Perfect sharpness in a photo isn’t always something you want. Blurring can come in handy both when fixing mistakes in your photos and as a tool for creative expression.

Metropolises are more than just streets lined with glass and steel skyscrapers—they’re also living organisms full of endless motion and commotion. Almost never-ending streams of cars flow through the streets—the urban arteries—and human figures rush by on the sidewalks. Motion is the city’s essence. And you can express it in your pictures using a fairly simple technique—blurring the picture.

What do you do if you’ve brought back beautiful photographic memories from your vacation, but they don’t look at all as lively and colorful on your computer as you remember them? If you need to add some shine to washed-out photos, try these four easy techniques for enlivening colors that are too pale.

Street photography is dynamic and full of surprises, once-in-a-lifetime moments, stories, and faces, as well as unexpected enchanting corners. It throws the cover off of day-to-day life and details that we normally overlook. And meanwhile you can do it practically anywhere. You just pick up a camera and head out into the street.

Our digital age makes everything a whole lot easier than it used to be. Every typo can be corrected, and every photo can be retouched, darkened, brightened, or otherwise fine-tuned to perfection. Well… usually. Levels, meanwhile, are an important, yet often forgotten tool that can rescue more photos than you’d think.

By mastering work with artificial light sources, and especially flashes, you break free of several exposure limitations that hold you back when you’re taking pictures in natural light. Using flashes also gives you much sharper pictures, because the flash is so short that it eliminates motion blur.

We’d all like to think of backgrounds as simply not an issue—when we think of them at all. But in reality, backgrounds can have a lot of clutter, especially in urban photography. Meanwhile, there are several ways to look at this issue.

Photographing horses well isn’t simple! Every breed of horses has something special about it, and you should keep that something in mind during photography.

The major advantage of artificial light sources over natural light is that you have them fully under your control. There are many tools for changing their characteristics. Artificial light lets you photograph topics that would be impossible to handle under natural light.

When you’re photographing outdoors—and especially in the city—you can often end up with chaotic colors in your pictures. And someday you might end up for example photographing an athlete for a sponsor… and their uniform shows other sponsors’ logos. What’s the solution?