In this article I’ll be leading you through several steps that should help you get good photographs of women. And telling you how to assess their strong and weak sides, help them with posing, choose an angle, retouch the pictures, and more. Based on opinions I’ve gathered from models themselves, I’ve written up this overview of what women like during a shoot—and what bothers them.

Zdeňka Vrátná focuses on a rather untraditional genre—cosplay photography. That means primarily costumes based on fantasy, sci-fi, or post-apocalyptic stories. We asked her she how she got into photography and what parts of it she enjoys. And she also revealed some of her tried and tested photography tricks and shared some of her experience. Read our engaging interview, browse her fantastic photos, and get to know this likable, talented photographer.

We’re sure you’ve seen photos somewhere before with a look  that you loved, that you wanted to imitate—but you couldn’t for the life of you. Trial and error doesn’t work very well here. Today we’ll teach you how to examine your favorite photo and how to use what you learn here to compose an editing approach that will give you the results you’re looking for. We’ll demonstrate all this with an example from practice. 

Multiple exposures are a traditional effect that first started in analog photography, where multiple scenes were exposed onto a single film frame to create a single final image. The majority of today’s digital cameras let you achieve this effect inside the camera. But you can get the most control over your results by simulating this technique in Zoner Photo Studio. We’ll be using a wintertime portrait to illustrate the steps.

A tough photographer with a heart of gold—that’s Lucie “Amulett” Věříšová. If you’re thinking of wearing heels to a shoot with this likable lady, think twice—she’d be quick to convince you it’s not the best of ideas. We’ve chatted with her about taking pictures in dark forests, about her models, and about her unusual (but superbly functional) production team. Read the whole interview, browse her great photos, and let yourself be swept for a while into fairy-tale worlds of fantasy.

You can get stronger background blurring in your photos by using a longer focal length, a lower f-number, or a smaller distance to your subject. But what if none of that is enough? We’ll show you a method that will help you get amazing bokeh. And you won’t even need to buy a new lens for it. You’ll just take multiple pictures and then stitch a panorama. This article will show you how.

We’re bringing you a series where we’ll teach you everything you need to know about portrait photography. This time around, we’ll be writing about how to find models for your portraits and what to take care of before the shoot.

In this article I’ll show you how to edit a photo from a nighttime portrait, and I’ll give you a RAW file on which you can try out the whole approach for yourself. This time around, you’ll be concentrating on work in the Develop module. You’ll learn how to rescue night photos that turned out too dark, improve their colors, and give them some spark using effects and local edits.

How can you make costumes really shine in your photos? In this article, you’ll learn where to find models for cosplay portraits, how to prepare for the shot, and what to concentrate on. Then we’ll illustrate it all through the example of a real-world shoot. 

Permanent lights for photography come in a variety of colors and shapes. Among the more exotic of these lights are LED ring lights. And we were interested in seeing what all you can conjure up with ring lights, so we gave one of them a thorough test run. Naturally we didn’t keep the results just for ourselves. We were surprised to see how much this light could do—the effects it produces are attractive, and it’s easy to work with. But we won’t stick to just theory; we’ll also show you how to work with ring lights in practice.