Time can fly by way too fast sometimes. I really can’t believe it’s been 2 years since I started this site. As something I first envisioned to be a way for me to connect with people that took my wedding photography workshops. I thought it would be a fun way to keep sharing things with them and also help me to stop repeating some of the same emails to people I would get with photography questions. It was October and wedding season was winding down so I figured a fun little creative project to take on. I figured it would be a small but fun side project and maybe post a photo tip once a week. It would also be another good creative outlet for me to write down some of my photography thoughts and tips to help others out. A few people a day visited the site at the start and left some comments on how much some of the articles were helping them out. That really encouraged me to write more but I still thought that only a handful of people would read (or even care) about what I had to say. Fast forward 2 years and I can’t believe how different things are from what I had envisioned.

We now have thousands of people that visit a day and a lot of great discussions going on in social media where there are over 30,000 followers total. It’s crazy how fast things changed one day and still continues to amaze me. As things have been growing I have been dedicating more and more time to the site and we now have over 500 articles that cover a wide range of topics from shooting tips, post production tips, lighting, marketing and product reviews. I really thank you all for your support along the way, every time you retweet a post or share one of our articles with a friend it helps to spread the word and I appreciate it! In the end the goal is still to have a thriving community of artists where we can all learn how to grow our art form together and help to encourage one another.

Looking forward I have some really cool things I am working on that I think you will all love. Lots more lighting tips, wedding and portrait tips, Post production tutorials coming soon as well as some really cool interactive iPad photography apps and a few lighting books. I am spending more and more time on this site than ever before and hope to continue to provide lots of great content to inspire you all in your photography journey!

Lets all connect and move our art forward!

– Mark

I also love to hear your suggestions for new articles, this site is all for you so if you ever have photography questions just leave a comment below or get ahold of me on our Facebook wall, Twitter or Google +.

In looking back over the past 2 years I revisited the site for a little while and wanted to share some links that you might have missed.

Our very first post was a quick article on how to Balance sunset and flash photography

As more questions came in on Lighting (which is still the #1 question I get so lots more coming) I started to create more lighting articles. Here are some of the tops:

Off camera lighting for weddings

An intro to off camera lighting

Using Fill Flash to Improve your Photos

I also had wanted to share some film like Lightroom presets that I had created to replicate certain black and white films. So I released a free little set of these. I didn’t think many people would download them but was amazed when over 100 people did on the first day! These have been shared over 400 times on Facebook and Twitter, you can check them out here: Black and White Film Lightroom Presets.

This encouraged me to create some more groups of Lightroom presets, you can see a list of all our free Lightroom presets here:
Free Lightroom Presets for Photographers

I have also released a lot of Post production articles and tutorials. Here are just a few of my favorites, feel free to do a search on our site at the top right or browse the Post Production category to find some useful tips.

10 quick lightroom tips and shortcuts – Shared over 700 times on Facebook!

Using brushes in Lightroom – Brushes are a powerful part of Lightroom to edit specific areas.

Using Lightroom Brushes to Soften Skin – A quick way to soften skin for portrait retouching.

Create a vintage polaroid look in Photoshop

Using lightroom graduated filter to create tilt shift look
– If you don’t have an expensive Tilt shift lens you can still get that cool look with Lightroom.

And the final few links have some great discussions in the comment threads:

Are you a Pro Photographer?

Pricing your photography
and
Why You Should Charge $60 for an 8×10

If you like our articles remember to share them on Facebook, Twitter or +1 them on Google. Sharing our articles keep our site growing and lets me write more and more articles for everyone!

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I had a great talk with Jerry from PWD labs a little while back about post production and how much we can really rely on editing to fix our mistakes or lack of knowledge. The question that popped into my mind was “What if we didn’t have Photoshop or Lightroom”? Would we think differently while shooting if we didn’t have these tools to correct things after the image. I think that we definitely would and sometimes can use post production as a crutch. Getting the shot right in camera and having a mental image of your final print in your mind when shooting is still as important as ever in this digital age. Here are a few top tips on things we should all master when shooting that will make the post production much more of a breeze.

