Full Set

50 resources to improve your photography

Photography is a wonderful hobby enjoyed by lots of people all over the world. It’s a very enjoyable passtime, but also a very technical one. There’s a bewildering range of cameras, lenses and accessories, and photographers also have to get to grips with computers and image editing software packages. It can get very confusing, especially for newcomers to the hobby, and there always seems to be something to new to learn, even for experienced photographers.

With this in mind SMASHING MAGAZINE put together a list of over 50 free resources that will be useful to anyone involved in photography. We’ve compiled a list of the best and most comprehensive websites that will help you get the most out of your photography equipment. You’ll find a gold mine of articles on equipment and technique, plus advice from some of the most active and well-known professional photographers practising today

Tutorials

NEW: Phototuts+

Phototuts+ is a source of learning on all aspects of photography. We pump out regular tutorials on composition, equipment settings, post-processing, film photography, retouching and much more. If you love photography, you will find a treasure trove of useful advice at Phototuts+.

Learn to take photographs - a visual guide

The most complete collection of secrets about how to take photographs.

5 Sites to learn a lot more about photography

You can find out a lot about photography right here on MakeUseOf. Stitching panoramas, finding new cameras, adding borders to photographs, getting your images noticed, finding photos, photo blogs,  and a whole lot more, but sometimes you need a real fix. You need, in fact, to get amongst it. Here are some places to go. If you run out, check the additional sites at the end of the post.

Tilt Shift Photography

Tilt-shift miniature faking is one of the most popular applications of tilt-shift photography. This is a process in which a photographer manipulates the angle of a tilt-shift lens to distort the focus of a scene to be captured by the camera, thereby creating an illusionary depth of field usually produced by macro lenses. This makes the particular scene appear smaller than it truly is. This article gives 80 examples and also various tutorials etc

34 Essential Tutorials to get started in Digital Photography

If you are completely new to photography, all the information you find might be a bit overwhelming and contradictory. Obviously, you want the most value for your money and get the most out of your purchase. Here’s a compilation of the best photography tips and tutorials found on the web. Starting with basics to make your first purchase, all the way to the inner workings of your camera.

50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials

In this article, we focus on tutorials on digital photography. You’ll find an assortment of top-notch tutorials that deal with applying post-production techniques and effects, color correction, enhancement and photo retouching. So fire up Photoshop and try out some of these wonderful tutorials on your own photos!

12 Ways to create random photography

Here are twelve fun in-camera hacks to experiment with to get more abstract and artistic shots - the results are only limited by your imagination!

30 Useful Macro and Closeup photography Tutorials

How many of you photographers have tried to observe something into detail and take a shot of it? How many times it turned out to be out of focus? For those of you who have no idea of how to take this type of photos and for those of you who know it but want to improve or learn more tips, we made a lovely and useful collection of macro and close-up photography tutorials.

Digital Photography Tutorials

Learn how to take and edit digital photographs using visual tutorials that emphasize concept over procedure, independent of specific digital camera or lens. Topics range from basic camera tips to advanced techniques.

50 Incredible Photography Tutorials

Over the recent months we’ve been presenting various showcases of photography – while many readers hated the showcases, most readers found them inspirational and perfect for a lousy workday’s morning. However, what we should have done in the inspirational posts is not just provide you with some inspiration for your work, but also present useful photographic techniques which can help you to achieve optimal pictures for your designs. And as requested by many of you, now it’s time to correct our mistake.

In this post we present useful photographic techniques, tutorials and resources for various kinds of photography. You’ll learn how to set up the perfect environment and what techniques, principles and rules of thumbs you should consider when shooting your next perfect photo. This round-up isn’t supposed to be the ultimate one – please feel free to suggest more useful articles in the comments to this post.

Among other things, we cover high-speed photography, tilt-shift photography, black and white photography, motion blur, infrared, night, smoke photography, macro photography, HDR, panoramic photography, RAW processing and others. Hopefully, you’ll find many of the listed tutorials and how-tos useful for your regular work.

Specific Articles

RAW setting Guide

One of my followers, Gail (thanks for the question Gail) asked about RAW and I said I would answer it in my next post. So here goes -- note that I keep mentioning jpeg but the same pretty much applies to tiff (an option on some cameras), too.

The Art of Architectural Photography

Architectural images should be constructed with the same care and attention to detail as the building being photographed

Candid Street Photography

Candid street photography, or candid portraits, can be some of the most interesting photos captured in everyday places. Heading out into the crowd with a camera is exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. Great photographic scenes play out on the streets right before your very eyes, but people are quick to recognize the camera and ruin the opportunity. Being covert without being creepy — it’s all part of the game we call street photography (and quite different from traditional portrait photography).

Web Sites

Top 8 web sites to sell your photos

Whether it’s a hobby or it’s your job, making money from your photos can help supplement your income and help businesses get the right images for their brand. Many photographers are daunted by the stock selling process but in reality it is very simple.

Whilst you are able to submit your photos for review, not all stock photography websites will accept your work, so they would need to be of a pretty high standard to gain admission to a marketplace.

With that in mind, I would like to present to you eight websites that will assist you in marketing your photos

Photography Magazines on line

Whatever country we live in, we’re probably all familiar with the well-known photography magazines available in our newsagents and bookstores. The UK has Practical Photography, France has Photo, the Italians have Zoom and the Americans have American Photo. What you may not know is that there are many more photography magazines that are only available online. And some of them are good, very good.

That’s the great thing about online publishing. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and just about anyone with a PC and an internet connection can take part. The difficulty lies in putting together a quality publication, something that rivals the best commercial magazines for content and quality (we hope you think that Smashing Magazine just does that!

35 Beautiful Photography Websites

We took a look at some of the beautiful photography websites that we could find, analyzing the design trends and the reasons why these websites work.