Photography Tips And Tricks

A Word About Non-Profit Image Pricing

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Howdy folks! I’ve just returned to the Yukon from a few days in Vancouver where I spent some time catching up with friends and running a few errands to pick up items that you simply can’t get up North. Just as an example, I’m unable to order any Li-ion batteries from Amazon and have them shipped to my home in the Yukon. That’s kind of a pain in the ass when your business revolves battery-powered devices. The reason for this is that for the most part, shipping companies don’t do road transportation up here, they fly things up on commercial

Why Do I Keep a Notebook in My Camera Bag?

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I just returned from a week-long photo trip to Vancouver Island where I spent time photographing black bears fishing for salmon as I work on collecting photos for my first ever book project. A couple of days after I got back from the trip I spent a few hours doing something that for me, has become almost ritualistic after an expedition. Let me explain… I keep a small Field Notes notebook and a pen in my camera bag, and I write it in every time something goes wrong. The act of writing it down helps me to remember the situation

A Reminder About Aerial Photography Tips!

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There’s nothing quite like flying over incredible landscapes! I recently went for a flight over Whistler with Sea to Sky Air to get some photos and footage for a new project. I was processing some photos today and it reminded me of a hugely in-depth tutorial that I wrote about this topic a while back when I flew over the same area. You can find the giant aerial photography tutorial on Shutter Muse. Just a couple of months ago I also wrote a quick not here on my blog about the best lenses for aerial photography. If you can make

Uh Oh – They Weighed My Carry-On Luggage..!

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If you’re reading the blog posts in chronological order, you’ll know I had a less than pleasing travel experience a few days ago on a flight to the Yukon. It seems that air travel is only destined to get more complicated, and on my return flight to British Columbia this morning with Air North (actually I’m writing this on the plane), I had another experience that’s worth talking about. In this instance I ran up against the dreaded carry-on luggage weight limit. I’ve flown a lot in my career and in well over a decade of flight you can count

How Not To Perform Autofocus Microadjustments

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As I mentioned recently, I’m working on some in-depth tutorials for Shutter Muse about autofocus microadjustment, which is a feature of some mid-to-high end cameras that allows you to fine-tune the autofocus performance of particular lens and camera combinations. Perhaps microadjustment is something you already do, and maybe you even own a LensAlign II or a SpyderLENSCAL? Well, during my research, a bit of lateral thinking lead me to discover something which many people are getting wrong when they are performing microadjustments. These days all cameras have a live view function, but what many people aren’t aware of is that

Do You Microadjust the Autofocus On Your Camera?

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A few days I was performing some microadjustments to my camera’s autofocus system and I snapped a photo of my setup and posted it to my Instagram stories with the question “do you microadjust your cameras and lenses?”. I wasn’t thinking too hard about it at the time, I was just snapping a quick photo of day-to-day life behind the lens as I often do on Instagram. Some of the responses to the question caught me by surprise though! I’m paraphrasing them slightly, but they loosely speaking they fell into 4 categories What is AF microadjustment? I didn’t know my

The Importance of Being Prepared As a Professional

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A few weeks ago I was photographing the Slush Cup event in Whistler for a client and the weather forecast was all over the map in the preceding few days. When working in the mountains, if it’s anything but a high pressure system and bluebird weather then I’ll always be prepared for pretty much anything. You can’t book a job and not deliver the goods because the weather was too severe for your equipment, there’s always a photo to be had and a way to get it! The question is often asked, “what makes a professional photographer?” or “what makes a

Day #10 | Macro Challenge

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Day #10 of my Stay Out There 10-Day Challenge!  This means it’s the last day of the Creative Cloud Photography plan giveaway as well.  You’ve got until midnight tonight to enter it at the bottom of this blog post. Earlier in this series I mentioned that you can use lenses on your mobile phone to create vastly different perspectives. In that post I talked about the amazing Olloclip iPhone macro lenses and showed a couple of pretty cool examples of extreme close-up shots.  Those lenses take things to extremes, but you can still get macro-like shots with most mobile phones

Day #9 | Chasing Your Photography Dreams

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  For Day #9 of my Stay Out There 10-Day Challenge, I want to share a little bit of my own story and talk about chasing your own photographic dreams. People always tell me that I’m “so lucky” to do what I do, but the reality is that there was very little luck involved at all.  I know that when most people say that, they don’t necessarily mean luck in the traditional sense of the word, like rolling a dice, but they still talk about it as if it’s something that they could never do themselves. I’ve met many people who

Day #8 | Self-Portrait Challenge

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Today’s challenge for your photography is all about self portraits.  We’re up to day #8 now on my Stay Out There 10-Day Challenge, and this one is another easy one that anyone with a camera or a cell phone can take part in. I’ve found that when you really love taking photos, you can quickly become the designated photographer in your circle of friends or family.  The result is many great photos of them, but often much less in the way of evidence that you were actually there as well. At the time it might not seem like a big deal, but

Day #7 – Photoshop Sequences

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For day #7 of my Stay Out There 10-Day Challenge, I wanted to highlight one of my favourite Photoshop techniques, called a sequence.  This is a technique that involves taking a number of photos in quick succession, and then layering them on top of each other in Photoshop CC. This kind of technique used to be confined to photographers with professional grade cameras, dude to the necessity for a very fast frame rate.  Thankfully these days, my iPhone shoots photo bursts and 10fps, and even my recently purchased Sony RX 100 IV pocket camera shoots at a mind-boggling 16fps!  Both of these