1) Exposure – One of the most important parts about photography is exposure but with some of the recent advances in technology is sometimes overlooked. With all professional DSLR’s now having full auto modes that actually can work pretty good many times, photographers have relied on shooting in P mode (program mode which is all auto). I even heard a top speaker at WPPI awhile back say that P is for Professional. Although cameras are smarter today than years past they still will be fooled easily with tricky lighting situations. If you want great images it all starts with exposure and the best way to get a good exposure all of the time is to take your camera off P. The best way to really get your exposure where you want it and also learn a lot about how exposure works is to shoot in manual. It gives you the opportunity to think about your settings and make sure that you have the shutter and aperture set for a specific reason and will allow you to fine tune the exposure so when you are ready to finally click the shutter it’s spot on. You might need a few more minutes to run a test shot or two through but it’s worth it to have that consistent exposure. Since I shoot mainly weddings I do also use Aperture priority from time to time depending on how quick light is changing. But when shooting in Aperture priority remember to use the Exposure compensation and adjust that up or down depending on whats in your frame. If I have a group of guys with black tuxes on i’ll turn down the exposure by at least 1-2 stops depending on how much black is in the frame and vice versa if shooting a white dress. Remember the cleaner your exposure the better the final images will look and less time you will spend in editing.

2) White Balance – Getting a good white balance from the start is another key to capturing great images. I always suggest to people to NEVER have your camera on Auto white balance. The main reason is you can shoot a series of photos all in a similar situation but depending on the exact light and whats being reflected in the frame the camera might slightly change the white balance. So when editing instead of being able to batch correct the color for a hundred images that were all taken during an outdoor ceremony you have to adjust each one separately. I always use the closest setting based on my preference for skin tones, many times which will be using the sun setting. If its a little off its really not a big deal the key is that every image will have the exact same white balance so be quick to correct them all at once with Lightroom. Check out our past article for more info on Creating The Correct White Balance In Camera.

3) Composition – Another key element that should be thought about before clicking the shutter is the composition. Although you can crop later with Lightroom or Photoshop the composition of the shot should be thought about while taking the image. We should all have a vision for each shot and really think hard about what the image should look like and say before clicking on that shutter button. I also think about composition and the final product. Since we do a lot of albums for our wedding clients there are lots of images I need specifically for the album like background images and details that have negative space to include other images over. Before you click the shutter take one quick second to look around the edges of your frame, maybe move a foot to the right or left and make sure you have everything framed just how you want it before clicking on that button.

Just a few quick tips today on how we can all capture better images and continue to improve our art! Remember to always post questions on our Facebook wall or in a comment, I love to hear your questions and will always answer them. Have a great week everyone.

If you like our articles remember to share them on Facebook, Twitter or +1 them on Google. I appreciate you spreading the word to your photo friends! Also remember to always start a conversation by leaving a Facebook comment at the bottom of the page. I love to hear from you.

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Everytime I hit a new milestone on this website I really can’t believe it. Some of you have been with me since the beginning and for those of you who have many, many thanks! From what started as a fun little project to take some frequently asked questions people emailed me about with photography and archive them on a webpage turned into something that I now spend hours on daily. Always trying to find out what photographers are struggling with or need the most help with and create some great tutorials that can help us all become better artists.

Today’s post marks our 500th post which is really unbelievable for me. It’s been an awesome journey so far and every month I get more and more excited about what I can create for the future. So today I wanted to take a quick trip down memory lane and look at some of the top articles you might have missed over the past 100 articles. Here are a few of my favorites separated by category that you might have missed over the past few months. I always want to create things that will help everyone grow as an artist, if you have any questions in your photography journey just ask away! You can always reach me by leaving a comment on one of these posts, our Facebook wall or Google +.

Photography Marketing Articles

Facebook for Photographers – 5 tips

How to Enable Facebook Comments on WordPress

Why You Should Charge $60 for an 8×10

Photo Lighting Tips

An Intro To Off Camera Lighting

Photography Tip – Learning to see with new eyes

Using fill flash to improve your photos

Using Off Camera Lighting For Portraits

Post Production Tips

Adding Grain To Your Photos in Lightroom 3

Using Smart Objects in Photoshop for Album Design

Sharpening Your Photo In Lightroom

Create a vintage polaroid look in Photoshop

Using lightroom graduated filter to create tilt shift look

App Reviews

Simply B&W iPhone app review

PhotoForge2 iPad App For Photographers

PhotoCopy Application Review From Digital Film Tools

Shooting Tips and Inspiration

Tips for long exposure photography

Using Leading Lines in Photography

Photo Tip – Remember To Try New Crop Sizes

I am super excited about the next 500 posts! I can’t wait to connect with more of you and help you out in any way possible to make us all become better photographers and artists!!!

We also released some really cool Instagram Presets for Lightroom that people have loved. If you have used them share some photos on our Facebook wall so I can see the results!

And if you want to enter to win one of 2 drobos that we are giving out soon, enter here: Digital Photo Buzz Drobo Giveaway

If you like our articles remember to share them on Facebook, Twitter or +1 them on Google. I appreciate you spreading the word to your photo friends! Also remember to always start a conversation by leaving a Facebook comment at the bottom of the page. I love to hear from you.

