In 2013, the Oxford Dictionary declared “selfie” the word of the year. The selfie is in short the photographic phenomenon of our age. But people, and artists especially, have been doing self-portraits since long before the birth of that word, or even the birth of photography.

No more walking the mountaintops waiting for better weather! You’ll find scenes for macro photography everywhere around you—or you can create them on your own. Miniature abstract compositions don’t demand any complicated ideas, and yet they can still be a delight to the eyes.

Photo editors have some quite powerful tools available for removing objects from photos—for example the clone stamp and healing brush.

Is center composition always a mistake, or—when you know what you’re doing—can it benefit your photos? We’ll show you several examples of when you should compose to the center and when to avoid center compositions, and also how to improve a photo you’ve center-composed.

Even though panning is a technique that’s mainly used in sports photography, you can experiment with it elsewhere too. For example you can get interesting abstract pictures by using panning on autumn leaves—that is, on something static.

Photographing animals and getting their proportions right is a challenge for both beginners and for experienced photographers. Often when you photograph your beloved pet and go back to look at your picture later, it’s a fright.

Spiderwebs are often associated with horror, dirt, and age. But there are moments when they can be beautiful. When dewdrops appear on the delicate strands of a spiderweb, its structure is made beautifully visible, and the right moment for a picture has come.

Both at night and at many times throughout the daytime, you can run into situations where there’s not enough light for a good picture. That’s especially true when the days are short and the nights are long. When you don’t have access to daylight or streetlights, you can also use a flash.

Many people consider layers to be something complicated that an ordinary person can’t even understand. But they’re really something very simple that will help you and make your work easier on even the simplest jobs. Let’s go make layers a part of your work too!

Digital photo processing opens up huge possibilities—everyone is free to edit photos to match their taste and their mood of the day. But this freedom can sometimes tie you up by leaving you with so many variants that you can’t even choose among them. Or at least, I know it happens to me—all the time.