Would you like for readers to pick your food blog, and none other? We can’t tell you how to make your content stand out, but we do know that with bad photos, you’ll go nowhere. You might say: hey, I’m just starting! But if you follow a few basic guidelines, your photos will be tastier right away.

We’ve probably all tried to photograph a small animal at some point, perhaps a cat, a dog, or a tame squirrel in the park. But many photographers make basic mistakes here that leave their pictures with no spark. So let’s take an illustrated journey through the usual defects.

Winter’s a season when most photographers put away their macro lenses until spring. But in reality this cold period offers much more than it might seem. Thanks to the freezing temperatures, you can photograph things like glaze ice… but snowflakes are a much bigger challenge.

Glass is a unique material that presents a major challenge for photographers. That’s because glass adds reflections to a photo, and these are usually unwanted. But there are also situations where reflections can be put to good use.

Incense sticks are normally used to give your room the right atmosphere. But the smoke from incense sticks also forms one long unique, creative movement. And that’s a natural challenge for photographers. So get inspired by this photographic experiment with incense sticks and tea lights, and take advantage of the Christmas holidays for similar experiments of your own.

The days are quickly getting shorter, and so even for us night owls, it’s worth heading into the streets with our cameras just before dawn. That’s because the morningtime city offers a feast for the eyes. In the empty and half-empty streets filled with still-waking light, pictures are a joy to find.

Birds are always frequent companions on nature hikes. And I’m sure you’ve felt an itch to photograph them before. But that’s not as easy as it might at first sound. You need a little practice and a little skill and speed.

Get inspired by our list of thirty topics you can shoot in December, and try to take at least one picture every day.

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.

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.