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PWD labs has been posting some great tips on their blog recently covering a good variety of topics many surrounding some tips on shooting and pre-production that will help your editing. I’ll cover some of my ideas and tips soon on some pre production techniques so get great files but today wanted to have a quick post about something I think many of us can gloss over quickly. I was reminded of this when I saw of post on their blog which you can check out here: http://pwdlabs.wordpress.com/.

They gave some great tips on certain characters to avoid in your files names like spaces and other types of characters like “&,@,#,$,*,’, ! “. For me I keep my file naming very simple and wanted to share it with everyone. The very first thing I do once I download my cards is to rename the files. For most of my shoots I use a very standard naming convention. If it’s a wedding I only shoot one per day so the weddings are named in the following manner:

fulldate_number
so they generally look like this 08252011_0001.jpg
I do have an associate that will sometimes shoot weddings on the same as me and with those I append his initials to the end of the date so it will look like this 08252011ms_0001.jpg

This way I can always search for my files based on a date and it keeps things nice and organized. For my portraits I do shoot many portraits a day so in this case i’ll add the last name of the client to the file. These would be named like this:
08252011_stagi_0001.jpg

This helps to make cataloging your images orderly, I also place all shoots in folders that first start with a year for the folder. Then I have subfolders with types of shoots, portraits, weddings, commercial and events. Within those are folders with the date of the shoot and then the files organized in there. This helps to make things very easy to find in the future.

A quick short and sweet tip today but hopefully one that can help a few of you keep your files a little more organized and help you to find things quicker when looking for a shoot in the future.

If you have any post production questions or really anything related to photography just let me know!

If you like our articles remember to share them on Facebook, Twitter or +1 them on Google:

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Also if you need any help with your post production and are backed up like many people this time of year, check out the great color correcting services they offer.

Long exposure photography can give you some amazing results. From silky smooth water to beautiful nightscapes a long exposure image can be an image that gives us a view so different from what our natural eye sees. Sometimes opening up the camera shutter for just a few seconds can capture light in such a unique way compared to what our eye and brain see’s and I think that is the fascination with some long exposure photography. It can give us a creative and fresh view on the beauty that surrounds us all.

If you are ready to create some long exposure images here are a few tips before you head out at night chasing stars:

1) Invest in a sturdy tripod. With long exposure photography your shutter speed will range from a few seconds to minutes (or longer) so a nice sturdy tripod is key to getting a great shot. Even the slightest shake of the camera can make a noticeable difference with a 2 minute exposure.

2) Remember to use the mirror lock up feature on your camera. A SLR camera uses a mirror that is placed in front of the shutter. This mirror reflects light coming through the lens and into your viewfinder so that you can see exactly what the image is that will be exposed to the image sensor. When you click the shutter on your camera, it will flap up this mirror which in effect now lets the light travel directly to the sensor. The mirror is pretty heavy and does shake the camera a bit. Without locking up the mirror you might get some camera shake. Most cameras have a mirror lock up feature in the menu, just remember to first compose the shot and then turn the mirror lock up on.

3) Use a cable release or remote to trigger the shutter. Just the small vibration of your finger on the shutter can also cause a little bit of camera shake in the images. With these really long exposures it’s always important to remove any possibilities of your camera moving.

4) Remember to have fresh batteries in your camera. There is nothing worse than setting up an awesome night landscape shot, leaving your camera for an hour while you think how great the image is going to look and coming back to a camera with a dead battery.

5) And last but certainly not least, experiment! Experiment with a range of different shutter speeds. When you find a image that looks good try out many different exposures. What might look good at 4 seconds can look very different at 10 seconds or minutes. Try out at least 10 different shutter speeds when you are starting out to see the differences that time has on your photography.

If you have any great examples or long exposure photography please share a link by leaving a Facebook comment (below) or head on over to our Facebook wall.

Image by Alex39

Image by Jakob Wagner

If you like our articles remember to share them on Facebook, Twitter or +1 them on Google:

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Photography Tip – Learning to see with new eyes

I have been working on an article on how the camera ‘see’ differently than our eyes. There are so many differences between the human eye and the camera that having a good understanding of these differences really do help us in our photography.

