When I first started carrying my camera around every day, I saw pictures in two dimensions. My photos were like line drawings on paper—so many inches wide and so many inches long, but flat. Later, I started to see differently. I learned to see in multiple planes, like an architect would when drawing perspective sketches [...]

“Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.” When he said this, Charles Baudelaire was talking about how photography seems to be a way to copy nature and present it as an archive of how we live. Baudelaire talked about photography as documentation and nothing more. He relegated its usefulness and [...]

One of the most important things we have to remember if we want to stay inspired in photography is to give ourselves photo projects. Engaging in a photo project is a lot of fun and a lot of learning. A couple of weeks ago, a reader asked us how we’d go about shooting martial arts. [...]

Like everything in photography, shooting in color is a decision. That sounds weird, right? After all, the world is in Technicolor and we can’t really turn all the color off. Color has emotional content. We use it a lot in the ways we express our feelings. “Red as a beet” for both embarrassment and anger. [...]

The impressionist painters have taught us that it doesn’t take a whole lot of detail to suggest meaning in an image; so it is with photography. Instead of snapping what is literally in front of us, we can capture in a photo the images we have in our minds. With the right content, lighting, and [...]

Many times, one light is enough. The master of the “one light,” Zack Arias once racked up a huge debt from being a gear head. From this experience, he learned to use the bare minimum equipment and came out stronger as a photographer. As someone who has been a gear head myself, I subscribe to [...]

We’ve all spent time browsing through a stunning collection of photographs and exclaimed, “Wow!” at each one. A lot of inspiration is so accessible online, and the range of affordable cameras has widened to the extent that in 2010 alone, people bought 21.7 million units of cameras with interchangeable lenses! Photography has grown into a [...]

Quite a few articles have been written about portraiture being one of the most difficult photography genres to master. Search online, and more than half a million blogs  write about portraiture—a lot of people are trying to make sense of all the things that go into making a beautiful portrait. Portraits are the most interesting [...]