The summer months bring heat, with heat the sun, and with the sun, sharp light. For a photographer, harsh and direct light is among the most unpleasant light there is.

Like many beginning photographers, you may wish for your own studio. But do you really need one? Many pro photos today are born outside the studio. In fact, more and more photographers are avoiding classical studios completely. This trend has been apparent for the past several years. So here’s a tip on how to work like a modern pro from the comfort of your home—by creating your own home studio.

You see photos everywhere. Browse the web: you see photos. Open a newspaper: you see photos. Drive to work: you see billboards with smiling models… in photos. And that’s just the situation for normal people. It’s even worse for us photographers, who live and die for photos. So how can you pick good photos out of the flood of them you see each day?

Invitations and advertisements for photography workshops are everywhere you look—on the street, on the web, on Facebook, in your mailbox… But how do you choose a good workshop, and what should you want out of it?

128 128 128. That’s the color code for neutral gray. And neutral gray is extremely important for digital photography. Not only because it’s easy to “hide” (to make it neutral, translucent), but also because you can us this color to easily balance all the other colors in a picture... or even in other pictures.

In an earlier article we took a look at how to quickly separate the best from the rest of your photos, in terms of technical quality. Today we’ll look at how to prepare a photo set for exhibitions or for contests where an expert jury will judge the photos’ quality. How can you create a great photo set? Read on to find o

Hollywood has been using color edits to get some fascinating looks for certain films in recent years. The’re especially prominent in war movies like Saving Private Ryan and Fury. Outside film, you’ll find them in Band of Brothers. Contrast and desaturation electrify these works’ atmosphere. The same look does great things for photos too. Read on to learn all about it.

To be in the public eye, you have to be seen, so public figures need occasionally need representative photos of themselves. If you ever get hired to create such photos, you need to be ready to produce great work in minimum time. What’s the workflow for photographing well-known people? In this article I’ll illustrate it using the example of a shoot for Czech violinist Pavel Sporcl.

How can you give photos just the right look, one that lets the right colors shine through? The blending modes in Zoner Photo Studio are your friend here—especially the Multiply, Soft light, and Lightness modes. In this article we’ll explain what they are and how they work. Most edits in Zoner Photo Studio lie on a temporary layer until you apply them, and that layer can be blended into the picture in various ways, called modes. To pick the most useful mode for a job, you need to know how modes work and what kinds of image information go best with which modes.

Every family has their photos, the ones that capture exceptional moments—times of joy and pain. How should you approach this kind of photograph? What are the things to avoid and rules to respect? To learn all this and a little more too, read today’s article.