While photographing a wedding the other day I came to the end of the evening and was trying to think of one last cool shot to get. I typically try and get a night shot at a wedding that is something always different and unique for that day/bride/venue. While I was walking around I started to look at the lighting on the building, looking for some spotlights maybe or anything that could create a dramatic light. I normally walk around with my camera and shoot a few images of the scenes around the venue and just try to look for inspiration. There wasn’t anything that really stood out at the front of the venue, I really wanted to capture the building in the front since it has some nice ivy and lights but it just didn’t have the look I wanted. Looking at the sky though there was this very low fog in the atmosphere that really had this cool, layered effect to it. It was already about 10pm but this layer was a light grey and made the sky look very unique. To the side of the building was an open grass area where you could really see the sky so I thought might work well for a shot incorporating the night sky. I knew that in order to get some of the detail in the sky I would need to slow the shutter speed down but wasn’t sure exactly how long of a exposure I would need. I ran a few quick tests through and all of the sudden when shooting at a second the sky started to glow with this beautiful amber light. It actually really surprised me since the human eye saw such a different view compared to what the camera picked up at 1 second but it looked beautiful and I knew would be the shot I wanted.

To light the bride and groom I kept things very simple. One light (Canon 580) my assistant was holding was to the right of the camera about 30 degrees, up high and pointing back on them with no diffusion. Using the Pocketwizard Flex TT5 I had set the flash to ETTL. Then behind them I setup a light on the ground pointing up that was set to manual 1/16th power just to give a little kick and backlight to them. I ran in to grab the bride and groom and did a very quick couple minute photo session. Having them turned towards each other, kissing against this amber sky made for a perfect image to end the day. Here is the final image, straight out of the camera:

I wish I could have taken a photo of what my eyes rendered this scene as so you could all see just how different it is compared to the final image. Your eyes will always see things different than the camera so never forget to experiment, try out really slow shutter speeds or extremely fast shutter speeds with fast moving objects. Keep pushing the limits of your creativity!

Here are the specs for the image:

Canon 5d
Canon 28-70 2.8 L lens
ISO 800
1.3 seconds at f/ 3.5

If you have any questions or comments please leave a comment below, I love to hear from you!

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Today marks another milestone for Digital Photo Buzz that I am very proud of. We have hit out 400th post and I just wanted to take a moment to thank you all. I know some of you have been following this site since it was created and many of you are new here. For the new visitors, welcome and I hope that this will be a place where you can go to not only get some great tips, tutorials and overall photo inspiration but also be a part of our photography community.

As some of you may know I started this website first just to fulfill a specific need. At the time I was running my photography studio mainly focusing on weddings and portraits but had been doing workshops a few times a year when I had the time. I have always loved to teach and share my passion for photography with others and doing workshops has been a joy for me. The only thing was afterwards I would get some questions in from people and would answer them via email, however sometimes would answer the same question a few times for different people. So I thought why not create a simple website to write down some of these questions and some other tips for people to read. Having always been into tech I thought it would be a fun project also to get a new website going.

About a month after that thought I had the site up along with a few articles and a list of articles to write for the next few months. I was posting a few articles a week and after a few months was very surprised that there were more than the handful of people I had told about the site visiting. There still wasn’t a huge amount of people coming to the site but there was much more than I thought and it made me feel compelled to write more and more. As I started to devote more time into this site things started to grow like crazy, this year has shocked me with how far the reach of the site is and the amount of people that stop by daily. It’s awesome to see such a growth and I do really hope to get to know you all though interaction either in the comments of the website or on Facebook or Twitter. For me its all about building a great group of photographers where we can all learn from each other and continue to grow our art and fuel our passion.

I always want this website to be a strong community and encourage you to leave comments at the bottom of any post to start a conversation. You can use our new Facebook comments feature to leave a comment through Facebook and its a great way for us all to connect. Also any time you have a specific photography question, just leave a comment for me or use the contact form at the top to message me directly. I love to hear your feedback and if you have something you would like to learn about will be happy to create a post to address your questions.

Also make sure to check us out over on Facebook here: Digital Photo Buzz Facebook Page.

Also in case you missed any past articles here is a small list of some of our most popular articles:

Lightroom Articles

10 Quick Lightroom Tips

How to create a light leak effect in Lightroom

Using Brushes in Lightroom

Lighting Articles

Creative lighting for first dance photos

Using off camera lighting for a photo in the rain

Using fill flash to improve your photos

Some Awesome Galleries for Inspiration

Great photos using Tilt-Shift lenses for portraits

10 Great Examples of Long Exposure Photography

Holga Photography

Awesome Digital Infrared Photography Images

Shooting Tips

Wedding Photography Tips – Reflections

Photography Tip – Shooting Through Items

There are many other useful articles, and you can always use the search box at the top to search for anything in particular.

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