Videos

Whether you shoot landscapes, street scenes, or seascapes, a crooked horizon is a sure way to mess up an otherwise great shot. You can avoid this problem by composing your scene properly in the camera, and most viewfinders have a grid option to make this pretty easy.

If you want to make great images of next week’s 4^th of July fireworks festivities it’s important to know what you’re doing before the spectacle lights up the sky. The six-minute video below will explain everything you need to know to make the most of this annual opportunity.

We’ll let you in on a little secret about all those spectacular photos of starlit skies that you wish you could take yourself: Astrophotography is easier than you think—especially if you learn the eight tips in the one-minute video below.

The first thing many photographers do after investing in a new lens is to screw on a UV or haze filter. The idea is that these filters protect the front element of your lens from dirt and impact damage while improving contrast and eliminating atmospheric haze.

We’ve all had an otherwise beautiful landscape or cityscape scene ruined by a dull, blown-out, or boring sky without clouds. In the Photoshop tutorial below you’ll learn a simple sky replacement technique for turning those outtakes into money shots.

There are a number of interesting film-era camera effects that are popular among today’s digital photographers, one of which is the so-called “Lomo Effect” named after an old Russian film camera. The inexpensive Lomo LC-A was known for creating images with blurry edges, a sharp center, weirdly saturated colors, and plenty of vignetting.

One way to avoid unnecessary processing time is to set the optimum white balance for your scene before shooting a photograph. That typically involves selecting one of the camera’s pre-set modes, or taking time to create a custom white balance setting yourself.