News

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s not Photoshopped. She’s standing there.