As I write, I’m looking back on my 36 years as a professional photographer with fondness and gratitude. I chose this profession because I wanted to travel and earn a living while doing so. It’s been an amazing three and a half decades and I’m still excited every time I...
Post Archive By Guest Poster - Page 7
How I Learned to Separate Details
A few weeks ago, I visited Casa Mila, also known as La Pedrera in Barcelona Spain, which in 1984 was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. It was the last civil work designed by renowned architect Antoni Gaudi, who was the best-known practitioner of Catalan Modernism. When visiting La...
What Is Color Banding and How to Fix It
Working on your photos in Photoshop, you might have come across the situation where you begin to see weird lines appear in places where they shouldn’t be and weren’t before. This issue is especially common for very smooth gradients, such as skies, and can undoubtedly destroy even the most beautiful...
Aquarium Macro Photography of Ornamental Shrimp
“There’s such a thing as ornamental shrimp?” This is the typical response of family and friends when I speak to them about my recent hobby of keeping ornamental shrimp. Believe it or not, there is growing interest around the world about breeding and keeping these little freshwater critters as pets....
Why Good Photographers Take Bad Photos
Have you ever seen a spectacular image and been flabbergasted when you saw that the photographer was an amateur - and they used their phone? Or looked at the website of a pro only to be disappointed by a slew of boring photos? Maybe you know someone who knows everything...
Wildlife Photography at Your Doorstep
I am an amateur photographer and have had a DSLR for approximately 10 years. It is only in the last 2 years that I have started to get seriously interested in wildlife photography. I feel like I am in the early days of building a portfolio of images. Living in...
Technicolor Black and White
Recently I returned to one of my enduring passions: shooting film. I'm Italian and I recently moved to California. In Italy, it's really hard to find a good lab to develop film and it's even more difficult to find rolls of film of the brands I like. Here in the...
Stop Taking Crappy Pictures!
Hi. My name is Elliot Madriss and I teach a successful class at the continuing education facility as part of the University of New Mexico called "Stop Taking Crappy Pictures!". This class was created as a direct result of my reaction to the very poor quality of images being posted...
How to Fix Lens Distortion
Lens distortion is a common issue we photographers deal with on a daily basis. It can be split into two groups - distortion by perspective and distortion by optics. Be it one or the other, it often causes unnatural-looking deformation of photos we take. As a result, we end up...
Photographing the Humpback Whales of Tonga
Photographing the humpback whales of Tonga has been on my personal bucket list for a number of years and finally in 2015 I got to spend nearly three weeks in Neiafu, the main town in the Vavu’a island group in the north of the archipelago, where the majority of the...