the Nikon D300–and loving it!–it was time to examine yet another zoom in the ultra-wide dimension (super-wide? potato, potato–you get what I mean).
